The Times: Religion-free education in UK may be made illegal

6 May 2007

In today’s The Times, there’s an article about how the Religious Education Council is attempting to eliminate parents’ right to remove their child from religious education classes.

From the article:

Plans to prevent parents removing their children from religious education lessons violate human rights, the National Secular Society has said.

The proposal to review the right of parents to excuse their children from RE at school on grounds of “conscience” came from the Religious Education Council this week.

…

The National Strategy for Religious Education, funded by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), proposes to make it illegal for parents to remove their children from religious education lessons.

At present, all state schools in the UK are required to teach religious education as part of the national curriculum but parents can opt to take their children out of lessons. But the strategy proposes a review of the right of parents to withdraw their children from religious education as a matter of “conscience”.

It seems awfully convenient that the religious have expressed their desire to discriminate against homosexuals as a matter of conscience, yet are not willing to extend that very same reasoning to a parent’s choice regarding the education of their children. This “do as I say, not as I do” attitude is an expression of pure hypocrisy.

From the strategy itself, we have this reasoning:

The growth in this country of Islamic self-consciousness, in its majority expression of asking for an end to discrimination and for its religious culture to be taken seriously and in its distorted form exemplified by 7/7, poses a considerable challenge to wider society. In response, it is easy for anti-discriminatory approaches to concentrate on race and ethnicity, but to fail to recognise the strength of religion as a key defining feature. Until the predominant culture fully recognises and appreciates the seriousness with which Muslims treat their faith, Muslims will continue to feel alienated.

If anything, event like the bombings in London on the 7th July 2005 and muslim protests against cartoons in a foreign newspaper exemplify the seriousness with which muslims take their religion. I don’t think any thinking person in the UK has any doubt about that.

It continues:

Whilst the issue is perhaps most starkly evidenced by Islam, other minority groups are affected and some still are. Christians too are looking for more deliberate attention in schools and colleges to deeper questions of meaning and purpose in both personal and social life and to religionâ€™s part in them.

So now christians are wanting schools to provide deeper meaning for them through their religion. How will forcing religious education on non-christians imbue their own faith? Do christians think that, if their faith in their religion isn’t strong enough, that having others around them being compelled to listen to religious claptrap will allow them to reinforce their faith by some kind of proximate osmosis effect? This is just a sham contrivance, and stinks of that old “no morality without religion” claptrap.

One of the aims of the strategy is:

Improve the quality of the RE taught in community schools so that faith communities can feel confident that their faith is being accurately and sympathetically portrayed.

So how does one measure this supposed accuracy of portrayal? If, for each of the individual religious, there was one single authoritative definition of what it means, and each individual adherent followed precisely the tenets of their religion, then this might be a fair enough goal. But this isn’t what we see in society. There are major divisions, and hundreds of sects, subsects and cults galore, each preaching that they, and they alone, have the correct interpretation of generic labelled religious scriptures. So, educating these kids about which versions precisely will be enough to be considered an “accurate” portrayal? I doubt that each sect would receive equal treatment, and there certainly wouldn’t be time to cater for them all.

The strategy also makes note of where the influence for this particular impetus for an all-inclusive religious education comes from (my emphasis):

The unanimity of support for it [all-inclusive religious education] from the RE associations and faith communities was unprecedented.

No shit, really? I would never have guessed that a call for forced religious education would come from religious education associations and religious groups. I’m completely astonished by this revelation. And I’m being sarcastic as hell.

This strategy is fundamentally flawed, but because the people promoting it have a dogmatic vested interest in achieving the goals set out in the strategy, it seems that they can’t see the wood for the trees.

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2365 Responses2007-05-06+14%3A14%3A28nullifidian to “The Times: Religion-free education in UK may be made illegal”

AV on May 6th, 2007 3:54 pm

What kind of religious education is taught in UK schools? Is it religious instruction–i.e. indoctrination in the tenets of a particular religion like Islam or Christianity–or comparative religion.

The former ought to be a definite no-no in public schools in a secular liberal democracy (but then the UK has an established church, doesn’t it?).

If, on the other hand, it’s some combination of sociology of religion and philosophy/ethics–well, I wouldn’t necessarily object to that, because you can theoretically do philosophy and ethics (and sociology of religion, for that matter) in a public school without threatening the separation of church and state (which I realise doesn’t technically exist in the UK.)
nullifidian on May 6th, 2007 4:44 pm

Traditionally, at least in my experience, RE was more along the lines of comparative religion, with a large chunk of humanities thrown in (I got my first and last taste of conversational Spanish in an RE class).

However, recently I’ve heard reports (via emails from the NSS, etc.) of RE classes increasingly being used as a place where children are being forced to read christian bibles, listen to koranic readings, etc., rather than being exposed to the broader and far less specific comparative religion textbook that we had as kids. This would have been unheard of in my youth, and I would have, at the time, demanded that my parents remove me from the class (or made such a nuisance of myself that I would have been excluded by the school itself).

We have, for a good number of years now, enjoyed the position that parents could opt-out of RE lessons for their children should the parent request it (and more recently if the pupil is in the 6th form [~17-18 years old] and requests it themselves). But this council aims to make RE totally mandatory, even for those who would not want anything to do with any form of religion whatsoever. While religion has a pretence to ethics and philosophy, these subjects are an aside from religion itself and should have their own class (possibly in conjunction with critical thinking), and while it’s a utter failure in its supposed explanations of reality, I can’t see how they can justify it being forced on anyone.

There’s also the issue of what aspects of religion to present. Who gets to decide what is “good” religious education? Representatives of the various religions themselves? Are they simply going to present the Sunday hymn-singing-tea-with-the-vicar and pious-kneeling-mosque-regulars types of religion, or are they going to include all the hateful bigotry and niche bam-pottery that is an integral part of it? Are teachers expected to promote, for example, catholic distaste for homosexuals or islamic hatred of infidels as virtues, or will they just gloss over and ignore them? If the latter, then they’d completely fail in the aims of the strategy, as it’s for a greater understanding of precisely this sort of behaviour that the strategy is being promoted in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m for an appreciation of comparative mainstream religion while it’s an integral part of the public sphere, and I would obviously prefer it if religion was purely a private matter of interest to no-one but the individual, but while the people promoting this strategy have an agenda to advance indoctrination outwith their “concern” for education, I think it’s a huge mistake to make this compulsory for anyone.
The Atheist Jew on May 8th, 2007 11:06 am

This has no shot of happening in England I would imagine. I couldn’t even see it happening in the US, and they are almost a theocratic state.
I have no problem with courses being offered that compares belief systems and religions, but not mandatory ones.
I think a good way to squash this is to add atheism into the program. That might shut the believers up.
Why Dont You Blog? : Educational Standards on May 8th, 2007 7:27 pm

[...] Nullifidian discusses an article in the Times which reports that the Religious Education Council (REC) is trying to remove a parent’s right to remove their children from a religious education class. This is pretty shocking and as you might imagine the arguments put forward by the REC are riddled with nonsense. It seems they have a “Good Idea” and the best of intentions (and it would do them well to remember the road to hell here…) but, as with most things Religious types get involved with, the practicalities and implementation sucks. When I was at school, RE was 95% Christianity, 4% Judaism and 1% Islam. I don’t recall any other world religion being mentioned, but it was good in teaching me the nonsense and sheer “woo” being spouted by theists. Thank [insert deity of choice] for Science classes… [...]
nullifidian on May 9th, 2007 10:25 pm

BEAJ, I suspect that you misunderestimate (sic) the influence that the religious (i.e. CofE bishops) have in our parliament – it’s blatent, unapologetic and they’re happy to spout about their god and the virtues of their belief system at any opportunity. I think it’s quite feasable…