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Religious leaders in Britain have warned that neglecting religious studies in school will lead to serious social problems. It’s being claimed that a subject vital for community cohesion is being side-lined by UK schools with few resources devoted to RE and an unwillingness in some schools to teach it. VoR's Flora Neve reports.
Debate has been growing over the quality and purpose of religious education in UK schools.
Last year, research showed less that £1 per child per year is spent on religious studies in most state schools, and in some it’s as low as 75 pence.
When
Education Secretary Michael Gove announced his plans for the new
English baccalaureate, religious studies was conspicuously absent.
MP Steve Lloyd is chairing a parliamentary report on religious education in school.
He
believes the government is neglecting a subject which is not only of
academic importance, but essential for reducing religious intolerance
and the likelihood of extremism.
"If
you have two communities and neither have accurate information about
the others beliefs or value system it tends to lead to aggravation-
sometimes violence and certainly not harmonious community relations. If
you have a complete misinformation about a different group that’s where
we tend to stereotype, we tend to scapegoat and we tend to turn people
into ‘the other’."
Although
a secular country, Christian morals and Bible studies are crucial to
understanding literature and the arts over a thousand-year period.
Diversity of faith
But religious studies classes do not only teach about Christianity.
The
UK is made up of a number of different religions: According to the
latest figures, London was the most diverse region in the country, with
the highest proportion of people identifying themselves as Muslim,
Buddhist, Hindu and Jewish.
State schools generally aim to reflect this diversity by teaching all the major religions.
However,
an Ofsted report published at the end of last year claimed more than
half UK state schools have been failing pupils in their religious
education.
Dr. David Lundie is a lecturer in education studies at the University of Glasgow and has done extensive research on RE teaching.
He says one of the problems, alongside cuts to resources, is a growing uncertainty over what the subject is actually about.
"Its
purpose has constantly been challenged. Is religious education, as one
school put it, 'respect' study? Is it primarily the academic study of
the doctrines of different faiths? Is it a study about the human
condition? I think these anxieties about the very purpose of the subject
remain unresolved. That leads to professional anxiety amongst teachers.
There’s simply no way they can cover such a breadth of entailments."
For many the biggest threat to religious education is not from within the state system but from elsewhere.
The government is now funding a significant number of free schools, and many of those are faith schools.
According to the latest figures a around a third of government-funded schools are schools with a religious character .
They have no obligations to teach about different religious and non-religious beliefs, and they are selective.
This
does not bode well for community cohesion, according to Richy Thompson,
campaigns officer at The British Humanist Association.
"In a full discussion about community cohesion in respect to schools we need to look at all sorts of things," he says.
"Most faith schools use selective admissions. This has a negative
impact on community cohesion. Anything they do in their curriculum can
only go some way to overcome the problems. Teaching about religious
beliefs is not as good as teaching in a mixed environment. Some
academies and free schools allow some schools to not only teach in a
less inclusive manner but also to set up their admissions and employment
polices in a more narrow way. And that’s going to add to their
problems.
The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Religious Education presented their report to the Education Secretary on March 17.
(VoR)
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