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 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.)