The culture of intolerance that has grown over time in the UK has undermined the ethos of British schools. As Islamist zealots grow stronger in influence in our society, a number of schools known for their secular, inclusiveness and apolitical approach, such as St Stephen’s Primary School, Parkfield Community School, Batley Grammar School, Kettlethorpe High School, and Barclay Primary School, have been caving into their demands one after the other.

There has been an attempt by Muslim fundamentalists in the UK to politicise educational institutions, in order to gain clout in social and political sphere.  And now these nefarious elements have come out in force to assert their intolerant beliefs under the pretext of religious freedom. They use religious identity and political grievances to subvert the secular democratic system. Unfortunately, innocent school children seem to have become pawns in their hands.

What happened outside the gates of Barclay Primary School in East London late last year illustrates this state of affairs. As reported in the Telegraph, children and parents had been in conflict with the school over its policy of being ‘apolitical’ and monitoring comments in parents’ WhatsApp groups, as well as not allowing the children to wear pro-Palestinian clothing. In December, the school was forced to close early for Christmas by a pro-Palestine protest in support of a boy who arrived at the school wearing a Palestine badge on his coat and refused to take it off. The boy’s mother was from Gaza; his father accused the school of ‘Islamophobia’. Yet neither parents nor protesters seem to have acknowledged the school’s interest in avoiding extremism and safeguarding for all students – or its claims that staff and the school itself had been threatened by ‘malicious fabrications’ and ‘misinformation’. Since then, the school has received threats of violence, arson and a bomb threat.

Given this toxic situation, it was only a matter of time before the Michaela Community School in north London was added to the list of schools singled out for their secular principles and inclusiveness.

Michaela was founded by headmistress Katharine Birbalsingh in 2014. The school, known for its outstanding academic results, is facing a lawsuit for maintaining its longstanding secular character by banning prayers. It is a sad state of affairs that a school known for its excellence has become the target of unfounded charges of prejudice. Among certain religious zealots, particularly Islamists at present, the attitude seems to be that those who defy their dictates must be punished pour encourager les autres.

The manner in which the Michaela case has been framed, with the accusations of victimisation and discrimination against Muslim pupils, demonstrates that Islamists will stop at nothing to bully people into compliance. They use the language of human rights to assert their supremacist beliefs. They attempt to use English legislation pertaining to religious freedom as leverage to force the schools to comply with their requests.

The issue of discipline within the school premises has now turned into a question of whether Muslims have the freedom to practise their religion on their terms. The Muslim author of an article recently published in the Guardian, Nadeine Asbali, castigated Birbalsingh’s supposedly ‘dystopian, sinister vision of multiculturalism’.

But this was not merely a case of students offering prayer in the school. As reported in The Standard, Birbalsingh said that her decision came against a ‘backdrop of events including violence, intimidation and appalling racial harassment of our teachers’. At one point a brick was even hurled through a teacher’s window. There was also allegedly intimidation of some Muslim pupils by others. The Muslim pupil who sued the school was reportedly suspended for five days in 2023 for threatening to stab another pupil. This suggests that children were being influenced by an extreme Islamist ideology, which cannot but harm the wellbeing of the whole school. Birbalsingh’s intervention was arguably a matter of safeguarding, as well as of fostering inclusion and cohesion among the student body.

Concerningly, the threat posed by religious extremists remains present and has often gone unnoticed. The Commission for Countering Extremism has reportedly revealed that research on radical groups is ‘skewed’ towards the far right. Consequently, Britain has ‘substantial gaps’ in its understanding of Islamist extremism, which has been ‘systemically under-researched’. The CCE also warned that Islamist radicals are attempting to dissuade researchers from writing about them by threatening legal action. This is just like the lawsuit being pursued by the unnamed Michaela student against her school: she may claim that the ban on prayer is discriminatory, but in fact, she, or whoever it might be speculated is behind her, is arguably attempting to exploit human rights law to enforce the sowing of division in the school, against the better judgement of its headmistress.

A highly polarised society where differences are valued more than similarities is a breeding ground for extremists. Parallel legal and educational systems based on extremist religious beliefs are operating in plain sight, contributing to further division in society. Disproportionate emphasis on religious freedoms has given minority ethnic or religious groups too much leeway to live according to their own cultural and religious norms, in disregard of the law, human rights principles and British values. Unfortunately, the main culprits at present are the Islamists.

The Michaela lawsuit and the threats and violence out of which it comes ought to be a wake-up call for progressives. They should acknowledge the perils of being in denial about the threats which Islamist extremism poses to the sort of peace, fair treatment and mutual harmony which are encouraged by a code of school rules that is universally applied, with no exceptions. In a modern secular society, it is surely in everyone’s interests if religion, like politics, is kept out of the classroom.

Asbali argues that the Michaela School prayer ban implies ‘the bleak and frankly insulting assumption that, in order for all of us to live harmoniously, we must become robots with no beliefs or ideas of our own’. But this arguably misrepresents the case. It is not a question of what pupils believe – that is, of course, their own business, as Birbalsingh would surely allow. It is a question of their public actions while in school, where a multitude of different considerations may apply, and headteachers must not be unduly shackled by religious demands.

Freedom of belief is one thing – but freedom of manifesting a belief is another. Article 9, paragraph 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights itself makes this plain, stipulating that ‘Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society’ for various reasons, including to protect ‘public safety’ and ‘the rights and freedoms of others.’

It may also be that, as Asbali says, some Muslims believe that the five-times daily prayer ritual ‘will be one of the first things we will be questioned about by God after we die.’ However, is at least questionable whether children are obliged to fulfil this ritual. More fundamentally, it is open to debate whether points of religious doctrine like this one, which are based on nothing but ancient traditional authority and faith with no evidence, should be allowed to take precedence over concerns for the wellbeing of a mixed group of children in the here and now.

The Michaela case is but the latest in a string of incidents at schools in the UK to pose the question of how far religious exceptionalism should be allowed to interfere with the good running of a school and the wellbeing of its whole community. The High Court will have to decide whether Birbalsingh’s policies have struck the balance fairly. In the meantime, the question remains how many other schools and headteachers will have the bravery and tenacity to stand up against the threats of litigation, or worse, from religious extremists. As things stand now, the storm of threats looks to be a long way from abating.

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The post The Michaela School and religious exceptionalism appeared first on The Freethinker.

Fanatics in all the wrong places

On 26 January, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) announced that it had received allegations from Israel that twelve of its employees were directly involved in Hamas’ attack on Israel last October. These employees, some of whom are alleged to have participated in massacres of Israelis, have now been sacked, are dead, or are under investigation by UNRWA. Israel has also accused 190 of the UNRWA’s Gaza employees of being operatives of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

This is not the first time that the UNRWA, founded in 1949 to aid the 700,000 Palestinian refugees created by the first Arab-Israeli War, has been accused of lax hiring practices. Last November, one of the released Israeli hostages claimed he had been held in an attic by a UNRWA teacher.

Now, a slew of countries, including the UK and the US, have stopped their funding for the UNRWA. Combined, these countries contributed over 60 per cent of the UNRWA’s budget in 2022. Whether this is a fair response or not (after all, the UNRWA is now more than ever a lifeline for besieged Palestinians), the allegations are worrying. What hope can there be of a just and stable settlement to this interminable conflict if even the aid agencies of the UN are harbouring violent extremists?

Speaking of fanatics popping up in unwelcome places, Dr Wahid Shaida was suspended by NHS England last month for being the head of Hizb ut-Tahrir in the UK. Hizb ut-Tahrir was itself proscribed as a terrorist organisation shortly before Shaida’s suspension. But just why the head of a woman-hating, homophobic, Islamist outfit, who had openly celebrated the stabbing of Salman Rushdie and the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel, was allowed to practise medicine in the first place is puzzling. One ought not to persecute others for their private beliefs, however distasteful, but it strikes me that such bigotry and fanaticism might have an adverse effect on a doctor’s ability to treat his or her patients fairly – particularly the female, gay, and Jewish ones. In any case, with the proscription of Hizb ut-Tahrir, Shaida’s suspension is certainly justified; though he is still, for some reason, registered with the General Medical Council.  

And then there is Mike Johnson, Speaker of the US House of Representatives and second in line to the presidency since last October. Johnson seems to be an avowed Christian nationalist and his pre-Speaker career highlights include advocating for the criminalisation of gay sex and helping Donald Trump’s demented and spurious legal attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election. Read about all this and more in a white paper released by the Congressional Freethought Caucus on 11 January.

It is a sad, sad irony that the very nation founded upon Enlightenment ideals by a group of secularists and freethinkers, including the two great Toms (Paine and Jefferson), is home to some of the world’s most backward and most powerful Christian fundamentalists.

Modi’s triumph and the decay of subcontinental secularism

Meanwhile, India’s great secularist tradition continues to decay under Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist rule. On 22 January, Modi officially opened a new temple to the Hindu god Ram in Ayodhya, proclaiming that ‘After years of struggle and countless sacrifices, Lord Ram has arrived [home]. I want to congratulate every citizen of the country on this historic occasion.’

With elections on the horizon, Modi’s fulfilment of a long-standing Hindu nationalist dream was obviously a vote-getting ploy. Little, of course, was made of the fact that the temple’s site was once home to a centuries-old mosque destroyed by a Hindu mob in 1992. The mob were convinced that the mosque had originally been erected by Muslim invaders over an earlier temple where Ram had been born. (Leave it to the religious to desecrate the sacred sites of their rivals.) Riots provoked by the destruction of the mosque killed thousands.

So: communal strife, destruction of ancient buildings, the death of thousands—and all thanks to religious fantasy. And now the vandalism and horror of 1992 are being erased because Narendra Modi wishes to stir up his supporters. In doing so, his assault on India’s rich secularist history reaches new heights. Here is the triumph of Modi.

And this prompts a further reflection: from Israel and Gaza to the US and India—not to mention the bloodstained steppes of Ukraine, where Orthodox-inspired and supported Russian troops are trying to destroy a young democracy—religion, in various forms, remains one of the world’s greatest threats to democratic and secular ideals, and to the ideals of peace and freedom. How far we secularists still have to go! And perhaps it really is not too much to say that ‘religion poisons everything.’

The Navajo Nation vs NASA

On 6 January, one of the great crises of our time arose. The White House hastily convoked a meeting, attended by officials from NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration among others, to meet the crisis head-on. For a commercial lunar mission, Peregrine Mission One, was due to launch in a couple of days—and its payload contained human remains which were to be buried on the Moon.

What, you might ask, was the problem with that? It has been done before, and the Moon is quite a beautiful final resting place. Many people, myself included, would feel honoured to be fired out into space to rest forever on the Earth’s closest fellow orb. Allow the Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren to explain:

‘The moon holds a sacred place in Navajo cosmology… The suggestion of transforming it into a resting place for human remains is deeply disturbing and unacceptable to our people and many other tribal nations.’

Yes, really! This is no different from Catholics or Muslims imposing their religious beliefs on others. The only surprising thing is that it was paid such heed. The only proper response to this sort of thing is: Who cares? Or, perhaps, Too bad!

Of course, the reason no such firmly secularist response was given in this case is because the Navajo are a minority and they have faced terrible oppression. Guilt-ridden liberals who would happily scoff at, say, Catholic calls to ban homosexuality, are unable to do the same when it comes to indigenous people staking their own arrogant claims to religious privilege. This is an act of unintentional bigotry. It suggests that indigenous people cannot be held to the same standards as others and that their superstitions, which they are clearly incapable of throwing off, must be indulged.

But as citizens of democratic nations, nobody has the right to make special claims for themselves based on religion, let alone impose their beliefs on others. That is the essence of secularism. It does not matter whether the demand for privilege comes from a powerful bishop or an oppressed minority.

The Navajo case is representative of a more general trend: the indulgence of indigenous superstition in the name of inclusivity. Other instances include the adoption of such superstitions in American museums and the credence given to ‘indigenous science’ or ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ even in such august journals as Science. In New Zealand, meanwhile, where the embrace of ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ (in this case, Māori ways of knowing) has gone the furthest, a Māori local district councillor defied the secularist mayor during a meeting and recited a prayer.

If Narendra Modi and Mike Johnson are examples of the religious right flaunting its power, are the claims of the Navajo and the Māori examples of the religious ‘woke’ left in action? At least, the ‘woke’ left tends to support these claims. As ever, the only solution is the secularist one of fairness: nobody, however powerful or oppressed, gets a special pass for their beliefs, nor do they have the right to impose those beliefs on others.

Muslims v Michaela

The legal case currently being pursued against Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela Community School by fundamentalist Muslims angry at the school’s restriction of Muslim prayer has stirred up something quite unusual, but also very heartening: an outpouring from across the political spectrum of sympathy for secularism. But, as Megan Manson of the National Secular Society notes, this sympathy is somewhat shallow, given its ignorance (or ignoring) of the UK’s deeply anti-secular education system – never mind its overtly religious political system. Still, who knows? Perhaps the intimidation meted out to Michaela by aggrieved fundamentalists and the wave of public sympathy for the school will inspire the country to finally cast off all the vestiges of theocracy.

Postscript: the Conservative MP Mike Freer has just announced that he will stand down at the next election. Why? He is scared of the Islamists who have been intimidating him for years. He is, in fact, lucky to be alive given that he was in the line of sight of the Islamist who murdered Sir David Amess in 2021. As Rakib Ehsan writes in The Telegraph, ‘Freer’s decision to walk away from British politics for fear of his personal safety is yet another example of the Islamist-inspired erosion of British parliamentary democracy.’

An irreligious king?

On a related note, talk of Prince William’s irreligiousness compared to his father and grandmother caused some speculation that he might cut ties with the Church of England upon becoming King. Alas, such rumours were quickly dispelled, but not before they provoked some amusing grumbling from Peter Hitchens in The Mail on Sunday.

Alongside some thin guff in place of any serious reasoning about the truth of Christianity (never Hitchens’ strong point, and something he usually and wisely avoids), there was one point with which I found myself agreeing: ‘If this stuff is not true, or is marginal, or if we do not really believe it, then there is no purpose in having a King, or a Prince of Wales. We might as well have a President in a nice suit.’ Indeed—and huzzah!

The resurrected exorcist

The Daily Star, citing ‘a recently unearthed interview with [an] obscure Spanish magazine’, says that the Pope’s former exorcist Gabriele Amorth (who left this vale of tears in 2016) believed that the Devil is responsible for political evil and corruption. Even Hitler and Stalin, according to Father Amorth, are to be explained by old Nick’s seductive whisperings. Spooky!

But come now. Aside from its obvious foolishness, this is an abdication of moral and intellectual responsibility. Never mind the hard and necessary work of bothering to explain the evil of a Hitler or a Stalin in rational terms, so that we might understand and stop such men from gaining power ever again. No, no: it was the Devil! Just pray and obey our ancient and constipated moral teachings and all manner of thing shall be well.

Remember: this was the Pope’s exorcist. So, quite apart from the fact that the Pope still believes in exorcism like some medieval peasant, until quite recently his exorcist was a plain idiot. But what do you expect from the Catholic Church? And millions, if not billions, take the Pope’s pronouncements very seriously. The human species is still, clearly, very immature.

Some more wisdom from Father Amorth:

‘I tell those who come to see me to first go to a doctor or a psychologist… Most of the time there is a physical or psychological basis for explaining their suffering… The psychiatrists send me the incurable cases. There is no rivalry. The psychiatrist determines if it is an illness, the exorcist if it is a curse.’

‘I work seven days a week, from morning until night, including Christmas Eve and Holy Week. Everyone is vulnerable. The Devil is very intelligent. He retains the intelligence of the angel that he was.

‘Suppose, for example, that someone you work with is envious of you and casts a spell on you. You would get sick. Ninety per cent of the cases that I deal with are precisely spells. The rest are due to membership in satanic sects or participation in séances or magic.

‘If you live in harmony with God, it is much more difficult for the devil to possess you.’

Well, there you go: harmonise your aura with the Lord above, then that rascal Lucifer won’t be able to get you, and there’ll be no evil in the world! Because, of course, no evil has ever been committed by godly men…

Enter Russell Crowe

Apparently, Father Amorth was the subject of a (highly dramatised) movie starring Russell Crowe last year. According to the summary on Wikipedia, ‘[Amorth] learns that a founder of the Spanish Inquisition, an exorcist, was possessed, which let him infiltrate the Church and do many evils. Amorth also finds the Church covered this up…’ This does not, so far as I know, represent anything done or claimed by the real Amorth, but it does chime with his comments given above—and what an easy escape for the Church! All its many crimes throughout history were just a satanic aberration. It was the Devil all along! Thank the Lord for that. Let us never trouble ourselves again about the Inquisition, or Galileo, or Giordano Bruno, or the Crusades, or child sex abuse, or…

So much for mea culpa, never mind mea maxima culpa, then.

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Further reading:

The Israel-Palestine conflict

Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? by Ralph Leonard

Christian nationalism in the US

Reproductive freedom is religious freedom, by Andrew Seidel and Rachel Laser

Secular conservatives? If only… by Jacques Berlinerblau

Indian secularism and Hindu nationalism

Religion and the decline of freethought in South Asia, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

‘We need to move from identity politics to a politics of solidarity’ – interview with Pragna Patel

Campaign ‘to unite India and save its secular soul’, by Puja Bhattacharjee

British Islam, secularism, and free speech

Free speech in Britain: a losing battle? by Porcus Sapiens

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities – interview with Steven Greer

Monarchy, religion, and republicanism

Bring on the British republic – Graham Smith’s ‘Abolish the Monarchy’, reviewed, by Daniel James Sharp

‘I do not think you are going to get a secular state without getting rid of the monarchy’ –interview with Graham Smith

The post Faith Watch, February 2024 appeared first on The Freethinker.

The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, raised eyebrows recently by suggesting that Labour in power would be ‘even more supportive of faith schools’ than the current government.

Given the current administration’s enthusiasm for faith-based education, it is hard to see how this could be achieved in practice. It may have been an empty gesture, a case of playing to the gallery – Starmer was speaking during a visit to a state-funded faith school. But if he is serious, the implications are worrying.

Labour’s uncritical support for religiously segregated education is alarming – especially as religiously segregated often means, in practice, racially segregated too. In pluralistic societies, inclusive secular schools can be powerful agents of social integration, forging connections that transcend the boundaries of race and religion. In a world riven with religiously motivated conflicts and tensions, it is unwise for the state to fund a form of education that restricts exposure to diverse worldviews and to critical thinking.

Britain’s Muslim, Jewish, Sikh and Hindu faith schools are largely monocultural zones – silos of segregation that do nothing to foster greater social cohesion. Interfaith work between schools is often offered as a remedy to this, but it is a poor substitute for a school in which children of different backgrounds are educated together and mix with one another every day.

Earlier this year the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child urged the UK to end the use of religion as a selection criterion for school admissions. Starmer’s promise not to ‘tinker’ with faith schools signals his intent to do nothing about discriminatory admissions.

The evidence is clear, though, that religious selection also acts as a form of socio-economic segregation. Recent research additionally reveals that Church of England and Catholic primaries ‘serve as hubs of relative advantage’, less likely than community schools to admit children with special educational needs and disabilities.

It seems that Labour’s promise to ‘break down the barriers to opportunity’ only applies where it will not upset religious interests.

Probably the biggest clash between education authorities and faith schools in recent years has been over the introduction of relationships and sex education (RSE) – particularly the requirement for this to be LGBT-inclusive. Catholic, ultra-Orthodox and Muslim activists have objected to requirements imposed on schools to teach pupils about sex, the existence of same-sex relationships and the legal rights of LGBT people. Good quality RSE needs to be evidence-based, impartial and free from ideology of all kinds. It would be shameful if Labour’s keenness to appease religious groups were to allow faith-based prejudice to undermine the subject, leaving faith school pupils in the dark and young LGBT people feeling isolated.

The 50 per cent admissions cap is another area where religious groups are lobbying for privileges. This is the rule that where newly established academies with a religious character are oversubscribed, half of their places must be allocated without reference to faith. It is the only meaningful effort we have seen to promote inclusivity and address the problems caused by faith-based schooling. However, Catholic and Jewish groups have been lobbying to get it abolished. In 2018 they almost succeeded, but Theresa May’s government eventually backtracked in the face of vigorous opposition. It would be bizarre for any party to resurrect a regressive policy that risks increasing levels of discrimination and making integration less likely. Yet under the Conservatives, the cap remains under review.

When it comes to faith schools, all the major parties appear minded to maintain the status quo.

The Liberal Democrats have typically advocated a more inclusive approach to state education. In 2017 the party passed a policy to support an end to religious selection in publicly funded schools. But the policy failed to appear in the 2019 manifesto – and there was no mention of reform to faith schools in the party’s ‘core policy offer’ on schools that was set out at their conference in September.

The Greens, meanwhile, are much more upfront about their vision for an inclusive and secular education system. Their education policy is underpinned by sound secularist principles and includes ending the state funding of faith schools, removing religious opt-outs from equality legislation and abolishing the archaic requirement on schools to provide daily acts of collective worship.

The Greens would also prohibit schools from delivering a form of religious education that ‘encourages adherence to any particular religious belief’.

England’s outdated model of religious education is certainly ripe for reform. Faith schools still teach the subject ‘within the tenets of their faith’, which means the subject is often confessional in nature, rather than objective, critical and pluralistic. Even in secular schools, RE remains compulsory yet separate from the national curriculum – and heavily influenced by religious interest groups, through bodies called standing advisory councils on religious education (SACREs), which determine the syllabus for each local area.

Both Labour and the Lib Dems have promised to review the curriculum if they form the next government. This ought to include replacing religious education with a more relevant subject that promotes critical thinking while giving pupils a solid understanding of diversity of belief and non-belief among the UK population and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. But whether either party will be bold enough to wrest this area of the curriculum away from vested religious interests is another question.

Whichever party forms the next government, it is imperative that they tackle the scourge of unregistered schools. An estimated 6,000 children are being systemically undereducated in illegal and often unsafe ‘schools’ that teach a narrow, religion-based curriculum without oversight or adequate safeguarding.

This year, the government scrapped proposed legislation which included measures to address this issue, such as a register of children not in school and new powers for Ofsted to act against schools which operate covertly. Despite junking the Schools Bill, in which these proposed measures were contained, the government insists that it remains committed to the bill’s objectives concerning unregistered schools. Labour has also pledged to crack down on unregistered schools but suggested it would take a ‘different approach’. What that may be remains to be seen.

But it is not enough to focus solely on the illegal sector. The more diverse our society becomes, the more integrated it needs to be. Faith schools build division into the system by separating children along the lines of their parents’ culture and religious belief, encouraging them to identify with this from an early age, rather than allowing them to make up their own minds about who they are and what they believe. Schools that educate children together without imposing a religious framework on them or discriminating against some in favour of others are the only model that public money should support.

There is also a big question mark over the sustainability of the Church of England’s role in state education. Church attendance is at a record low. Data from the latest British Social Attitudes survey suggests that just three per cent of those aged 18-24 – tomorrow’s parents – would describe themselves as Anglican. Yet the Church of England runs a quarter of primary schools in England and is the biggest sponsor of academies. Despite all the talk about faith schools offering choice, it is already the case that in many areas of the country, families have little or no option other than a church school.

The Church of England is currently targeting schools as part of its plans to ‘double the number of children and young people who are active Christian disciples by 2030’. It is a sign of how privileged the established church is that so few politicians appear willing to question its exploitation of state schools as mission fields for Anglican evangelism. The more pluralistic and secular Britain becomes, the less appropriate will it be for churches to exert influence over state education.

It is unfortunate that, for the upcoming general election at least, faith schools are unlikely to be on the agenda. But the case for inclusive, secular education will only grow stronger. Politicians cannot file it away in the ‘too difficult’ department forever.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on freethought. Or make a donation to support our work into the future.

On religion in schools, see further:

Faith in education, by Emma Park (New Humanist)

Religion and belief in schools: lessons to be learnt, by Russell Sandberg (Freethinker)

Post-Christian Britain and religion in schools, National Secular Society podcast

Unregistered (illegal) schools with Eve Sacks, NSS podcast

A new Catholic school for Peterborough, NSS podcast

The Church of England’s influence over education, NSS podcast

The post Faith schools: where do the political parties stand? appeared first on The Freethinker.

Some stakeholders in the world of religious education believe that RE is the best subject in the curriculum, offering an exploration of deep existential questions; philosophical and ethical discussions and debates about the meaning of life, purpose and identity; and learning about other’s worldviews in a way that is culturally, morally and socially enriching. Unlike other subjects, which are a dry accumulation of facts and figures mainly driven by economic and employability values, RE offers – so the argument goes – the development of the whole person. RE complements the curriculum perfectly. It is all pink bubbles and balloons everywhere.

Religious Studies GCSE entries have fallen for the third year in the row, but according to NATRE (the National Association of RE Teachers) and the REC (Religious Education Council), this is despite the subject’s popularity among students.

In his book, Reforming RE (2020), Mark Chater describes the ‘enthusiast’ position shared by teachers and educators who believe that everything in RE is great. According to ‘enthusiasts’, the drop in intake is due to neglect by the Department for Education (DfE), low funding, and RE not being included in an ‘Ebacc’ – an accountability performance measure by which schools are monitored. RE, they say, is invaluable for a well-rounded curriculum and relevant to modern life, and we just need more of it and better funding… Why can’t others see it this way?

Ofsted’s 2013 report on RE, ‘Religious education: realising the potential’, concluded that the structures that underpin the local determination of the RE curriculum have failed to keep pace with changes in the wider educational world. The same report stated that the teaching of RE in general is poor and that many pupils leave school with scant subject knowledge.

One survey by Opinium Research asked more than 1,800 adults who had attended UK secondary schools which subject they thought was the least beneficial to their education: RE was among those ranked lowest. Just over one in five (21%) said that RE was the least beneficial, and this was followed by art (chosen by 16%) and PE (10%). Another more recent survey by YouGov from 2022 asked the question, ‘How important do you think it is to teach [various subjects] at secondary school?’ It found that 55% people in UK believe that RE is either not very important or not important at all, ranking it 15th out of 18 subjects in terms of importance. Even more tellingly, the same polling company asked school students in 2018, ‘Which subject do you enjoy the most?‘ On a scale of ‘I enjoy it a lot’, RE was second to last, with only Citizenship being behind. When it comes to the percentages of participants who chose ‘I don’t enjoy it very much’ or ‘I don’t enjoy it at all’, RE was by far the least popular, with 44% pupils disliking the subject.

Yet the number of students entering on GCSE RE full courses increased from 170,303 entries in 2009 to 284,057 in 2016. This was used by enthusiasts as evidence that the subject is popular among students – despite consistent feedback about its confusing purpose, the low quality of the teaching, and its low popularity among both students and parents. However, any weight placed on the increase in the number of students taking the subject ignores the fact that RE is compulsory across all key stages. The increase in the number of entries was always driven by its compulsory status rather than its popularity. The recent decreases which are taking place in spite of its being compulsory only serve to show how troublesome a state RE is in.

The latest Ofsted review of RE, published in May 2021, has provided the first academic literature review of RE and pointed out numerous flaws in subject pedagogy as well as in the general teaching of the subject. Among many technical points that are more relevant to teachers, I will focus on the parts that I think are the most important in demonstrating why the subject is inherently flawed, why students dislike it, and why its educational outcomes are not beneficial for our modern liberal democracy. 

Firstly, the problem of the knowledge being taught. The report states that there is no clarity as to what constitutes reliable knowledge in teaching religions and non-religious worldviews, and a lack of clarity as to what constitutes objective, critical and pluralistic scholarship in RE. This is because the subject is not grounded in the academic study of religions, and is consequently the only subject without a national curriculum. Rather, the ‘knowledge’ taught in RE in schools is determined by religious groups themselves, in every borough, through religious representation on the SACREs. The latter are the standing advisory councils on religious education which usually determine the syllabus for maintained schools in their area, and which act as political interest groups offering their ideological products.

Religious groups are less interested in the academic study of religions than in the pastoral aspect of their religion, religious apologetics, and in presenting their religions in the most beneficial light. They are happy to use taxpayers’ money to do a soft form of proselytising by influencing schools’ RE syllabus.

The status quo, and the power structures that determine the RE curriculum to the benefit of religious groups, are sometimes defended with an argument that the current RE settlement of local syllabus-making promotes democracy, inclusivity and diversity. But this is a fallacious and self-serving argument. The current arrangements are only beneficial to the dominant religious groups’ interest. They are not in the interest of the public, nor of religious and non-religious minorities, nor of dissenting ‘heretical’ and progressive voices, nor of our students, who are being denied an unbiased education.

Similarly, in the opening decades of the 21st century in the USA, we have seen Christian groups passing ‘academic freedom’ bills and using their privileges and influence to undermine the teaching of evolution in science lessons – all in the name of inclusivity and pluralism. They love democracy and freedom when it benefits them, but less so when their privileges are challenged.

As a consequence of the local arrangements of syllabus-making, in which the representatives of religious groups decide what should be taught, the content of RE becomes distorted. This is because the purpose and vision of the subject, as interpreted by religious representatives, is to implicitly assert a benevolent view of religious traditions and beliefs. This is usually done indirectly, through the omission of the negative parts of a religion. Explicit instruction into positive beliefs is never as effective as indoctrination through the omission of problematic ones. The subject tends to be taught as a form of indoctrination through a partial and incomplete presentation of a particular religion’s tenets. Students are left with a false sense of having complete knowledge and an educated understanding about the religion, when in fact they do not.

This outcome has been emphasised in the Ofsted review: it concludes that ‘bad RE’ is spreading ‘unhelpful misconceptions’ by presenting religions only in a positive light, and claiming that ‘only good and loving religion is true religion and bad religion is false religion’.

As teachers of RE, we seem to be masters of spreading the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy. Take any of the abusive theology found in religions or any abusive beliefs or practices throughout history or today that are inspired by religions. These are usually omitted in RE lessons, but sometimes crop up. As an RE teacher, one just needs to select one of the plethora of rhetorical devices deployed in religious apologetics to dismiss any such negative aspect out of hand. For instance, one can tell students that they are taking it out of context; that people who do unpleasant things in the name of religion are not true believers but are just extremists and not true to their religion; that it is culture rather than religion; that it is politics hijacking religion – and so on and so forth. The blame is always laid on something else, while the attitude is maintained that nothing negative could truly be part of the religion.

RE as taught in England and Wales today is a subject where religions are deliberately sanitised and misrepresented in the name of promoting respect, tolerance and community cohesion. Respect and tolerance are legitimate ideals that we should still hold on to, but unfortunately, we extend these to respecting beliefs and religions, rather than promoting respect for individual people and their rights.

It is vital to promote respect and tolerance for individual human rights and people, not for individual beliefs, including religions. In doing so, we must be able to deal with the abusive elements of religions that do not respect human rights.

The 2021 Ofsted review made several recommendations that could enable RE to become a pluralistic, objective and critical subject, and not spread unhelpful misconceptions. Above all, it recommended that RE should be grounded in the academic study of religion and non-religious worldviews, using the well-established methods, processes and other tools of scholarship that are already used by scholars to make sense of global and historical religions and non-religious worldviews. However, the DfE seems unwilling to make reforms. A recent chance to make progress would have been following the REC Commission on RE final report in 2018, which recommended changing the subject to ‘Religion and Worldviews’. But the DfE rejected this recommendation on the basis that it would add too much to teachers’ workloads.

With the DfE unwilling to make reforms, RE remains cluttered with many pedagogies and different visions about the aim and purpose of the subject. Enthusiasts believe that having a subject that touches upon philosophy, ethics, theology and many other disciplines is its strength. Yet in reality, this mixture of approaches only obfuscates the subject further. It would be far more beneficial for our pupils to study only ethics or philosophy, with their clear aims and purposes, as well-established disciplines in their own right, than to keep on with this artefact of the past called RE, burdened as it is with external ideological demands that acts as a proxy for religious apologetics and soft proselytism. We do not have ethics or philosophy in our schools because RE has hijacked them and is doing their work badly. 

RE’s distorted pedagogy, lack of objective knowledge and unclear educational outcomes produce confusing assessment criteria. In KS4 (when they are aged 14-16), students face exam questions like ‘Why is prayer important for Christians?’ or ‘How does a belief in resurrection influence Christians today?’ A typical mark scheme will contain a list of benevolent generic answers: ‘It makes them do good deeds in order to go to heaven’, or ‘Prayer gets them closer to God’. It is not hard to see why students dislike the subject, especially as according to the latest research on religiosity, almost 60% of citizens in the UK are not affiliated to a particular religion. The proportion is even higher among the young. Outside school, it would seem, religion in the UK is losing relevance generation by generation.

In the limited time allocated to a subject on the curriculum, is RE as it is currently taught really what we want our students to learn about? Is it going to help them grasp the messy complexity of religion and non-religious beliefs and their global, historical and contemporary place in the world? The educational outcomes of RE are designed to create a ‘religionist’: a soft religion apologist who will not be able to think of the place of religion in the world in a critical manner, but will be well-equipped to explain away any criticism of religion. They will become bad thinkers, and fail to see both the good and the bad in religions. They are wired to believe that the RE teacher in Batley Grammar school should have never shown the cartoon of Mohammed in class, because it is ‘disrespectful’, whilst in another breath stating that violence and hatred have nothing to do with religions.

Extreme beliefs and behaviour can only flourish when they are protected with a buffer zone of ‘enablers’, a majority of well-wishers who view their tradition uncritically and are happy to endlessly explain away any abusive theology.

It might be hoped that the fallacy that ‘only good religion is true religion’, identified by the 2021 Ofsted review, will trigger a change in the way the RE syllabus is put together, and the way it is taught. But I am not so optimistic. It seems to me that there will be no change until the power structures behind RE, and the influence of privileged religious groups over it, are removed.

This does not mean that religious groups should not be stakeholders, influencers and partners when it comes to working on the RE syllabus. Rather, it means that their privileged position should be removed, so that we can have a secular RE for the 21st century. Such a subject should be grounded in academic study; should be objective, critical and pluralistic; and should be inclusive of both religious and non-religious views. It should offer powerful knowledge of the best that has been said in religious studies scholarship, not theology. It should have clarity in its aims, which will be to promote academic scholarship about religions, as well as the British fundamental values of liberal democracy, equality and individual liberty. By doing so, it should implicitly promote respect for human rights. This should in turn aid and support progressive views in religious traditions, because students will be more educated and more able to identify and discern what the real scholarship is and what is just religious apologetics.

But support for these progressive views can only happen if we are able to identify which ones are regressive and which ones are progressive. We cannot do this by lumping together all religions and religiosity in one basket. Change will not come until privilege-blind stakeholders change themselves – which is highly unlikely – or until their privileges are taken away from them. This will only happen when this country truly becomes a secular country and a state for all of its citizens, no matter what religion or belief they hold. We can start by taking into account the important insights from the 2021 Ofsted review, and work on building a national curriculum for RE that is grounded in the academic study of religions.

When the DfE, in 2018, rejected the recommendations to start working on a new subject called ‘Religion and Worldviews’, I felt disappointed. Now, after considering what kind of changes the RE stakeholders do propose, it has become clear that much of what they propose is merely cosmetics without any substantial change in the pedagogy. Religious groups are as keen as ever for RE to be their platform for apologetics.

As long Britain has an official state religion, and as long as dominant religious groups are privileged, real reform of RE will simply not be achieved. Perhaps we should replace the subject with wider civic and moral education, which would include the basics of religious education, but not be the basis of the subject. Such a subject would enable our students to learn more objectively about human rights like freedom of expression and freedom of religion, and concepts like religious discrimination and religious privilege. It would enable them to discuss the place of religions in the world in a more informed and critical manner.

Civic and moral studies was introduced in France during its 2015 school reforms. In a light of the DfE’s inability to substantially reform RE in a critical, objective and inclusive way in England and Wales, a vision for a similar subject, which would replace RE, is slowly being formed, among others by the National Secular Society’s Secular Education Forum, of which I am a member. I and others have also been helping the NSS to develop resources for schools that touch upon issues of secularism, human rights, equality and freedoms, religious privileges and discrimination. These themes should be well suited to civic and moral studies; to me, at least, they seem far more educationally meaningful than the proselytising of RE. Ultimately, replacing religious education with wider civic and moral studies would probably be the best course for future students and our society as a whole.

The post Bad Religious Education appeared first on The Freethinker.

‘I’m offended by that….’ was the startled response I got from a fellow teacher. I’d raised concern in a department meeting. A student had been coming to school with her face concealed behind a niqab. I said that children shouldn’t have their faces covered in school.

Eyebrows were raised. Lips were pursed.

‘So…. Anyway…’

The ‘discussion’ was over.

I couldn’t help a final retort… ‘Be offended, then. It will do you some good.’

Admittedly conceited – and childish – I was sincere. I wanted my colleague, with whom I normally had an excellent relationship, to ‘feel’ the sharp jab of offence and consider, really, what had spurned it. After all, pain is so often a precursor to change, or at least to reflection – I hoped.

It was October, and for a month, a new, 16-year-old Year 12 student of Bengali heritage had been coming to our east London school wearing niqab – an Islamic face covering. She was a new student. Nobody had ever seen her face. She just arrived wearing it. Nobody said anything. We prided ourselves at this school, a recently established free school in east London, on our reflective, progressive ethos. Yet as far as this student’s approach was concerned, any sense of reflection or progress was hard to find.

I raised my concerns. On a practical, safeguarding level alone, it was a worry. How could the school know the student was who they claimed to be? Sixth formers have branded uniforms and carry photo identity cards for a reason. Then, of course, there’s the ethical quagmire around the whole ‘covering of women’ issue.

‘Just get over it. It’s their culture,’ I was told by a colleague.

‘Whose culture, exactly? Niqabs are a Gulf tradition and about as Bengali as the didgeridoo. And we don’t have a problem policing “culture” when it comes to the fashion choices of other minorities’ – is what I would have responded, had the conversation been allowed.

Meanwhile, other students were starting to follow suit. A handful of girls – all of Bengali heritage – were now coming in to school in niqab. For some reason, it seemed to be fine for them to do so intermittently: some days a student in my Year 12 English Literature class would wear a niqab, other days she wouldn’t. On the days when she did, her height and voice were the only ways I could identify her. She was quiet and of average size, so I couldn’t be certain who she was on the days that she did come in covered. My go-to approach was by process of elimination via the class register, which didn’t seem satisfactory or safe.

Then the Muslim boys, in disobedience of the school dress code, started to come in to school in thobe – long gowns traditionally worn by Muslim men. The school’s management team buried their heads deeper in the sand. Apparently, Muslim students could bend the rules, while others would get detentions for wearing trainers or donning ‘sculpted’ haircuts.

Any time I brought up this Islamic exceptionalism, papers were shuffled, eyes were averted and excuses made. Being of part-Bengali heritage myself gave me a certain latitude to be franker than others, but the mostly white, middle class staff room – normally a cacophony of ‘decolonising the curriculum’, ‘white privilege’ and ‘women’s rights’ – was silent on this issue, even though it blatently involved privileging one group of students over the rest.

And we all know why.

For the same reason I have to write this article under a pseudonym. The same reason a Yorkshire teacher and his family are still in hiding after showing the wrong cartoons to his class. It is ‘Islamophobia’ in the literal sense: teachers and schools are scared of Islam. Batley Grammar, protests at the gates, online furore, death threats, Samuel Paty, being labelled by colleagues as ‘intolerant’, ‘racist’, ‘offensive’. Schools are terrified of doing the wrong thing – so we do nothing.

And the worst symptom of this fear? Silence. In order to counter the unresponsiveness of my colleagues, I contacted my Head and other senior management via email to outline my concerns. There was no reply. Eventually, when I encountered my Head in the staff room, he nervously agreed that the school needed to ‘have a conversation’ about these issues.

That was four years ago. Since then, the cultural stand-off has only become more entrenched. The Muslim students effectively wear what they want, leave lessons to pray when they want, separate themselves according to gender when they want. They excuse themselves – on cultural grounds – from assemblies celebrating ‘controversial’ topics such as Pride month. Classrooms are commandeered in break times as ‘safe spaces’ and ‘prayer rooms’, segregated by gender, ethnicity and religion.

The staff pat themselves on the back for their ‘tolerance’ while simultaneously wringing their hands when the same students express intolerance on issues such as women’s rights, homosexuality, censorship and evolution – which they often dismiss as being inappropriate, ‘Western colonial’ content. But still nobody wants to have a conversation about it. Or even to ask what kind of message we as a school send when one group of students is allowed to create its own dress codes, curate its own curriculum, crowbar its ideas on gender and sexuality into classrooms.

While there may be some merit to certain cultural accommodations, the fear and silence that surround the whole situation are the most worrying aspect of all. Teachers today cannot even talk about the repercussions of allowing one particular group to break the rules applicable to everyone else, for fear of causing ‘offence’. What hope do future generations have?

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The post Silence of the teachers appeared first on The Freethinker.

The law on religious education and collective worship in England means that schools are at risk of breaching human rights law. But the government has decided to do nothing about it. 

Lost within the high drama in Westminster in the last week have been two important and contradictory developments concerning the law on religion in schools. On 5^th July, the High Court of Northern Ireland, in Re JR87 (by her mother and next friend) and her father (“G”) for Judicial Review, held that the law on collective worship and religious education there breached human rights laws, because it was not sufficiently critical or pluralist. On 12th July, the House of Lords voted down an amendment to the Schools Bill that would have ensured that the law in England would be more critical and pluralist: it would have meant that the study of non-religious beliefs would have been explicitly covered as part of a renamed ‘Religion and Worldviews’ subject in academies in England.

On the face of it, the High Court decision in Northern Ireland seems geographically specific. The laws on religious education and worship now differ in each of the four nations of the UK. In Northern Ireland, although the law requires ‘undenominational religious education’, it states that this means that the subject should be ‘based on the Holy Scriptures’ rather than ‘any tenet distinctive of any particular religious denomination’. The reference to ‘Holy Scriptures’ means that it must be Christian. The core syllabus – which applies throughout Northern Ireland – is drafted by the churches and does not mention faiths other than Christianity at all at primary school level.

It is therefore unsurprising that the High Court found that this law breached the parents’ rights under Article 2 of the First Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) read with Article 9 ECHR. Together, these provide, respectively, for the right for parents to have their children educated in conformity with their (the parents’) philosophical or religious convictions, and for freedom of thought, conscience and religion. However, the reasoning of the Court suggests that schools in England and Wales are also likely to breach human rights.

Collective worship

The concern about human rights compliance in Northern Ireland is in part because of what the High Court there said about collective worship. Colton J noted that it appeared ‘from the evidence that the only external persons invited to attend assembly are exclusively Christian’. He concluded that collective worship was ‘not conveyed in an objective, critical and pluralist manner’.

Although this finding is fact-specific, it raises questions about how collective worship is practised in other schools, not only in Northern Ireland but across the UK. There is nothing in primary legislation in England and Wales that requires collective worship to be pluralistic. Rather, collective worship must be performed on a daily basis and ‘shall be wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character’. This permits but does not mandate pluralism. Whether this will be enough to render it compliant with human rights will depend on what schools actually do. 

Countless pieces of empirical research have demonstrated that the collective worship requirement is regularly breached. There is a longstanding concern that many schools do not hold a daily act of collective worship for all pupils. As long ago as 1994, the General Secretary of the Secondary Heads Association stated that: ‘A law which cannot be obeyed or enforced is a bad law, and it should be amended… This is undoubtedly the case with regard to collective worship in schools’. Yet, paradoxically, it is likely that those schools which are fulfilling the collective worship requirement may well find themselves breaching human rights law. 

Providing collective worship that is both ‘wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character’ and ‘conveyed in an objective, critical and pluralist manner’ – reflecting the right to freedom of religion or belief – is a tricky tightrope for headteachers to walk. 

The United Nations Committee on the Right of the Child has repeatedly stated that the UK position breaches human rights. It has expressed its concern that pupils are required by law to take part in religious worship. It has also recommended that the law be changed to ensure that children themselves, as opposed to their parents, have the right to withdraw from such worship.

Even in Wales, where the law on religious education has been reformed, the Education Minister, Jeremy Miles, has shown no appetite for reforming collective worship. He responded to me on Twitter in May that it was not part of the curriculum and so outside the scope of curriculum reform.

The High Court decision in Northern Ireland highlights the two competing legal obligations that schools are faced with. It is surely time that this impasse be resolved. Numerous private member’s bills have been considered, but so far all attempts have failed.

Religious education

The High Court decision in Northern Ireland is also noteworthy for what it said about religious education. Much of its commentary will also apply to England and indeed Wales, notwithstanding the reforms that have transformed Religious Education (RE) into Religion, Values and Ethics (RVE) in Wales but not in England.

At first glance, it might appear that the court’s verdict on the core syllabus is specific to Northern Ireland. The High Court held that ‘on any analysis the teaching of the syllabus can only have the effect of promoting Christianity and encouraging its practice’. However, the key point is that the basis of the Court’s finding was that ‘RE is not conveyed in an objective, critical and pluralist manner’. The High Court discussed in detail the case law of the European Court of Human Rights on the matter. It distilled underlying principles from this case law, including the key requirements that religious education be ‘conveyed in an objective, critical and pluralist manner’ and that it accord ‘equal respect to different religious convictions and to non-religious beliefs’. 

While the agreed syllabi developed by a local authority in England and Wales are obliged by law to take into account other religions (and in Wales, other beliefs as well), it is still possible that individual syllabi may be judged to have fallen short of these requirements. This is particularly true of schools with a religious character, which in some cases are permitted to teach RE in accordance with their trust deeds.

In England, moreover, there is no explicit requirement that RE take into account non-religious beliefs, either in terms of the content of the agreed syllabus or in terms of the composition of the local authority bodies who draft and police it. Under English law, the agreed syllabus must reflect ‘the fact that the religious traditions in Great Britain are in the main Christian whilst taking account of the teaching and practices of the other principal religions represented in Great Britain.’ The composition of the local bodies must ‘reflect the principal religious traditions in the area’. There is no mention of non-religious beliefs. The reforms in Wales have redressed this problem, but England still lags behind.

Although pieces of government guidance have gone further, there is still no requirement in English law to consider non-religious beliefs; rather, the requirements of objectivity and pluralism exist implicitly at best. In the recent reforms in Wales, it was decided that these principles underpinned policy-making, but should not be underpinned in legislation.

In short, the law in England, and possibly also in Wales, does not explicitly require that religious education be ‘conveyed in an objective, critical and pluralist manner’ and does not require that schools accord ‘equal respect to different religious convictions and to non-religious beliefs’. This means that it is likely that schools which are fulfilling their legal obligations in terms of the teaching of religion may well be breaching the human rights of parents and pupils.

In Re JR87, the High Court also made it plain, again referring to the Strasbourg case law, that the fact that parents can opt their child out of religious education is no answer to a charge that the religious education provided is not compliant with human rights. As Colton J observed, the case law showed that ‘exemption arrangements were insufficient to mitigate or balance courses which, as the court finds in this case, were insufficiently objective, critical or pluralistic’. The judge stressed that the right to opt out of RE or collective worship ‘is not a sufficient answer to the lack of pluralism identified by the court’:

‘[The right to opt out] runs the risk of placing undue burdens on parents. There is a danger that parents will be deterred from seeking exclusion for a child. Importantly, it also runs the risk of stigmatisation of their children’. 

Although this clearly recognises the distinct religious situation in Northern Ireland, it is applicable to the situation in England, where opt-outs exist for pupils in all schools, as well as in Wales, where they are retained in relation to schools with a religious character. It is clear that the existence of an opt-out is no defence to a finding that education is not sufficiently critical or plural. Thus the current legal framework places schools in an unenviable position, with education law pushing them in a direction that risks breaching human rights law.

The Schools Bill

It is fortunate, therefore, that there is a vehicle currently before Parliament that could and should be used to amend the law on religious education and collective worship, in order to ensure that it is compliant with human rights and that schools will not breach human rights by following it. All it would take would be an explicit requirement that non-religious beliefs be included, as well as, ideally, a further requirement for a critical and pluralist approach.

Unfortunately, this opportunity has not been taken by the government. The vehicle in question is the Schools Bill, which has enjoyed a somewhat bumpy ride since being introduced in the House of Lords in May. The Bill is a ragbag of provisions that mostly attempt to resolve problems caused by previous education reforms by the Conservative government. Some of it is welcome, at least in principle, such as the greater scrutiny of unregistered schools. Other aspects, such as the imposition of standards upon academies, are incredibly vague, and it is unclear what the general thinking is behind them other than a power grab by the Secretary of State. The Bill has since been ripped to shreds by the Lords, so much so that whole parts of it have been largely gutted; the government has said that the Lords will have the opportunity to scrutinise the replacement clauses after the Bill has proceeded through the Commons. 

The Bill as originally drafted made provision for academies with a religious character which was basically in line with the current law. This led to amendments being considered at the Second Reading that sought to reform the position, especially in relation to academies without a religious character. These proposals sought to recast religious education as ‘religion and worldviews’ and sought to make explicit the inclusion of non-religious beliefs. Unfortunately, however, they were rejected. Similarly, amendments were tabled and rejected to replace collective worship with inclusive assemblies, following the unsuccessful approach of a recent private member’s bill.

At the Report Stage on 12^th July, after the decision in Northern Ireland, a further attempt was made to amend the Bill’s stance on religious education, on similar lines to the previous amendment. But this too was unsuccessful, voted down by a majority of 145 to 82.

Baroness Meacher, tabling the amendment, stated that all it would do would be to ensure that education law in England would be in line with the recent legal cases and developments in Wales: ‘surely we do not want to be left behind by Wales.’

Baroness Penn, responding for the government, saw the reform as unnecessary, since ‘worldviews can already be taught as part of religious education’. She also insisted that such reform would go against the spirit of the legislation, which sought ‘largely to consolidate existing requirements on academies, not place more burdens on them or interfere with their freedoms’. The government, she said, believes that academies ‘should be free to determine their own approach to the teaching of RE’. 

It is that word ‘can’, italicised above, that is the crux of the issue here. The Northern Ireland case and developments in Wales highlight that ‘can’ ought to be replaced by ‘should’. In order to be compliant with human rights, worldviews should be taught as part of religious education. The absence of an explicit statutory obligation to do so means that schools in practice are more likely to be in breach of human rights provisions by adopting a narrowly denominational understanding of RE. 

Baroness Penn said that the Schools Bill should ‘not specify the nature of how RE should be taught, which we think is best determined at the local level.’ This is absolutely right – though I think it should be determined at the school level rather than by local authorities. However, the amendment would not have affected this, but would have cleared up the statutory obligations on schools by showing them how to meet human rights standards. In contrast, the law as it currently stands pulls schools in the opposite direction, leading to confusion and a conflict between obligations under education law and human rights law. 

Concluding thoughts

The judgment of the High Court in Northern Ireland makes it plain that changes are needed to the law on religion in schools in England and Wales in order to make it compliant with human rights. The knee-jerk rejection by the government of amendments to the Schools Bill is therefore foolhardy. In the absence of reform, schools are left to attempt to marry education law and human rights obligations, which at the moment are an ill-fitting pair.

The best that can now be hoped is that further amendments along the lines of those proposed by Baroness Meacher will be considered via private member’s bills or by the Commons, if the Schools Bill continues that far. But reform of the law on religion in schools is unlikely to ever become a priority for any government. As I document in my new book, Religion in Schools: Learning Lessons from Wales, the reforms that occurred in the 1940s, 1980s and more recently in Wales, were all side effects of wider reforms of the curriculum. Grappling with the law on religious education, collective worship and the position of faith schools was seen as a necessary evil.

Yet, as the amendments to the Schools Bill have shown, the main issues with the current law could be easily resolved. Adding ‘and non-religious beliefs’ would basically do the job. Religion in Schools outlines how more comprehensive reform could take place. 

There is a danger that the government’s Bill of Rights may end up resolving the matter by weakening human rights protections and the courts’ powers of interpretations. This may entrench the non-pluralistic starting point found in domestic law. As I argued in my previous post for the Freethinker, the Human Rights Act 1998, for all its faults, has played an important role in requiring that protection be afforded not just on grounds of religion but also on grounds of belief. The Orwellian-titled Bill of Rights is actually about the restriction if not removal of rights, and is highly dangerous.

The current position makes further litigation inevitable. The Bill of Rights would mean that such challenges would occur in Strasbourg rather than in domestic courts. And all the time, while this legal wrangling continues, children will miss out on an education that explores religions and beliefs in an objective, critical and pluralist manner. The result can only be the fostering of illiteracy and intolerance.

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The post Religion and belief in schools: lessons to be learnt appeared first on The Freethinker.

A satisfactory apology?

The Church of Rome has finally started to face up to some of the historic abuses committed in its name. Earlier this month, a remarkable series of meetings was held between Canadian Indigenous leaders and Pope Francis I. The latter issued an apology, in Italian, for ‘the deplorable conduct of those members of the Catholic Church’ who had participated in the abuse of the Indigenous children caught up in the government’s coercive system of residential schools between 1883 and 1996. At least 150,000 children were forced to attend the schools, and more than 4,000 died.

The long-festering scandal of the schools took on increased prominence in May 2021, when the unmarked graves of 215 children were discovered by ground-scanning devices at a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Several hundred more unmarked burial sites have since been detected at other former schools. The continuing shock of these discoveries has been such that, in the Canadian media, the five-day Rome meetings sometimes overshadowed even the war in Ukraine.

Not all those present at the meetings, however, and even fewer of those watching from Canada, were entirely satisfied with the Pope’s apology. By limiting its terms to only certain ‘members’ of his Church, the Pontiff has been perceived by some to be ducking responsibility for the failure of the institution as a whole to renounce the evils of its past.

‘His [the Pope’s] words may be what some want to hear, but there are no repercussions for what happened,’ said Gene Gottfriedson, a 58-year-old survivor of the Kamloops school and a former altar boy. ‘Forgiveness is not easy,’ wrote journalist Tanya Talaga, who is of Indigenous descent, in a response to the Pope’s apology in Toronto’s Globe and Mail. ‘Reconciliation does not stop here at the Vatican. And it will not end until we bring all our children home.’

The harm caused by the residential schools

In Indigenous tradition, harm done to an individual can extend through seven generations of their family. This has truly been the case of the school survivors. On top of the sexual and other physical abuse many suffered at the hands of their priest teachers, they were forbidden to speak their native language, were taught nothing of their tribal heritage, and emerged, in many cases, as rootless teenagers who went on to become parents without having learned any parenting skills. Associated harms include the alarmingly high rate of Indigenous prisoners in Canada’s jails: this is seven times that of other Canadians, accounting for 27 per cent of the inmate population while representing only 4.1 per cent of the Canadian population as a whole.

The so-called ‘education’ that residential school children received was heavy on Bible teaching, but proved useless in enabling its students to lead normal adult lives. After they finished school, most returned to the ‘reserves’ – inferior land set aside for Indian tribes in the 1800s – and subsisted on government welfare. They were forbidden by the Indian Act to own property, to borrow money to start businesses, or to leave the reserves without a pass issued by the local Indian agent, a government employee. (When South Africa established its apartheid system, it used Canada’s Indian reserves as a model.) Ironically, thousands of Indigenous families later became adherents of the Christian churches in which they had suffered abuse.

Truth, reconciliation and the Catholic Church

Today, the schools are viewed by most Canadians as a national disgrace and a stain on the country’s reputation as a tolerant, secular, liberal democracy. Two prime ministers, Steven Harper and Justin Trudeau, have previously apologised for them. The issue has occupied political and public centre stage since the signing of the Indian Schools Settlement Agreement in 2007. The agreement, involving the government, Indigenous organisations, and the Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian and United churches, led to the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which heard 6,500 witnesses and in 2015 issued a report containing 94 ‘calls to action.’

Every denomination has since met their obligations to provide reparations and assistance to surviving Indian school residents and their descendants – except the Catholic Church, which operated about 70 per cent of the 130 schools.

Under the Schools Settlement, most of the $4.7 billion (£2.9 billion) paid to survivors of the schools and their families came from the Canadian federal government. Together, churches and dioceses of the Catholic Church in Canada pledged $54 million in various cash donations to compensate survivors, plus an additional $25 million in services in kind. In the event, they fell seriously short in their promises – despite the fact that cash reserves, property and other valuables owned by the Church in Canada amount to billions of dollars, making it reportedly ‘Canada’s largest charity by far’.

Shamefully, the federal government let the Church off the hook to the tune of millions of dollars, because, according to government lawyers, there was little chance of recovering the funds through a lawsuit. However, in an apparent response to mounting pressure following the recent discoveries, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops last year announced plans for a second fundraising campaign for survivors of the schools; this is still in progress.

The residential schools and secularism in Canada

For all the furore over the visit to Rome and the Pope’s response, most commentators have overlooked the consideration that the harm done to Indigenous children would have been largely avoided if Canada had required a secular education to be provided in its Indian residential schools.

The residential school system was intended to be managed by the Catholic and Anglican churches. In 1879, just as it was being finally approved, George Jacob Holyoake, the British secularist and coiner of the term ‘secularism’, met with the Canadian prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, over lunch in Ottawa. While the record is silent on this issue, Holyoake would, one imagines, have cautioned Sir John on the adverse effects he had observed in England on schools that retained religious management of their classes and curriculum.

Any advice that Holyoake may have given ultimately fell on deaf ears. The schools, set up to ‘take the Indian out of the child,’ ignored every principle of secular education that had been provided by the public school systems since 1867, when Canada became a self-governing Dominion of the British Empire.

Canada’s failure to adequately anchor its laws and institutions in secularism has led to tragedy, persecution and indifference. It has harmed generations in the 160 years since Confederation and has delayed the development of a clear national identity. There are still a number of anti-secular legislative provisions in force in Canada, including the public funding of Catholic schools and tax exemptions for churches. While humanist and secular societies in Canada have campaigned to abolish such provisions, they have so far made little progress.

The Canadian Constitution Act, created in 1982 out of the old British North America Act, flies in the face of secularism in its declaration that Canada ‘is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God’. The Fathers of Confederation saw Canada as a constitutional monarchy in which the monarch, whether Queen Victoria in 1867 or Queen Elizabeth in 2022, would reign as both Head of State and ‘Defender of the Faith’ – the ‘faith’ being that of the Church of England.

Despite such legal provisions, many Canadians appear to go about lives that are largely secular. According to a recent study, ‘Religiosity in Canada and its evolution from 1985 to 2019’, the share of people who reported having a religious affiliation fell from 90 percent in 1985 to 68 percent in 2019. Those who attended a religious activity at least once a month dropped from 43 to 23 per cent. The jettisoning of religious affiliation and the growth of secular sentiment in Canada go a long way to explaining public indignation over the failure of the Catholic Church to atone for its mistreatment of Indigenous children.

The Pope is expected to visit three Canadian cities in July – Quebec City, Edmonton, and Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavit in northern Canada. According to CBC News, ‘the delegates who travelled to Rome expect Pope Francis to deliver a fulsome apology on Canadian soil for the church’s role in running residential schools.’

Demands that he recognise the Catholic Church’s institutional failures are likely to increase as the visit draws near. Will Francis show true contrition, and will he provide just compensation for the victims? As far as many Canadians are concerned, he has a long way to go – spiritually as well as geographically.

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