“If parents wish to bring up their children in their own traditional superstitions, they should do it on their own time and at their own expense… Religion, the bane of the modern world in so many respects, has got to be relegated to the private sphere and kept there. And religious worship (not of course historical and sociological comparative study of the subject) should be removed from publicly funded schooling, as being divisive there too – among many other deficits.”
A.C. Grayling (September 2007)
“We have a very powerful educational lobby which considers it improper to teach children the Christian faith in public schools, and claims rather to offer (in the words of one syllabus for religious instruction) an objective and critical view of all the religious and non-religious stances for living. This programme, of course, conceals from the children’s sight a whole range of assumptions on which such a critical view rests. It denies to the children the possibility of criticizing that.”
Lesslie Newbigin (May 1988) See “Religion, Science and Truth in the School Curriculum”
This is not an argument for a Christian take-over of the public school system nor is it an argument that public funds should be used to teach religion. It is just an observation of a fairly basic internal inconsistency in arguments like these. Grayling is objecting to so-called ‘faith schools’ in Great Britain (the issue is also popping up here in Canada as well).
I have very little background regarding what these schools look like or how they teach but I find his view of what religion is and how it should be taught to be a fairly exhausted idea. There seems to virtually no capacity here to understand that secularism is as much an ideology as anything that could be included under the heading of ‘religion’.
To teach that ‘God’ is an idea that individuals use for private and therapeutic purposes (if at all) is not to teach an ‘objective’ view of religion (what Grayling calls the “historical and sociological comparative study of the subject”), it is to teach a very insistent view that religion, if it is chosen at all, is basically irrelevant to most of the concerns of life.
Now I have no problem with people holding views like this on religion (though I would vehemently disagree with them) but I wish they would admit them for what they are: a particular view of the world, based on a certain set of assumptions about the purposes toward which human life should be directed and where meaning is to be found. To continually ridicule efforts to teach from within a tradition in order to continue that tradition is blatantly self-serving. The argument is essentially: we disagree with the perspective that you are teaching and we would like to teach ours instead. I, for one, would find it very refreshing to hear it framed that way in our public discourse.
Can any legitimate Christian expression of education exist apart from teaching what we know of Jesus of Nazereth?
What value is secular knowledge apart from Christ?
I would probably make less of firm distinction between ’secular knowledge’ and what we know about Jesus. As a Christian I believe that truth is something that has its ultimate origins in God wherever it happens to be discovered.
I believe that Jesus Christ is the clue to the meaning of everything and that the resurrection of Christ is the turning point in history. But I also believe that rationality is part of the makeup of who God is and that we reflect that aspect of God’s image in our ability to think and reason, no matter what the subject of our reflection is.
-most models of logic point to the belief in a deity to be essentially irrationally held. it’s probably not surprizing then that people like Grayling are interested in removing religious education from schools since he would likely see it as a flawed concept. But I am going to suggest that there might be more going on here. I’m not sure Graylings or this lobby that Newbigin talks about are really interested in intellectual intergrity so much as they are interested in ridding the population of the didactic rigidity of religious education that has – typically – refused to acknowledge fundamental changes in scientific thought and research and has in large part (especially in the past) dictated a regime of condemnation and judgementalism. I think it is important to own our responsibility in that even if it is not the way some of us view our faith positions currently.
Even in my philosophy class the thing that I find most frustrating is that my professor references essentially what I feel is an antiquated idea and function of religion (namely Christianity). This is frustrating because it feels like if I identify with Christian thought in any way I will be immediately tied to this way of understanding. The other thing is that it is way too convenient to ‘pick on’ the fundamentalists or older expression of faith because even so many Christians today see those expressions as faulty in some ways…
Though Grayling seems to be mostly arguing against the use of public dollars in faith based schools, his disdain for religion certainly implies an attitude which would limit the addressing the spiritual needs of students within the public education system.
It is, in fact, this kind of attitude which in fact leads religious groups to form their own schools. When public prayer was taken out of Canadian classrooms there was an explosion of new faith based schools. I myself question the validity of schools whose prerogative is to segregate students according to religious difference. But as parents and students increasing find their deeply held religious convictions to be ignored, it’s hard to convince them that an education in the public system offers a truly holistic education.
I am excited that in Saskatchewan, the public system seems to be moving in the opposite direction – in many cases even beyond a watered-down liberal democratic “acceptance”.
I would be curious how exactly one would removed religion from the classroom. How would teachers and students deal with a third of the school population fasting for the month of Ramadan (hungry teenagers are not exactly the happiest people in the world). How would one explain the greatest works of art and literature (inspired by “superstition” no doubt)? And how would teachers and counselors comfort students in times of tragedy?
It’s not only impossible to remove religion from the classroom, it’s traumatic and counter-productive and looks more to avoid conflict than to prepare students for the “real world”.
I am for privatizing public schools. Then parents can just pay to send there kids to whatever school they want to. Problem solved.
In class today my philosophy prof said, “It is not all right if pedagogy teaches anything that suggest that there is an alternative reality to the natural world because there is no good reason to do so.”
its interesting to juxtapose his thoughts against what is found in 1 John 4:7 and following…
Dale,
I would obviously dispute your prof’s assertion that there is ‘no good reason’ to exclude everything beyond the natural world. I think there are plenty of good reasons to suspect that what we see might not be all there is.
I would also argue that it is bad pedagogy to take one person’s assumptions (in this case some form of empiricism) and uncritically suppose that they must be the only place to start from in the search for truth . It seems to me that good pedagogy requires a bit more humility and a bit more openness to a truth that is bigger than we are. Thanks for the example.
Everytime we encounter the kind of didactic propaganda that rejects or more precisely excludes the opportunity to engage more deeply with any subject – we have ‘good reason’ to be annoyed. It is interesting that this approach can be found just as easily on either side of the question about metaphysical realities.
What is especially taxing is the intellectual endeavor to seperate the exclusive nature of God-human relational design (I am the only way) from the assumption that we as humans are able to access the infallible total of knowledge about God. One seems to inevitably lead to the other.