RE classes are ‘key to tackling extremism’, Government told

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION is key to tackling extremism in schools.

That was the claim made this week by the Church of England’s Chief Education Officer, the Rev Nigel Genders.

Commenting on the Religious Education Council’s comments that the removal of short courses from the Department for Education performance tables is having a negative impact on the number of pupils choosing to take Religious Studies at GCSE level, Genders has said that ‘religious literacy’ is key to the modern world.

Despite the 5.3 per cent rise in the number of pupils taking RE at GCSE level across England and Wales this year, Former Education Secretary, Michael Gove’s decision to introduce the five key subject areas of the EBacc in 2012, has had the adverse effect of making RE an ‘unintended casualty’.

“The problem is that if you don’t then make it part of your accountability measure, then schools will not give it the kind of emphasis that it needs.”

He added: “If we end up downgrading RE, then the number of people who want to train to be RE teachers will drop, and it becomes a spiral in decline and you end up with no subject specialists and the subject gets weaker, and then people say ‘oh this is a weak subject, what are we doing this for?’,” Genders said.

According to the Religious Education Council, almost two thirds of short course GCSEs taken across England and Wales are RS, but argue that the short course’s nonaccountability on the Department of Education’s performance tables is at odds with the Government’s growing emphasis on religious literacy.

“Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ book Not in God’s name [talks] about the increasing secularisation that we’re living within [which] is actually the thing that is fuelling the surge in extremist behaviour and radicalisation,” he said.

“Young people are looking for some sort of religious identity, and they’re finding just a moral vacuum because religion has been side-lined or it has been treated as a subject that you can actually water down to be something about values or something about citizenship.

“In order to play their part in the modern world, that kind of religious literacy is crucial,” he added.

The Religious Education Council lists key outcomes of KS4 2015 for Religious Education in England and Wales. Statistics show that there were 283,756 entries for the full course in GCSE RS, a rise of 5.3 per cent from 2014 (269,494) but a decline of 26.8 per cent from 2014 short course in GCSE RS. There were 370,435 entries for GCSE RS (combined short and full courses), a decline of 4.5 per cent.

A-level Religious Studies is being ‘reformed’ by the government, or its advisory panels, towards more descriptive and less critically analytic emphases. This was discussed on Radio 4’s Sunday Programme. The presenter Edward Stourton asked his guest expert Ben Wood why the changes were needed, given that rising numbers of pupils now choose RS A level. Mr Wood said that more time was needed to study a specific religion, its customs, practices and beliefs, its evolution and way of engaging with modern issues. This is to show the systematic coherence of a religion, how it fits together and works.

Mr Stourton challenged Mr Wood on this new dimension or orientation of RS because it seemed to stress learning about a religion and not encouraging the asking of critical questions about it, protecting it from rigorous intellectual challenges and debate. Rabbi Jonathan Romaine had also expressed this worry about the ‘reformed’ syllabus: this looked much more regimented and didactic, killing off probing challenges and exploration, preventing individual critical work.

Linked to this he feared a return to a form of RS which was giving instruction in a religion, such as might be given by an orthodox cleric, a form of indoctrination in effect. It does look as if RS is now to become far less critical and analytic, and far more didactic, a subject to be learned and repeated correctly.

Listeners will have gained the impression that government advisers on the syllabus have decided to use RS as a kind of way of encouraging multiculturalism by presenting friendly and uncritical accounts of faiths in the UK. In short it could well be a thinly veiled politicisation of the subject, at the expense of free critical questioning. Why change a syllabus that is currently very attractive to pupils in the direction of a descriptive didactic orientation, feared by Rabbi Romaine?

The 2014 QAA Benchmarking document for Theology and RS in universities follows the same new orientation, a move away from the ‘Berlin Model’ of open free critical thought and study, towards an empathetic approach that aims to achieve sympathy with religions. Social pressures and governmental concerns are clearly affecting educational syllabus design at all levels. A kind of intellectual chill factor may be coming down on critical freedom, even in universities whose mission statements insist on it.

Another Radio 4 programme, Today, gave listeners the discussion between presenter James Naughtie and a representative of the charity ‘Show Racism the Red Card’. She said that this charity now ceased accusing children of being racists if they disagreed with other religions and instead tried reasoning. The kind of ‘facts’ given to children can be seen on their website against Islamophobia: http://bit.ly/1LsduM0, including the assertion that Muslims worship the same God as Christians, a contestable opinion.

For the history of the term ‘Islamophobia’ as developed by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Kindle booklet of that title by Spencer and Horrowitz is worth consulting. How should politicians, educators and activists use religion: that is clearly a deepening question in and for our society.