This month’s challenge in the RE and
Philosophy Echo Chamber is to imagine what RE will be like in 2020. If I were
cynical (and those of you who know me know I’m anything but…), I’d say that I’m
not entirely sure that I’m expecting to see RE on the timetable in 2020 at all.
However, being an optimist at heart, I am
hopeful that the subject will be flourishing, whilst also recognising the
urgency of setting in place now those conditions that will make this possible
in five years’ time.
RE in 2020
So, what do I think it will look like in
five years’ time? Well, I hope it will have parity with other curriculum
subjects and will be delivered by staff who are fascinated by and passionate
about the world of religion, faith and belief in all its forms. I hope that
they have sufficient training and support to help them deliver the subject
confidently. I sincerely hope the subject is not the driver of or servant to
social change, as I’m increasingly wary of binding any curriculum subject to
this, even for the sake of ensuring survival! As Clarke and Woodhead point out
in their recent report,
this is to load the subject with too much or too little significance. The
particular problem with this, as far as I can see, is that it could lead to the
subject being changed at the whim of short-term political goals – or not being
changed at all.
Education and Formation
An interesting debate is opening up within
the RE community about the purpose of RE. At a recent meeting of local RE
subject leaders, I asked them what they thought the purpose of RE was. Out of a
group of twelve different people, I received six different answers… This is
something that must be addressed and I know many of many colleagues are doing
just that. However, I’d like to pull apart Clarke and Woodhead’s recommendation
that RE be renamed RME, as it is called in the Scottish education system. To
call our subject ‘Religious and Moral Education’ is to open some doors and
close others. It raises questions about the relationship between our subject
and formation – religious, moral, spiritual, ethical. Students studying Moral
Education are presumably being asked to reflect on issues of right and wrong,
both in terms of what different religions and worldviews believe, but also what
they themselves believe. In this sense, they are explicitly participating in
moral formation as part of their studies. The manner in which the curriculum
material is presented is therefore key to the way in which the student
understands right and wrong.
I don’t know about you, but as an educator,
I’m in the business of formation. I don’t work in a mechanistic world that
produces identical automata who are ‘economy-ready’; I work to help individuals
develop their humanity through a love of learning and an engagement with the
whole person. Much of the discussion about the future of RE considers the
age-old associations many people often make with the subject: religious
instruction and religious formation, alongside religious education (or studies –
take your pick). For the most part, in my day-to-day work these associations
are distinctly unhelpful. I spend much of my time reassuring concerned parents –
and sometimes confused governors – that RE is not religious instruction even in a Church school and RE is only
formative insofar as any other curriculum subject is formative.
However, I’ve been reflecting more deeply
on Clarke and Woodhead’s view that any form of religious (or non-religious)
formation needs to be clearly advertised (A
New Settlement, 49). There seems to be an underlying assumption, firstly
that faith schools and schools with a religious character are somehow covertly
forming their pupils in a particular religious tradition and secondly that there
is something insidious about formation per
se.
The thing is, faith schools and schools
with a religious character patently do not hide that fact that their ethos
relates to a particular faith tradition. For the most part, the clue to the
ethos is in the name of the school… And should we believe that any given ethos
may be something potentially damaging, then we need to consider very carefully
what may replace it. It is not as though there were such a thing as a
value-free ethos.
Religious Formation and Religious
Education
How does this relate to RE? Well, it
appears to be very difficult for many people to separate religious education
from religious formation. There is a fear that if a school has a religious
character, then its RE will be necessarily biased towards that religion to the
extent of coercion into that faith or distortion of other religions and beliefs;
in other words, that its RE is more about formation or instruction than
education.
This is really worrying; I am not in a
position to assert that no school – religious or otherwise – delivers RE in a
coercive or distorting manner. However, I am able to assert that the schools I
work alongside do not and nearly all of them are Church of England schools. It
is understood that the formation offered by these schools – openly Christian in
its foundation – is delivered across every aspect of the life of the school. In
this sense, RE is no more formative than Maths or Literacy and it is every
bit as academic and rigorous.
Hopes for 2020
My hope for 2020, then, rests almost
entirely on clarity of communication and understanding. What we have at the
moment is chaotic to say the least with a lot of confusion about what RE is and
what it is not. There are many, many interested parties involved in the
discussions about RE (the quietest voice sometimes is that of the teachers
themselves) and it often feels that we are talking at cross purposes. Ultimately,
the consequence of this is that we are continuing to let our students down.
I hope that by 2020 we have a clear
statement of purpose and a clear understanding that religion, whether delivered
educationally, formatively or instructionally, is not necessarily interchangeable
with coercion or distortion – indeed, any more so than any other world view or
belief system.
