This edited volume is essentially a critique of the 2018 report of the Commission on Religious Education. In 1944, a coalition government (Conservative and Labour) passed a landmark education Act, which put classroom teaching of religion onto the statute book. The Act created a national framework for religion to be locally delivered through a series of agreed syllabuses, each syllabus being written by a group of teachers and church representatives together with local authority officials. The system was designed to ensure the teaching of religion reflected the sensibilities appropriate to each geographical area.
As the demography of Britain changed in the post-war years, membership of the local standing committees broadened and this had the effect of adding further religions to their syllabuses. Christianity was still given a major role because of the contribution it had made to Britain’s history and, indeed, literature, architecture and law. To avoid any notion that religion was being forced on the population, a ‘conscience clause’ in the Act allowed parents to withdraw their children, and many Jehovah’s Witnesses did. The result was sufficiently flexible, stable and satisfactory to last for about 50 years.
One of the results of broadening membership of local committees, however, was to put more and more material into the same curricular space. Each religious group wanted to ensure its religion was included in the syllabus, and, when non- and anti-religious groups (for instance Humanists) were included on the committees, syllabuses became more extensive still. To avoid overloading the poor teachers of religion, the six major world faiths practised among the population in England and Wales were prioritised. Speaking as someone who taught full-time at three large comprehensive schools for 10 years, the subject was popular (even to the extent of some pupils opting for extra lessons in the lunch hour).
Yet, there were difficulties. The training of RE teachers was underfunded and the pressure to include so much material in the classroom led to selectivity (e.g., by the teaching of cross-religious themes) which could be empirically shown to confuse pupils. Because religious education had been a requirement but not a clearly defined part of the National Curriculum, it was not protected in the same way as other subjects. In recent years, Ofsted inspectors were not impressed by the provision they found in most secondary and primary schools (though schools with long-standing religious connections did a great deal better). The Commission, set up by the Religious Education Council (REC), comprised 14 members who, during their two-year consultation, took 190 submissions from organisations and over 1,100 from individuals. In essence, the Commission recommended changing the name of the subject from Religious Education to Religion and Worldviews, establishing a new statutory framework, revamping initial teacher training and professional development and placing most control of the subject matter in the hands of nine professionals. The local standing committees would be relegated to a merely advisory role and, instead of introducing young people to the great religious traditions of the world, they were to be taught a great deal about worldviews (both personal and institutional) with the intention of enabling each student to formulate their own worldview. The right of withdrawal would be reviewed and bureaucratised, and the aided and controlled religious schools (mainly Roman Catholic and Anglican) would appear to have less freedom of manoeuvre than before.
Religion and Worldviews: The triumph of the secular in religious education is made up of ten chapters, each of which is written by one or more educationalists, addressing the Commission’s proposals and testing them in a variety of ways for instance by logical analysis or by historical precedents or examining the Commission’s processes or against a concept of religious rights and sometimes in all these ways. One of the chapters is written by a member of the Commission, Anthony Towey, who lifts the lid on what happened behind the scenes including the ‘pedagogical polemic’ (22) to which he was exposed and, even, the personal threats (25). Friedrich Schweitzer’s chapter reflects on 20th century German history, and questions the recommendation that so much power should be placed into the hands of nine professionals with the right to influence content and determine approaches for all schools. To anyone with concerns for participatory democracy, the downgrading of the local standing committees and the elevation and creation of a single new Quango is alarming. The nine members would be appointed by, and paid by, the Department for Education on recommendations from the Religious Education Council (REC) of England and Wales. The REC effectively wants to make itself the gatekeeper of religious teaching in schools and taken that role away from the many religious and other bodies who currently assist in the writing of agreed syllabuses sensitive to local needs. The REC’s inflated position and the religious teaching it would sanction are cast in the form of a ‘national entitlement’ for young people but such a phraseology appears disingenuous. It is more of a national imposition than a national entitlement.
Given the proposal to vest such power in nine ‘professionals’, Thompson examines the idea of professionalism and shows, among other things, the difficulty religious education teachers could have in claiming to be professionals because of the uncertainty of what constitutes professional knowledge. Others have other concerns. The Board of [Jewish] Deputies, the only ‘democratically elected, cross-communal, representative body in the Jewish community’ in Britain, spoke of the Commission’s report as ‘fundamentally flawed’ and said it ‘might be seen as an attempt by those hostile to faith to push their agenda of undermining rigour in religious education at a time when faith literacy could not be more important’ (6). Philip Barnes observes that there does not seem to be any specified common content and as many as 24 religious and non-religious worldviews are believed appropriate for study. Roger Trigg traces the philosophical path preceding the ‘reducing’ of religion to a worldview that is indeterminate and highly personal. Gert Biesta and Patricia Hannam spell out philosophical, theological and educational objections to a worldviews approach and Daniel Moulin-Stożek, reviewing the five or six pedagogical approaches to religious education developed since the 1960s, finds little in the way of a solution to the perennial issues of the subject and little attempt to engage with the extensive (empirical) research literature in what the Commission writes. The result on the next generation of school leavers would be an increase in bewildering and probably socially divisive subjectivity, secularisation and the framing of religion as an arbitrary category without attention to its truth claims or internal debates. In any case, for whatever reasons, the government rejected the Commission’s proposals and so its supporters are embarking on a campaign of persuasion.
If this book is judged, as it should be, against its own aims, it must be highly rated. The chapters are varied, cogent, academically informed, thoughtful and well crafted.