Worship and RE in schools

Please also see our pages on the apartheid of religiously segregated faith schools and working with SACREs.

Religious worship (a daily act of corporate worship) and Religious Education (at least one hour per week) are legal requirements for all local authority schools.

The law insists that worship and RE are both of a "broadly Christian nature."

Our campaign in schools

A secular state is the only type of state that guarantees freedom of thought, belief and expression. In a secular state "It's OK to believe" as long as what you believe causes no harm to others.

Our campaign simply makes it clear to all children, school pupils, students and teachers that in our state, which is not secular, it is perfectly OK and acceptable not to believe in gods, religions or any other superstitions.

All too often schools (local authorities, head teachers and teachers) are afraid to challenge the ideas of religions - yet it is questioning and challenging that should be at the heart of all good education - the best teachers have always known this and practised it.

How can a primary school pupil be "religious?" What religions has such a child investigated before making an intellectually informed choice? Does the child even know which of the hundreds of gods available he or she is supposed to believe in?

The truth is that a "religious" pupil is pressured to follow the religion of his/her parents, family or community - without enquiry, without investigation, without challenge - i.e. out of ignorance of everything except what he/she has been told.

Is this what education is all about? Would we accept it if a pupil came to school saying that "the earth is flat because my mum says so" or that "the white race is superior to the black race because my dad says so"?

Why are so many people afraid to challenge religion and the assumption that religions should be free to indoctrinate children within the family, outside the school, or, in the case of religiously segregated schools, within schools which are 100% funded by taxpayers?

The threat of apostasy

Freedom of belief includes freedom to change or abandon one's belief. However, many religions bring enormous pressure on people to toe the party line and not to abandon their religion. In some cases this goes to the extreme of violence or even death threats.

Schools have a moral and legal obligation to support pupils who wish to question their beliefs and, if they wish, abandon the belief in which they were brought up.

It takes great courage to stand out from the crowd and to resist the enormous social pressure to confirm - pupils need our support as they question, challenge and decide for themselves what they believe and what they do not believe.

Religious worship in schools

We are totally opposed to any form of religious worship in schools - we consider forced worship to be a form of child abuse.

Assemblies have a significant role in building the community spirit of a school (its ethos) but they are not an appropriate place for worship.

Worship implies prayer which implies a god. This is "the god assumption" that non-believers find so offensive.

Worship is not "reflection" or "meditation" or any other comfortable liberal wooly compromise - it is praying to a god - out loud or inside your head.

Legally enforcing worship on children is an attempt to enforce belief in a god.

This is totally unacceptable in a society where the overwhelming majority of adults (over 90%) do not take part in any form of religious worship and where those who do need a god have widely different religions.

With children it is doubly unacceptable - it is the imposition of god and religion by force.

Fortunately many schools, and teachers recognise this, they deeply resent the imposition of worship and, in many schools, they totally ignore the legal requirement - despite repeated complaints from Ofsted. Local SACREs have a duty to monitor worship in schools, a duty most of them fail to perform.

Religious Education in schools

It may surprise many readers but we support RE - as long as it is done correctly.

It is this qualification for our support that is so vitally important.

Religious Education has replaced Religious Instruction in schools - though many religiously motivated people in Education, and on some SACREs, do there best to ignore this.

The 2004 QCA document, "Religious Education: a non-statutory national framework" provides a model RE syllabus and is used by most (but not all) SACREs when drawing up their own local syllabus. The document requires that children are made aware of secular views, humanism for example, at all stages during RE.

Problems with RE

Failure to define religion

Religion is not defined in Acts of Parliament, curriculum documents, Ofsted reports or anywhere else.

The person leading an RE course for Derby primary school teachers was asked to provide a definition of "religion". She said: "that is a hard question, I would require notice of that one." Several alternative definitions were put to her but she refused them all. Later she said that an RE training course for teachers was not the place to engage in a philosophical discussion.

The problem with the wooly-minded, liberal, "inclusive" agenda is that it doesn't want to leave anyone out. Buddhists, who do not worship a god but who do believe in life after death, need to be included and those strange god-free humanists who deny the existence of god and do not believe in life after death cause a problem.

There can be no definition of "religion" that includes those who are, by definition, non-religious. The best way to solve this conundrum is to ignore it - so they do.

It would appear that we have legally enforced "religious " education where no-one is willing to provide a clear definition of what the subject is about!

Failure to define Religious Education

The QCA National Framework document states:

The learning about seems perfectly reasonable - we think we understand what that means. To us it means that children will learn about the beliefs of different groups of people and how those beliefs are practised.

The learning from causes us some problems because it seems so vague and wooly. Perhaps that is because we feel that we have nothing to learn from religions - but they have a great deal to learn from those of us who are not religious.

Like many government-inspired documents, the QCA document has failed to read and understand the implications of Human Rights Act of 1988. The Act talks specifically about "religion and belief" yet QCA continues to use "religion" on its own. As humanists we have beliefs but we are certainly not religious in any way whatsoever - god forbid!

The good news is that the QCA document requires that a secular view, such as humanism, is to be taught at all stages of RE.

Most teachers are very busy people, they don't have time for the wooly, they want answers to simple questions:

• Why are we doing it?
• What do we do in the classroom?
• What are we trying to achieve?
• How do we know we have achieved it?

Failure to say "some people believe this, some people believe that"

This is our complaint about The God Assumption that underlies so much of religion in schools - whether explicit in worship or implicit in RE.

Very young children, in infant school and lower junior, are taught the stories told by different religions and no doubt some of them recognise that these are stories, just as Snow White is a story.

However, if one listens to the way things are taught, one finds it rare for a teacher to say "this is what some people believe is true, others do not believe it is true."

All we ask is balance: wherever "belief" is taught, the alternative, "non-belief", should be made clear.

This is a very difficult area because the teacher is being asked to be neutral, not to promote one view over another but to give equal weight to all views without leaving any assumptions in children's minds - a task that would defeat most philosophers, theologians and evangelical atheists! It is certainly not like teaching that 2 and 2 make 4!

Failure to analyse why some people need religion while others don't

Religious and non-religious people have traditionally been obsessed with the narrow issues that divide them, particularly: "is there a god?"

Religion obviously meets a need for some people, it seems to answer awkward questions for them and it overcomes their fear of death.

The most important question for children to answer is "why do some people need god and religion while others don't?"

Modern research in psychology and sociology, along with old-fashioned common sense, allows us to provide an education that enables children to answer this question for themselves.

If children still need a god and religion after answering the question, then fine - but at least they will have sought the answer for themselves.

Failure to deal with controversial issues across all age ranges

Turn on the news and the chances are that someone has blown up themselves, and others, in the name of religion.

Look at the newspaper and you will see that some religion or another has made an announcement about how it wants to control everyone's lives (including the lives of non-believers!): no condoms to help prevent AIDs, no abortions, no homosexuals in the clergy, no women without scarves, no women driving cars, no stem cell research, no sex before marriage, no sex without procreation, keep your hands outside the bedclothes. The list of religiously-dictated "thou shalt nots" is almost endless.

Children know of these problems - they can see for themselves what is going on in the world.

Why are so many mature adults afraid to address these issues with pupils and students - across the whole age range from infant school to college?

Religion is not all sweetness and light with babies in mangers donkeys braying, shepherds with their sheep and wise men bringing gifts.

Religion is blood and guts, religion is about death and destruction (Old Testament), religion is about conquest and mission, religion is about forcing your point of view on to others.

Derbyshire SACRE has made a really excellent start by sponsoring a book for teachers: "What do we tell the children" but many other SACREs turn a blind eye to the uncomfortable aspects of religion - despite government requests for them to be open about controversial issues.

Patronising classroom resources

A lot of material used in RE promotes one religious view over another or shows different religious practices while being guilty of The God Assumption.

Each religious group spends huge amounts of money producing "resources" to be used in class. Each diocese of the C of E employees professional staff who sole task is to ensure that the C of E line on Christianity is well supported with material for use in class - along with school visits and teacher training to make sure the lesson gets hammered home.

There is very little material that promotes a balanced view - where non-belief is given even weight to belief.

There are some superb little books for kids that promote free thinking and continuous questioning: "Maybe yes, maybe no - a guide for young skeptics" by Dan Barker is an excellent example - unfortunately, it is culturally American ("raccoons", "mom", "basements" etc.)

There is also the terrible danger of a patronising teacher attitudes - fortunately increasingly rare these days:

"of course, children, there is a god, it is just that different people understand him in different ways. Now let's look at how the Hindus see god."

Some things often forgotten

• All babies are god-free until they have religion thrust upon them.
• Linking morality exclusively with religion is dangerous (and dishonest). Will young adults abandon morality when they abandon religion - as most of them will?
• Moral education, and the instillation of social values and responsibilities, are far too important to be left to the religious.
• We need better training for primary school teachers and for RE teachers in secondary schools. They must understand the need to balance belief with non-belief without making value judgements.
• We must accept that many primary teachers teach RE because they are forced to, not because they are motivated to do so. We must provide them with a syllabus that they, and we, accept is fairly balanced between those who need belief and those who do not.
• We most not dodge the difficult, controversial issues - religion is a force for evil as well as a force for good - and children need to understand why - at all stages of their development.

To be honest, we would like to replace "Religious Education" with "Philosophy and Ethics" - that would take the emotion sting out of legally enforced religious education. (Yes, children as young as 4 can handle Philosophical and Ethical issues - the trouble is, so few of them are given the opportunity.)