I spent the summer holiday in a villa on the Algarve, accompanied by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and a staunchly Roman Catholic mum. Dawkins and Hitchens, of course, came in my bag: mum could not be convinced to join them.
I’ve always imagined that questioning a pupil’s inherited belief system in class was a sackable offence. I imagine this because I’ve never really had the guts to test it out, what with my own children needing shoes and stuff; though that is not to say that I haven’t been tempted. Kids’ justifications of the religious beliefs inflicted upon them by various agencies usually hinge upon what Sages describe as the, “Because it does. Right?” argument, and this renders the temptation to just apply the merest, tiniest, most wafer-thin pinpricks to their balloon quite awful.
Thankfully, for the English teaching atheist, there’s Literature. You know the stuff…written by great men and women…full of superior insights…generally satirical or scathing when dealing with what Man will do in the name of faith. ‘The Crucible’ has allowed me to allude to the Hell that my pupils might experience should they ever attempt to employ their questioning spirits in a theocratic society. It is down to ‘Of Mice and Men’ that I’ve been able to ask them to imagine the possibility that Heaven might be a lie conjured up to keep them in their place, without the fear of a sacking.
So, it was some delight that I spent my summertime sweating with Christopher Hitchens in a pool of anti-theistic zeal next to a swimming pool in downtown Vilamoura.
Having gathered lots of fantastic facts – did you know, for instance, that the idea of Mary’s assumption into heaven wasn’t coined until the early 1950s? - I resolved that my first column on returning would be to write a piece arguing that, since Atheism now has its own version of the good book, perhaps it could now assume its place on the Religious Studies curriculum, and moreover, since religion is a pretty binary choice - you believe: you don’t believe – perhaps it would be even-handed to give half the curriculum time spent studying the various versions of idol worship to its more rational, analytical antithesis.
All sounds reasonable enough. Job done. But then I made the mistake of doing some research, which screams to be shared.
Two years ago Charles Clarke introduced the first ever ‘non-statutory’ framework for the teaching of religious education. In case you didn’t know, kids have a legally protected ‘entitlement’ to religious studies, but there is no statutory control over what is taught. It is, for instance, entirely plausible that schools could teach children, without so much as a threat of a chastening governmental finger, that those children alone are God’s elect, that faiths apart from the one they follow are entirely deluded and that it is entirely righteous to wage Holy war on those who, by accident, are born on the other side of a wall to them. If I wanted to set up a Satanist school, and it’s a thought I entertain from time to time, I could.
The framework itself, given that it had to accommodate viewpoints as diverse as The Russian Orthodox Church and the British Union Conference of Seventh Day Adventists and pretty well all other perspectives on religious education, (aside, of course, from those of the National Secular Society) is about as sane as these things can be. It is when we delve into the realms of suggested practice that it all gets a bit Old Testament.
The Standards Site features examplar schemes of work for key stage three, which - some commendably tissue thin sophistry aside - may as well have been written by Billy Graham. Creationism on the curriculum is not just happening in the American Bible Belt or in aberrant outposts in the North East; the Government recommends it as a topic for study in every school in the country. The suggested learning outcomes suggest that all year nine pupils should be able to “explain the nature and meanings of the Genesis creation story for theists, creationists and others.” It goes on to state a desired intention that children, “understand that science leaves questions of ultimate meaning and purpose unanswered.”
There is a logical pedagogic link here that, though it may have been intended to promote a mature, dialectical approach to these themes, actually gives explicit permission and approval to those who want to teach creationism as fact. First, you teach the existence of the theory, then question science’s ability to answer questions about our genesis.
The desired conclusion of this scheme of work is that children, “understand that historians of Science now view the conflict account as misleading.” Let me unpack this disgracefully disingenuous phrase for you: the Government’s desired final outcome of religious studies teaching in British schools is that children realise there is no conflict between religious belief and the evidence of science. This is a lie, the extent of which, so my catechism tells me, hits the three criteria for a mortal sin: it is grave, it is committed in full knowledge of the sin; and it is deliberate.
It goes further. Having invigilated Religious Education exams before, and having had a shufty at the papers, I had always suspected that the mark schemes rewarded blind obedience to a theistic point of view: “List ten reasons why God exists” (10 marks), “Come up with a shaky reason he might not” (1 mark). These suspicions are finally confirmed with a look at the Standards Site’s exemplar materials. The first scheme of work that it is suggested for pupils on entry to secondary school is full of affirmations of the nature of religious truth, and arguments for the existence of a deity. There ain’t much there for the secularists to be singing about.
My father’s generation had a timetabled lesson that went by the name of Religious Instruction, RI for short. There is a valid argument – though there is an equally valid and never ventured argument for its abolition - that some form of religious education is vital for children to operate as decent members of a pluralist society. Where Religious Studies is of value is as a disinterested study of the customs of those people you are going to school with. As such, the only stakeholder group likely to produce Religious Studies materials with the appropriate degree of dispassion would, I think, be the National Secular Society.
As it is, the Government’s suggested framework gives schools explicit permission to reinstate RI, but this time the ‘I’ stands not for instruction, but for indoctrination, and, things remaining so, Sir Peter Vardy receives his reward on earth (yet again). Blessed indeed are the automative retailers!
(An abridged version of this article first appeared in The Guardian where Phil write a regular column)