If you don’t know the difference you are living with, how can you learn to live with it? Taking difference seriously in spiritual and religious education

Abstract

This article discusses the implications of difference in relation to religious education, multiculturalism and contemporary ‘terrorist’ global activity. It argues that the model for religious education in England and Wales has not been sufficient in addressing children’s spiritual development. Religious education has been pursued through the lens of multiculturalism (more recently understood as interculturalism or pluralism), with the idea that diversity is an enrichment to society and not a danger to morally agreed codes of conduct or social cohesion. This form of religious education has not sufficiently addressed the ideological bases and political activity that religious faith entails. As a result, young people are insufficiently spiritually educated to deal with and adequately evaluate and respond to the realities of the modern world within which spiritual conviction has presented itself as a divisive as well as a cohesive factor. Although the context for this chapter is religious and spiritual education in the UK, the question raised for those working within other national contexts is whether their own system is more sufficient than the UK model.

Keywords:

• Religion
• Faith
• Spirituality
• Ideology
• Nationalism
• Morality
• Modernism

Notes

1. Foreword in Smart, Approaches to the study of religion (1998).

2. One of the most notable and widely reported examples of this internal tension becoming public was the violent demonstration by Sikhs against a play staged in Birmingham that had been written by a Sikh woman but offended Sikh leaders and traditionalists by including a rape scene within a gurudwara. The subsequent reporting on this revealed generational tensions existing between Sikhs in the UK in relation to the issues this play provoked, as well as tensions between religious representation and the creative process. For one of many examples of reportage see Harriet Swain’s article, ‘Talks with Sikhs backfired on theatre’, Guardian, 29 December 2004.

3. Michael Grimmitt’s exposition of pedagogy has been important to me at this point, and I follow his brief outline of what constitutes the various levels of pedagogy here; see Grimmitt (2000), pp. 16–21. Grimmitt provides a critical commentary on a number of influential theoretical approaches to RE assessing their pedagogical sufficiency.

4. A SACRE monitoring body is established within each local education authority (LEA) for ensuring that schools comply with the law regarding legal requirements for and quality of religious education. Agreed syllabuses are produced b SACREs as legal documents that provide statutory guidance as to provision for religious education. The SACRE is the author of an agreed syllabus on behalf of the county or city council. Inspectors/advisers in religious education are provided by the LEA to assist SACREs through providing their professional advice and support, and ensuring support for schools in meeting the requirements of the locally agreed syllabus for RE