Religious Education?
For the final discussion session on the system I would like you to read the section entitled "Religious Education?" and Kleinig's corresponding chapter 20.
The question to ponder is: Does a teacher of religious education have to be a believer?
So far most of the problems we have looked at have centred on conceptual difficulties of various sorts. The topics often raised other issues, but we did not follow those issues very far. In the case of religious education, there is a certain amount of conceptual confusion, but what I want us to focus on is another kind of question, to do with what decisions we should make about the curriculum. Once we decide what we are talking about, should it be part of the curriculum, and if so, how should it be approached? Just as we have not tried to answer all the questions raised previously, so we shall not try here either — part of the point is to make you realise just how large and encompassing these questions are.
I said there is conceptual confusion in this case too; it usually arises when people try to "define" what they are referring to in discussing the place of religion in the curriculum. It is usually pretty clear what they actually want to have in the curriculum, but they get into difficulties trying to characterize it generally. Kleinig gives you a fair idea of the problems here. You may get a feel for them by reflecting on religion as a way of life, a set of practices, a way of thinking about and acting in the world; or religion as a theology, an explicitly formulated theory; or religion as found in the "world" religions contrasted with the myriad cults of different tribes and other groups of people; or religion as primarily involving certain kinds of experience (mystical, or broadly moral, or whatever). No doubt there are further complexities here. How does one distinguish a religious view from magic, or superstition? If the term "religion" is simply to pick out an area of human thought and concern, why does it not cover negative, sceptical, or purely secular answers? The reasons some writers give for having religion in schools demand equal attention for Marxism and other varieties of atheism; some such writers would agree, but most people would wish to draw the line here.
Another whole area of confusion is the relationship between religion (however you eventually see that) and morality. Many people mistakenly believe that if you want morality you must have religion too, and so arguments for religious education are often in fact defences of some place for morality in the curriculum.
On these matters, I shall be brief and dogmatic. I shall restrict the term "religious" to refer to things that involve a belief in something supernatural or some form of non-natural "salvation" (to cover what I believe to be some sorts of non-theistic Buddhism). So whatever else we may want to say about it, Marxism isn't a religion on my stipulation. As far as morality goes, it is evident that you can have many different moral systems without any commitments to anything religious; but it is also true that many religious systems come fitted out with moral systems too, and those moral systems may not make much sense detached from their religious foundation. (It was a notorious claim of the nineteenth century philosopher, Nietzsche, that "our" enlightened modern secular morality is a hang-over from a Christian past and doesn't really make much sense divorced from it; most of us haven't noticed our absurdity yet. Many ideas certainly outlast their appropriateness, but it is doubtful Nietzsche was right about morality in general.)
The last preliminary point is obvious, but does not get the attention it deserves in curriculum discussions. Religion is tremendously important as a matter of culture. It is this that seems to count most for many people, but they refuse to admit it. The difficulty in admitting it is that unlike one's language or one's cuisine or one's "national dress" one's religion incorporates distinctive and usually exclusive claims about the nature of the universe. And so, you have to pretend that you want children to be able to choose rationally amongst the various claims in the market place; but of course, you don't want to do that, you want to bring up your children to share your way of life. Religion is then an area where it matters a lot to distinguish education from socialization.
Teaching X and teaching about X
Most discussions of the question of the place of religion in schooling or education make a distinction (which they then often confuse again) between teaching about religion and teaching religion. The distinction is clear enough and can be made in any area of the curriculum. One could teach about mathematics as a human activity or one can teach mathematics. The former would be a kind of history and sociology of mathematics (one might learn that the ancient Egyptians thought various things about the sizes of fields and made these suggestions because they needed to redraw boundaries after the Nile floods); the latter is, as we all know, an attempted initiation into contemporary practice. It is immediately clear that if you teach about religion you are more honestly described as teaching history or sociology (or even philosophy), though that is not to say that it might not be better for you to be an expert within the field as well, just as the history of mathematics is probably best told by a mathematically literate person.
If one argues that the proper place for religion is as something that one teaches about, one is thereby making a very sharp boundary between religion and other areas of human thought, such as history or mathematics. The former may not be taught itself, whereas the point of teaching the latter is to teach them, and not just about them.
Some people deny that the distinction can be applied in practice on the grounds that teachers could not fail to reveal their commitments. This seems simply wrong; it is possible to teach about what people do without taking any stand on it. I have heard of a tribe who measure their rectangular fields by adding the length and the breadth. I can tell you how they do it; I need not indicate whether I agree with them, or whether I would do it differently.
Why advocate merely teaching about religion?
There are various reasons for advocating such a position, some more extreme than others. At one extreme one might argue that religion is erroneous, like astrology, and that therefore it should only be examined in ways appropriate for errors. On such a view it would be very difficult to get beyond teaching about religion. A less extreme view that results in a similar recommendation would be that while some religion or other might be true we do not know which one it is, or even less extremely, we are not agreed which one it is, so we should not teach any particular one but only teach about some religions of more than parochial concern. The contrast with history and mathematics would now be that in these subjects we do have either genuine knowledge of the right way to go or at least general agreement on such matters, so that teaching our subject is not presuming the superiority of one variety unfairly to other competitors.
In casually mentioning philosophizing as one way of dealing with teaching about religion, I am raising what is in fact a serious difficulty with the whole subject. Many people who advocate teaching (about) religion want such teaching to lay the foundations for a student's rational decision regarding his or her religious commitment or lack of commitment. Doing this would be educative, not an exercise in indoctrination. But we should keep strictly separate the different issues here: as I said, we can study Egyptian mathematical beliefs without raising any question about whether we ourselves should adopt them. Or we can up to a point. When we seek to explain why the Egyptians held them, it often makes a difference whether we think these beliefs correct or mistaken. In the case of the tribe, the interest of the example is precisely because we do not measure areas like that; any explanation we give is going to take for granted that their procedure is mistaken, even if it suggests it may not make much difference if all their fields are roughly the same shape.
In the case of religion we have other promptings, besides a desire for understanding, to reflect on the acceptability of the beliefs in question: they are about matters of supreme importance; as St Paul said, if they are true nothing else is more important, if they are false nothing else is more foolish.
But once we hope that our study of religion will lay the foundations for rational choice we have the problem that there is no agreement on how to go about rationally choosing in this area. Kleinig's suggestive discussion of the difference between 'coming to fiducia' and 'continuing in fiducia' fails to say much about the former, which is crucial. The problem with most suggestions is one of begging the question, as in Pascal's notorious view that one should begin to live as if you believed and then one day you will find that you do believe. But why choose the local superstition to experiment with? In general, the crucial first step cannot be rationally motivated, independently of a commitment to a religious view of things.
A further point is that rational choice demands a full awareness of the range of choice. As noted at the start, there are various views that repudiate all religions. Studying only the "world" religions with an eye to future rational choice is no more acceptable than studying only liberal political parties with an eye to future rational voting. Even if there are no neutral canons of rationality to help decide between the religious and the non-religious, responsible teaching aimed at a student's informed decision-making must surely set out this fact too; so it would seem that decent religious education must also make room for scepticism and atheism.
A different but related problem arises if one emphasizes the student's need to understand a religious way of life or view of the world. This sort of understanding seems to involve being on the inside of a way of life, rather than standing outside as an uncommitted spectator. Perhaps this is somewhat exaggerated since one can learn to see the world in Homeric terms, say, without having to endorse all his values. We often exercise what Coleridge called a "willing suspension of disbelief." But the opposing side might then say that we cannot in fact grasp Homer's religious thinking and see the world as he might have done, peopled with gods and goddesses liable to surprise the passing hero. It may in the end be an empirical question how far the suspension of disbelief must turn into positive acceptance in order to come to something we can accept as a proper appreciation1 of a way of life or way of seeing the world. But we must also ask ourselves how valuable these ways of seeing are; and that does not seem to be able to be given a generally acceptable answer.
So far we have taken for granted that many people want and expect something called "religious education" in the schools. That is a mark of our position in a tradition deriving from Britain and its established church. Our discussion has reflected philosophical difficulties with the cognitive status of religion and the requirements of understanding ways of life. It is worth noting that it is quite possible to have a very different view of religion and the curriculum, based on a political principle that rules religion out of the state, while allowing and in fact manifesting considerable religious commitment. Such is the official US position, in which the public school system is meant not to deal with religion as such. We cannot go into them now, but this position yields a quite different set of considerations of a broadly political kind for helping to decide what should and what should not go into the curriculum. I mention it now merely to indicate that there are these distinct kinds of issue to be considered in any full discussion of the curriculum.
1. But this conceptual issue is equally important: what should count as sufficient understanding of Homer or the Old Testament?
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© Ed Brandon, 1992, 2001. HTML prepared using 1st Page 2000, last revised June 21st, 2001.