The series specialised in a spiritual/religious reflection relevant to the time, with a mix of contributors including Chad Varah and Trevor Huddleston. In my case, as an atheist, my comments were more spiritual than religious with the general theme of multi-faith religious education, which at the time was my bread and butter, having been a religious education teacher and then a teacher trainer. I was invited because of an account of a talk I gave in Banbury on multifaith religious education, reported in the Methodist Recorder (I wrote the copy). My stance was that informing children about a range of religions would reduce the tendency towards prejudice and racism but increasing understanding and enthusiasm, taking away the fear of the unknown. Today, I am pleased that diversity is generally more comfortably accepted than then. However, the anti-racist task requires more than making children/people more informed. Some ‘nice’ and well-informed people are racists and profoundly bigoted.
Writing something meaningful in 200-250 words proved to be an exacting task, a very important discipline for my later writing. Reading it to camera proved no less simple. Here are the talks followed by a few comments.
Monday. Teaching World Faiths.
Imagine, if you will, a class of six year olds. Their teacher decided to hold a Passover celebration to be fair to Ben, the only Jewish boy in the school. The children acted out the Elijah story, visited a local synagogue, made a Menorah candlestick and other items, and as a climax held a Passover meal. With the help of Ben’s parents, food was prepared in accordance with Jewish food laws, a search for bits of hidden leaven was made, and the wine (really grape juice) flowed. The ritual followed simply. Ben recited the four questions in Hebrew, unleavened bread and bitter horseradish were eaten, the afikomen was hidden, and found. By this time, Elijah’s cup had been mysteriously drained. A child called out, “Three cheers for the Jews”, which prompted a spontaneous response. The children had learnt that most important of lessons, that learning about people, their culture and religion can be fun, and can be meaningful. They had taken a big step towards understanding and empathy.
Next term I unexpectedly received a card, skilfully crafted by a six year old hand, wishing me Eid Mubarrak, a Muslim blessed fast-breaking greeting. The Muslim children had also shared their celebration, the end of a month of spiritual discipline, prayer and fellow-feeling for the hungry.
A nine year old Sikh boy from another school exclaimed, when I recognised a picture of Guru Nanak, the first Sikh spiritual teacher, “How do you know about our Gurus? No one in school knows about them. Later I ended the assemby with the words “And now for a Sikh prayer”. Sikh children responded with devotion, others with genuine interest and respect.
Teaching world faiths is not a chore, but a joy which can be exciting, stimulating and truly moving.
Discussion:
Teaching world religions was a new development in the 1980s. None of us were trained properly to do it, and many teachers did not dare. They got rather confused about who believed what, though to be fair the children grasped things rather more quickly if clearly taught. I tried things out in various schools, covering Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism. I gave a talk about this to a Methodist group in Banbury, which I wrote up for the Methodist Recorder. Thames Television researchers saw it and invited me to record seven daily talks about religious education. The scripts, otherwise not archived, have emerged from my attic, and here they are.
In my lifetime as a teacher of religious education, the curriculum moved from being pro-Christian and Bible based, to an attempt to lead children to understand religion itself. The teachings of the major faiths therefore became more central. I regard this as an important shift, but there is still a further shift to be made. The curriculum has promoted the major religions, aiming for understanding and empathy. And that has been useful. However, we are in a post-religious age, and there are secular ethical and moral positions. Religion has over the years been harmful where personal freedoms have been curtailed and orthodoxy has been forced. We as a species need to decide over the next century or two whether religion, and in particular fundamentalist and tribal religion which regards all others as wrong, is in itself helpful or harmful. For me, the potential for harm outweighs the potential for good.
Tuesday – Without Prejudice.
The 1944 Education Act, still the current law on religious education states that religious education should be “not distinctive of any particular religious denomination”. Wisely, Christianity is nowhere mentioned. I recently sat five young children down around a tape recorder to discuss beliefs and customs – a Hindu, a Sikh, a Muslim and two Christians, from the Moravians and the Brethren. Each contributed openly and with deep interest and fascination without condemning others, and without condescension.
Teachers are committed to developing children’s understanding through open and unbigoted investigation. Religious education partly involves learning about religious stories, rituals, festivals and beliefs. In part it illuminates what, beneath the surface, religion means. In part, too it explores issues that religion ought to confront, such as purpose, meaning, justice and social concern. One such issue is prejudice, deep-seated in all societies and a profound influence on children and their parents. Fortunately in the primary school children’s opinions have not yet hardened into prejudices, and attitudes are mostly positive and open.
It is the task of religious education to confront prejudice by encouraging children to reflect upon its root causes – ignorance, low social concern and patronising assumptions. This task requires sensitive handling, but will be well worth the effort.
Discussion:
The law regulating religious education changed in 1988 in the Education Reform Act. Christianity was made the dominant religion, but the requirement for a broadly based curriculum covering the other religions was enshrined in law. I recognise that the term ‘other religions’ is demeaning, but this division of status is implied by the Act. Practitioners were not deterred from good multi-faith practice by the new law. The LEA Agreed Syllabuses continued to cover five or six world religions.
Over time, I continue to emphasise that issues of purpose, justice and prejudice should be the starting point for religious education. I later developed this further in ‘Challenging Religious Education’ (linked here): religious education should challenge children’s assumptions and open them up towards inter-faith understanding and global relationships. A sound knowledge of world faiths is not enough to conquer prejudice – prejudice itself and its effects have to be one of the lens through which children should develop understanding of why people have valued religions.
Wednesday – Frogs
Each March hundreds of frogs migrate through our village for their annual courtship rituals in a small pond in our garden. Some die on the road, though we help as many as we can. We are powerfully reminded that life goes on. Frogspawn is often taken into school to let children see it hatch and develop into tadpoles. I have seen tanks of oxygen starved dead tadpoles in many places, so a greater emphasis on care for fellow creatures would be helpful. I recently overheard a proposal, thankfully thwarted, to kill and dissect tadpoles in a primary school. The pupils would learn one vivid lesson, that wildlife can be mistreated and killed for our benefit and interest. That lesson, if learnt young, will not go away but be there fore life.
“I am, therefore I exploit”. This sums up a widespread western attitude to the world and the environment. For Buddhists, non-violence is a vital principle that should govern our relationships with all living things. Bushmen of the Kalahari and Australian Aborigines, both cultures savagely and wilfully hunted down within recent history, regard people as part of creation, not as its kings. Theirs is an intimate and harmonious interaction with their world, expressed through attitudes, myths, rituals and behaviour.
We too in the developed world have powerful myths. “Life came by accident and destroys itself selfishly and wilfully”, we say. This of course says more about us than about life. As for our responsibilities to life forms and the environment, we have a great deal to learn from such groups as the Bushmen.
Discussion:
I was influenced then by the writings of Laurens Van Der Post, especially his children’s story A Far Away Place in which white and Bushman children relate comfortably and learn from each other. The filming came at a time when the frogs were breeding in the garden, and my other more prosaic ideas were falling through. A teacher training student had proposed to dissect a tadpole, and I had dissuaded her for the reasons given, and with the more persuasive instruction to consult the headteacher.
Religious issues seem to me to be central ethical issues of life itself. In fact, ethics are an absolute must for all subjects of the curriculum – this is a real preparation both for childhood and for adult life. Respect for life is part of this, more trendy today than then. Animals are still generally assumed to not have rights – we kill to eat, and kill animals such as foxes, badgers and seals who threaten this carnivore business by being carnivores themselves. There is a balance which we have not yet found.
Thursday – Teaching Christianity
“The trouble with multi-faith religious education”, an infants teachers said to me “is that Christianity loses out”.
“By no means”, I responded “in fact Christianity can gain a great deal”. By not demanding that children accept Christian dogma, teenage rejection diminishes. The clash between religion and science disappears. Some denominations get a fairer deal – Mormons, Rastafarians, Jehovah Witnesses and Pentecostals.
Take Jesus. That Jesus is Messiah is a Christian belief, but not an objective fact. That this is meaningful to Christians is a fact worthy of exploration. Educationally it is inappropriate to demand belief, as if we are in a fascist state; nor conversely to make a dogma of agnosticism, the “don’t know” cop-out. Children need to be allowed to weigh up evidence, positive and negative. They can legitimately explore how the life of Jesus helps Christians visualise something of what God is or does. The virgin birth and resurrection, described by Christians themselves as ‘myth’, become less problematic. Pupils are able to discover what different Christian groups claim, and why. They ask what Christians mean when they represent God in human form, and how the belief in God’s continuing presence in the world affects the way believers think and behave. Whatever they personally decide, they will have a greater understanding of Jesus’s importance.
Discussion:
British education has been an imperialist Christian enterprise that discussions of religious education can become meaningless. The objectors referred to here of course were arguing from the point of view that religious education should preach and convert. I taught in a school in the 1980s that regarded its multicultural intake as all ‘English’ which was represented by hymns such as ‘Onward Christian Soldiers” in Assembly. Imagine a hymn today, “Onward Muslim Soldiers”!
My promotion of rationalism generally received short shrift – that was not what they meant at all. Yet I would still assert it today. The impact of preaching within religious ‘instruction’ did lead to total rejection of religion (Christianity) which had been ‘shoved up our throats’ and went the way of Santa Claus, that other major adult fraud against children. Uncovering the one led to rejecting the other. Adults (teachers and parents) should not lie to children and leave problems to be sorted out later. God becomes a problem, as does death and Santa Claus. Adults follow social pressure to conform, to confirm the lies. I discovered the truth about Santa Claus aged about 3. I am still angry about the deception. A friend traumatically discovered it aged 10, and is still traumatised by the shame. Rationalism is the only way. Talk to children as to adults. Do not patronise.
Friday – Integrated Learning.
We divide knowledge too easily into convenient sealed packages or “subjects”. Integrated learning, common in primary schools, can help children see themselves and their world as a harmony, with various perspectives enriching the counterpoint. I worked recently with a class of seven year olds on the topic ‘Earth’. This explored the world they experienced and invited their deep inner reflection.
In observing our earth, we interpret what we see. Human issues emerge – of value, feelings, mystery and responsibility. We reflect on meaning and purpose, putting feelings into words in a poem, or creation story perhaps. We reflect on our place on earth, our potential for good, and our habits of possession and destruction. We express our feelings, our hopes, our wonder or sheer joy, through art, drama, movement, music or creative writing. Myths, stories, poetry – like the Psalms of old – express similar responses in religious language. We encounter and enjoy life and growth, with wonder, respect and concern. And we contemplate death, the ultimate mystery.
Such reflective attitudes to life and the world are the stuff that religion should be made of. Enriched by it, children can begin a real dialogue with others, their environment, and with the world they inhabit.
Discussion:
It has always amazed me how the simple truth, that knowledge is unified and too important to be divided into so-called ‘subjects’, should cause politicians and the Daily Mail to get their knickers in such a twist. After 1988, the National Curriculum divided ‘knowledge’ savagely into subjects with learning objectives and content in ways which made integrated thinking impossible. Children, after all that abuse, cannot therefore think holistically, and nor than the teachers who were trained post 1988. Most of those dedicated experts trained before that were edged out by the inspection regime which recognised compliance but not talent. Still today, attempts to return to a sensible curriculum are met with cries not to return to ‘topic work’. I agree in the sense that we should not return to superficiality; but we should be building connections across all aspects of knowledge and help children to make ingenious and unexpected links, which will be the creativity of tomorrow.
Saturday – Symbols.
We take symbols for granted, but children cannot. To recognize what common emblems mean gives them a good start. When they express themselves through symbols they create, children gain a deeper understanding of why symbols are used and what they seek to express.
Religions express deep concerns through more than emblems. Clothing (like prayer shawls), food (like the Eucharist) and images all point to symbolic meaning and evoke devotion. Initiation rituals act out commitment. Sculptured images and icons, of Jesus, Durga, Krishna or Buddha, evoke a realm of meaning far beyond the significance of their raw materials, deeper even than the real lives of those depicted.
Religion explores concepts and insights far beyond descriptive language, and often resorts to pictures. Images can be verbal. If God by definition is beyond description, not attempt at description can be authentic. So we use symbol. When we call God father, mother, creator the sun, even the wind (or spirit) we say nothing about God but a great deal about ourselves. We may prefer to visualise God through a human being – a Jesus, or a Krishna.
Religion involves profound human concerns, the human spirit expressing what it feels and means by creating images for what it finds impossible to describe. Yet symbols alone, without reason, justice or compassion, can be diabolical, not benign. The value of a symbol lies in the quality of what is symbolised, not in its origin.
Children can symbolically express their own feelings and ideals through art, drama or creative writing. Exploring ideals, insights and perplexities through symbols and symbolic metaphors of their own making can greatly enrich their learning and understanding.
Discussion.
The confusion between symbolic/metaphorical language and literal description presents crucial lessons to be learnt. Much that is accepted as ‘real’ is in fact metaphorical: a radio ‘wave’ does not resemble the sea, nor does an electrical ‘current’. Yet we need metaphors to understand things, by analogy. Religious writings are full of imagery; working out the reality is far more difficult and is always problematic. Education’s task is to make a child’s understanding of metaphor to be liberating and thereby an aid to learning and understanding.
Sunday – Religion and Science
The clash between religion and science began long before Charles Darwin; but the problem is a false one, created by a religion more concerned with literal biblical interpretation than with deep contemplation of life. It was a clash of rival certainties, with appeals to authority coming from different directions, from religious teaching on the one hand, to observation of the universe itself on the other.
Dogmatic approaches to the hypotheses of science, or to religious beliefs, tend to close the mind to wider – and deeper – possibilities. Science observes, records and seeks to explain, contributing tiny pieces to the cosmic jigsaw. Imaginatively filling in gaps, it theorises on what the completed jigsaw might look like. This raises more questions, which it then takes into account. This process ideally begins in the primary school when children explore and experiment, stimulating their scientific skills. When children learn to ask the right questions, they begin to glimpse the wider picture and become part of the universal search for knowledge and meaning.
Religion in contrast contemplates ultimate meaning. We each perceive this in a personal way. We express it all too inadequately through our attitudes, behaviour, art, stories and rituals. We are human and may prefer a quick, easy fix, and off-the-peg belief system. Children are aware that life is miraculous, the birth of a kitten or lamb, the pupating butterfly. They respond with wonder and excitement. Within the egg lies the mystery of life. The Hindu Vedas recognized this when they celebrated the birth of existence as the hatching of a cosmic egg. For Jews this creative mystery is God, fashioning order from the void by the divine word. Christians and Muslims continue this insight. Children can respond to the mystery through their own art, poetry and speech. They may find traditional responses enriching, or constraining. Their personal responses can deepen with time, or dulled by dogma. Yet together scientific investigation and inner reflection are formidable tools for reflection and understanding, helping children to come to terms with their world and, more importantly, with themselves.
Discussion.
Christian creationist views have come to blows with science since Darwin, but other religions to not so much share the same battleground. Scientism, which is the use of scientific ‘knowledge’ as the only basis of understanding, is an atheistic fundamentalism which battles against religious fundamentalism. Yet there is middle ground in which positive dialogue takes place.
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