RE in 2020

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.