| If parents, teachers and pupils (even when informed) make assumptions like within the following, then good and corrective RE is justified. |
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| These assumptions either have to be challenged or subjected to better information in RE or both. RE itself in school does have a problem when compared with other subjects. A comparison is history. The problem is that RE fails to develop after primary school so there is repetition, and RE tends to look at the same things again whereas history thinks it is following what historians do and what makes for historical method (principally the issue of primary resources). |
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| So it is important that RE uses its opportunity to develop abstract thought and converts this into reading, comprehension and writing. Secondary school RE must build on and go beyond the primary school. |
| The following sections look at RE as it happens and potential. |
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| RE is compulsory for all pupils in state schools to 18 (except FE colleges and private schools). County schools must teach in accordance with the local Agreed Syllabus agreed by the Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education (SACRE). |
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| Teaching must: |
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| In other words there is a heavy emphasis on religions over and above experiential and implicit approaches. |
| Voluntary Aided and Voluntary Controlled schools can form their specific foundation or Diocesan guidance, then known as the 'Agreed Syllabus'. |
| Two aspects of collective worship in County schools (Voluntary Aided schools act according to foundation bodies): |
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| The headteacher may ask the SACRE to decide if these are incompatible for the whole school or a named part of it. |
| Parents can withdraw their children from RE and/ or collective worship. Alternative provision must be made. Teachers can avoid teaching RE and participating in Collective Worship. They can be given other work. |
| Sir Ron Dearing's recommendations of RE for a year in his 'Final Report' on the curriculum (1995) and the QCA Model Syllabuses for RE: |
| Key Stage 1 | 36 hours |
| Key Stage 2 | 45 hours |
| Key Stage 3 | 45 hours |
| Key Stage 4 | 40 hours |
| The 1988 Education Act: schools should promote the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development. It should be the concern of all subjects and school life but can be religious and RE has an important role. |
| This should be especially relevant to RE: |
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| Beyond all this there is what RE actually covers, in terms of aspects and perspectives. |
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| The importance of religious education: Religious education develops pupils' knowledge and understanding of, and their ability to respond to, Christianity and the other principal religions represented in Great Britain. By exploring issues within and across faiths, pupils learn to understand and respect different religions, beliefs, values and traditions (including ethical life stances), and their influence on individuals, societies, communities and cultures. RE encourages pupils to consider questions of meaning and purpose in life. Pupils learn about religious and ethical teaching, enabling them to make reasoned and informed judgements on religious, moral and social issues. Pupils develop their sense of identity and belonging, preparing them for life as citizens in a plural society. Through the use of distinctive language, listening and empathy, RE develops pupils' skills of enquiry and response. RE encourages pupils to reflect on, analyse and evaluate their beliefs, values and practices and communicate their responses. RE does not seek to urge religious beliefs on pupils nor compromise the integrity of their own beliefs by promoting one religion over another. RE is not the same as collective worship, which has its own place within school life. |
| It is British, concerns Christianity, and even Anglicanism, on its own terms. 1944 Education Act stated that RE should bring children to an encounter with Jesus Christ, to recognise the challenge of His personality' (also in a Schools Council Working Party Report in 1971). This approach demands that faith as delivered be taken seriously as all people should develop a life stance, indeed the one on offer commended to all. The wheel does not need to be reinvented (it would claim): greater people than schoolchildren and their teachers have worked out religious concepts and religius experience to be gained. |
| From the 1960s on criticism centred around that this was partial, from on high, of no real business of county schools, and because the educational method is passive does not engage sufficient critical thought. |
| There is no confession to be had, but there is examination as if a confession was to be offered. Religions are systems that are wholes to be examined for conceptual consistency and inconsistency and for their delivery of theologies and ethics for followers. These theologies and ethics clash with others wihthin and between religions. This position is thus not relativist but of (the secular) Isaiah Berlin who held to objective truths even that may clash against each other. |
| The people of this approach are sometimes called Coolingites after Trevor and Margaret Cooling, who write about Christianity, though any faith can be so covered. It is also called concept cracking. Issues such as tolerance are not discovered on universal liberal principles but on the basis of the systems of faith themelves, for example Islam's own revealed justification of tolerance (Andrew Wright). |
| This approach is more systematic and critical than descriptive religious studies phenomenologists. The phenomenologists delude themselves with an impossible value neutral position. Experiential approaches as too subjective. Instead, pupils develop critical thinking skills and make judgments. This might be seen as too academic and too negative, but can still be seen as taking religion seriously and having a positive engagement. |
| This operates via an empathy of meaning by faithfully describing as if from within and tackling issues as they arise from the descriptive exercise. There are philosophical questions especially regarding God and ethics answered from within each religious tradition. No confession or assent is required, but accuracy and internal debate. |
| It is an academic religious studies approach (over theology, but includes it) that is about observable knowledge, being both critical and empathetic. Sometimes called SHAP after promoters Ninian Smart (Christian theologian and religions), John R. Hinnells (Zoroastrian and S. E. Asia specialist) and Geoffrey Parrinder (world religions and Hinduism). It never wants to impose categories on how to look at a religion, e.g it would not say that a Christian has a church and so the Muslim has the equivalent of a mosque, or the Sikh a gurdwara. Instead let Islam describe how the mosque plays its role within the faith, and let Sikhism describe the role of the gurdwara. Comparative religion from a Christian category system is a distortion. |
| There is a parallel here with the social anthropologist who essays a culture and declares that internal meanings are so subtle that there can be no comparison between cultures, especially from one cultural position. This approach to RE is subject to the same criticism, the contraction by the description and the inevitability of cultural comment. |
| Indeed Ninian Smart has dimensions of ritual, myth (why stories are told), doctrine, ethics, social, and experiential in order to identify the concept of "religion" to study. Yet each religion properly represents a post-liberal closed world where the bigger world may be secularised and uninvolved. |
| This has stronger conceptual examination on a more open postliberal model than phenomenological where each and every package and each and every pick and mix is open to examination for consistency. It avoids the illusion of being value neutral on a religious studies approach, by choosing, displaying and justififying its own consistent critical stance and apparatus. It develops from radical cultural anthropology; and in Western Christian theology relates to a cultural linguistic motivator of meanings or, alternatively, a non-cultural pure space of its own (revelation so pure it is dislodged from human cultural containing and therefore also beyond objectivity). These two are in literary "death of God" approaches especially relating to the Near Eastern faiths. Like them this RE perspective learns particularly from humanism, Buddhist non-theism and modernist Hinduism. It tackles religions, philosophy, assumptions of science, the outpouring of culture and creating morality. Its stance might be ethically driven or coming from a social critique. |
| This is often an unrealised approach, not neat and not complete (but would not intend to be). This is because it is a "both and" position of using interpretive and critical realist approaches and is aware of the commentator. It tries to suggest to pupils that a religion is not a truth competition over scientific explanation (the danger of compartmentalism is that "You did science in the last lesson, this is what religion thinks") but instead is its own space of creativity, but open to criticism from a chosen one of so many hopefully coherent points of view (if incapable of completion). It says the teacher and pupil doing it matters, and they can disagree. It requires more abstract thinking and higher end pupil understanding. It is often the further questions that happen after description. |
| This is another unrealised model and one often skirted around. Just as feminist research laid down partiality as a methodological starting point, so this promotes equality and liberation. School settings and policies do promote these through education. Yet many of the religions described, especially the Near Eastern, are structurally male in orientation and promote attitudes that a liberal tolerant society have come to oppose. The RE teacher is often in a feeble position, doing educationally minimal tasks of using inclusive language where possible, but failing to criticise the immense symbolic bias in religion. The feminist RE teacher would be unafraid to expose and challenge the masculine nature of religion, and promote those aspects of religion and thought that are more inclusive. The blockages that religion offer to spiritual, moral and cultural development are often sidestepped, and many teachers avoid RE and collective worship altogether in part because of its perceived negative impact on equality and liberation. |
| This is an ethnographic model in terms of investigating how religions are to their believers in all their varieties of believing. Official descriptions of religion are not the whole story in how they are practised and what they mean to adherents. So whilst an official description may state what makes a Christian, or a Jew, or Muslim, the group and the individual may display something quite different and challenge the dominant or official view. |
| In general this approach will also discuss official descriptions and spiritual experience as a comparison with members' views and activities. Therefore pupils should develop skills of comparison, interpretation and making sense. There is the level of the group and the individual. Robert Jackson promotes theory and will draw in phenomenological description too, and there is Eleanor Nesbitt of the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit (WREP - http://www.warwick.ac.uk/wie/WRERU) who does much observation fieldwork. Another important influence is Clifford Geertz, the social anthropologist. |
| In RE terms, pupils' writing can be read for their own religious interpretations, either from a community or not. RE teachers often spot the literacy of pupils who are members of faith communities, but some prefer to keep quiet. In terms of resources, the work is so varied and research long term that teaching materials take a long time to build. The variety of group and individual experience may be such to make the subject difficult to examine. Variety makes common generalisations difficult. Do all Christians pray - is prayer an essential part of Christianity? Do all Muslim men go to the mosque for Friday prayers and pray five times a day - therefore is a Muslim really to be identified by daily and weeky prayer patterns? |
| There needs to be more work on those non-aligned (including religious people who are DIY) or across religious communities (as in mixed faith families). |
| Difficulties include an inability to apply critical methods between one ethnographic description and another that may differ. Indeed this may not be RE but a form of social anthropology. Although dominant representations of religion might be challenged, new representations can be exaggerated by interest groups. In any case the framework is still an official religion (when many people mix and match). Conversely, community and institutional definitions are being undermined which see themselves as undergoing a task of shaping their peoples (confessional model), not being shaped by them. |
| Rejecting confessional approaches this was about absorbing religious questions and feelings and developing the means to do it by young people. A more radical versions focussed on experience and human meaning. |
| This is about developing young people's spiritual insights through creative imagination and educationally justified religious-like practices. These might include stilling, careful fantasy guidance and using the arts. Writers include David Hay, John Hammond, Mary Stone, Veronica Williams and Clive Erricker. |
| The pedagogy here is not some form of knowledge into the pupils, but the pupils giving out their experience. Pupils give out their learning and are empowering themselves through the activity. Of course it is very difficult to conceptualise, and therefore ask about and examine: but the promoters of this approach say this is the problem of the system not good Religious Education. The system assumes what pupils mean, but, given the limited nature of the usual RE conceptual assumptions, do they? In the experiential approach it is the pupil who develops the question and the metaphor using narrative comes out of the deepest formed experience - whether to be called religious or not in conventional terms. So it is also difficult to validate as good experience or less good experience: every feeling driven account is as good as another. |
| The focus is concrete human living and the meaning of it all, as can be related to religions and other philosophies, but not the religions themselves as givers of meaning. Life experience as it is lived is the key (especially for young people) rather than an inner mental and spiritual world. In life itself are the moral issues. But does this not degrade the specifically religious, avoiding it rather than tackling it? |
| In a more humanist view, human beings have language, history and they can remember and predict. They can imagine before their lives and prokject beyond death. They can categorise and count. Meaning is in the arts, sciences and social sciences, and they add to the quality of life. Spiritual experience is essentially human, part of our brain development and relates to the arts and to those moments of inspiratation. Religions are cultural phenomena and influence social and political developments reflecting important motivating beliefs both at an individual level and collective level. Such a humanist account tends to become another phenomenological account or be subjected to critical realist treatment. An ethnography of humanists might be useful too, some of whom are more agnostic, softer and warmer to religion than many a representative publication. |
| All schools are concerned with numeracy and literacy and RE interacts with these. Also there is the creative arts. |
| Literacy is always a concern of schooling because without it at a sufficient level children cannot learn and perform in other subjects. RE and literacy interact. |
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| Geometric patterns come especially from islam and Christianity, and relate to: |
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| Using arts involves Art, English, Drama, Music, and Technology departments and is therefore cross-curricular. |
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| Allows entering into a story even with different beliefs: |
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Institute for Learning Centre for Educational Studies (2002), text by Julian Stern, Secondary Initial Teacher Training Partnership, Secondary PGCE, Religious Education, 2002-2003, known as RE PGCE Handbook 2002-2003 (2002), Hull: University of Hull.
Adrian Worsfold
Pluralist - Liberal and Thoughtful