Why Are We So Afraid Of Teaching Religious Education Properly To Children?

Knowledge, some higher power seemed to have decreed, was a dangerous thing. Particularly for girls, fragile beings that they are.

Far safer to keep us uninformed; far more useful for us, in adulthood, to be able to conduct a decent dinner party conversation on the ethical dilemma du jour.

When my old classmates and I discuss this now, there’s a lot of resentment. It turns out that learning about the Ten Commandments (how many Brits could recite them all?), the Five Pillars of Islam, the Torah and the Brahman, and knowing what might cause offence to whom, when and why, might have come in handy.

Not just for that gap year trip to India when you were turned away at the temple gates for wearing shorts, but because it’s just possible that even back home you might occasionally chance upon someone from a different cultural background to yours.

Information about the tenets of Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism would come in handy.

I’ve avoided using the word “religious” here because, as one teacher helpfully pointed out on a message board about religious studies, “the word ‘religious’ seems to have such a negative effect”. Which suggests that the ignorance of my generation is about to be imposed on another.

It is presumably for this reason, among others, that a high court ruled this week that, from the next academic year, “non-religious world views” be included in the religious studies GCSE. Because as things stand, the laughable implication seems to be that RE is far too religious.

According to Mr Justice Warby, it’s vital that the new school curriculum ensures that information is provided to schoolchildren about atheism and other non-religious beliefs, and that knowledge is conveyed “in a pluralistic manner”.

Since the UK is now one of the least religious countries in the world, with only 30 per cent of the population calling itself religious, it would make sense to include agnosticism, atheism, humanism and secularism on the syllabus – but only if RE dares to do what it says on the tin in the first place.

Otherwise we find ourselves in a farcical PC world where we teach anti-religion but not religion; where we concentrate on why there is nothing but are too cowardly even to allude to the concept that, who knows, there might be something?

The UK fails to do anything meaningful with the Church of England.  Photo: Rex Features

When are we going to stop punishing ourselves for our Christian heritage? The fact that RE continues to exist would suggest that, despite our liberal, moral, relativist society, we somehow, beneath it all, still believe that Christianity is a part of who we are, and yet we’re too squeamish to tackle it head on.

We can’t quite let go of the establishment of the Church of England and yet we’re too embarrassed to do anything meaningful with it – and certainly too embarrassed to allow the Lord’s Prayer to be featured in a nationwide advert.

So in an effort to make RE more palatable – and less offensive – we do away with the religious part (the part where the history of civilisation and the human condition is imparted), and replace it with half-baked teachings of “social ethics”, philosophy and spirituality. Though, of course, Buddhism and atheism can still be taught, neither of which involves the problematic, thorny element of a God.

In which case, let’s break out of this paralysing identity crisis, do away with the self-flagellation and the pretence, and ditch RE completely. Like the French, let’s just decide that, as an atheist society, religion has no place in our public life or state education and instead teach philosophy (the serious kind, not the discussion of opening Christmas presents early).

I would prefer my daughter to be instructed in the elements of all great world religions as well as the origins of atheism, but anything would be better than the toe-curling adolescent limbo we currently find ourselves in.

Such a pathetic lack of confidence in our own cultural heritage might deeply undermine our national identity in the long run, meaning that in three or four generations’ time we would be reduced to a bloodless and neutered, materialist society.

One for whom Good Friday will have lost all meaning, but Black Friday – pegged to a US national holiday that we neither fully understand nor celebrate – will mark the start of a month-long consumerist festival.