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 Why not be an electrician and a musician? |
Religious education is divisive in tragic ways
The closest I can get to religion is through Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, who contrasted ‘I-thou’ – treating people as equals – with ‘I-it’ – exploiting people.
In education all curricula and targets are useless unless the teacher meets the child where he is.
That’s where we must start. Otherwise, all education is a sham.
Some illustrations: for the Marriage Guidance Council I used to visit schools, prisons, borstals, because we believed education for family life would avoid marriage breakdown. We did not believe in sex education alone but as a brief part of what we called education for personal relationships – EPR.
On one occasion I was visiting boys in a borstal. They had excellent teaching especially in biology. After a short period of discussion, I asked: “How is it that you seem so ignorant of sexual matters when I know you have an excellent teacher?”
The reply came: “All them long words, Miss, and them diagrams. We never knew ’e was talkin’ about us!” I asked: “Well are we talking about us now?” “Yes!” “Why?” “Because you let us use our words!”
On another occasion I was greeted with: “’Oo are you? F*** off!” I said: “Would you mind explaining what you mean?” After I clarified my interpretation of the verb ‘f***’ this led to real discussion.
We have to speak the same language. Words mean different things to different people. Buber writes: “All living is meeting”, and too often we do not meet and understand one another. That’s why so much of today’s education is a failure. It is disgraceful when children move to secondary school unable to read and write.
There were many wonderful comprehensive schools but we made the mistakes of streaming and appointing grammar school heads to run many new comprehensives.
In one incident, I was shown into a room full of boys. One said: “You shouldn’t come ’ere miss!” I said: “Why not?”
He answered: “We’re the D stream, nobody knows what to do with us.” Condemned for life by a single letter! Anyone can teach bright, motivated children.
It takes real understanding and love to appreciate the multiple, diverse backgrounds that have shaped the population of many schools today and bring out the best in children.
CP Snow was wrong to divide people into sciences and arts – different human beings! I have known carpenters, plumbers, electricians, who are also musicians, poets or artists.
Religious education, separating children by faith, exacerbates that division. Education is not only words and books but a gesture, a posture, a facial expression. This leads me to the veil – no, I am not about to become a nun.
I object strongly to teachers wearing the veil It is more than a choice of dress. It is a symbol of subservience, everything our parents, grandparents, the suffragettes fought against and we have still not won complete equality and freedom for women.
The veil is a disguise with no place in school. It may hide a highly educated professional woman, a wealthy woman wearing the latest fashions and marvellous jewellery, a poor woman subjected to clitorectomy, a woman beaten and bruised, a child married against her will, or a woman about to be murdered by her family for loving the wrong man. It could also hide a loving mother and a truly religious woman.
Seeing a pair of dark eyes, you may be looking at a terrorist in disguise, a murderer who believes in jihad and fatwa. Which of the women behind the veil genuinely represents Islam? How do we know?
It is anathema to free, Western thinking for children to be taught that it is wrong for a man to see a woman’s face.
Religious education divides people so totally in tragic ways.
Every religion I have studied, and I would certainly not claim familiarity with many, has at least six different sub-groupings, sects, cults, who often hate each other even more than they hate other religions. Religious schools and separate schools for different talents merely estrange people.
In numerous schools children teach each other about different faiths.
Many good schools teach multiple religions and none. What about agnosticism and atheism, often as arrogant as fundamentalism?
Atheist communism became an intolerant creed. For those who have it, faith is a wonderful thing. When consistent, as with Quakers or others who believe that religion is love, and there are many, I would not deny anyone its comfort.
But it is a matter for the home and place of worship. It has no place in business and should play no part in government.
I considered the proposal for religious schools to take pupils of other faiths modest step in the right direction.
Although many of the best religious schools already do this, the government’s stated intent to make this mandatory evaporated at the first sign of pressure from some religious leaders – proof that even more dangerous for society is allowing formal religion to get too close to government and pandering to its demands for formal integration into government.
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