So, Richard Dawkins has promised – no, that’s too strong – intimated that he might set up an atheist school, as he would presumably have the right to under new government ‘free school’ plans. During a chat on mumsnet http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/mumsnet_live_events/985509-Live-webchat-with-Richard-Dawkins-Wed-23-June-10am-11am?pagingOff=1 he responded to a few suggestions that he start “an atheist free school” by saying he liked the idea very much.
This might seem odd coming from someone who has said (indeed said in the same discussion) that “faith schools… are divisive… [and] encourage children to segregate into tribes”. How exactly is a faith school divisive in a way that an atheist school wouldn’t be?
Muddled as this may seem, there is a kind of logic to it. Dawkins went on to explain that though he liked the idea of an atheist free school “very much” he would “prefer to call it a free-thinking free school”. “Free-thinking” has been the adjective of choice for the irreligious in Britain since the late seventeenth century. It was coined to describe the uninhibited mental activity that was supposedly permitted only beyond the borders of established religion. Once upon a time a credible label, beastly postmodernism came along in the twentieth century and pointed out that there is no thinking that is truly free, unencumbered by tradition or authority, convention or culture.
Dawkins, however, is scornful of postmodernism. “I would never want to indoctrinate children in atheism,” he told mumsnet. “Instead, children should be taught to ask for evidence, to be sceptical, critical, open-minded. If children understand that beliefs should be substantiated with evidence, as opposed to tradition, authority, revelation or faith, they will automatically work out for themselves that they are atheists.”
The problem here is not so much arrogance as a failure of the imagination, a failure to recognise that you can be sceptical, critical, open-minded, etc and still come to the conclusion that God exists or that, for example, Christianity is true. As Peter Hitchens observes in the introduction to his recent book The Rage Against God http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rage-Against-God-Foundation-Civilisation/dp/1441105727#noop, “the difficulties of the anti-theists begin when they try to engage with anyone who does not agree with them, when their reaction is often a frustrated rage that the rest of us are so stupid.”
So, how would this neutral, objective, free-thinking school be different? It would, Dawkins explained, “teach comparative religion, and teach it properly without bias.” In case you were wondering, “without bias” means “as a branch of anthropology”. And religious texts, how exactly do you teach them “without bias”? Quite simply, you teach that they are untrue. “The bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality,” Dawkins explained. “It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality.”
This is a legitimate opinion – although one from which millions would dissent – but to imagine it is neutral, objective or self-evidently correct is absurd. To arrive at (and teach) such ideas is to take a whole series of contestable positions on a range of theological, philosophical and scientific questions
To claim that an atheist school would “teach comparative religion, and teach it properly without any bias towards particular religions” is so naïve as to beggar belief. Does it mean you should dedicate as much time teaching Zoroastrianism as Christianity, to take the claims of Judaism as seriously as those of Jedis?
The “without bias” ambitions are faintly redolent of the first amendment to the US Constitution that promises to make “no law respecting an establishment of religion” in its quest for an level playing field. Schools are not like constitutions, however, and cannot simply withdraw from religious judgment, least if all if they hope to teach the subject. And in any case, even the US solution is itself plagued with problems. Philosopher Roger Trigg, in his book Religion and Public Life http://www.amazon.co.uk/Religion-Public-Life-Faith-Privatized/dp/0199543674/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277457463&sr=8-4 , cites the example of how US courts felt that they could not legitimately adjudicate over the genuineness of the Church of the New Song, a religion founded in the 1970s by an inmate of an American federal jail, which apparently required prisoners to be served Harvey’s Bristol Cream and steak every Friday at 5pm. Teaching, like living, is always biased. Neutrality is not an option.
None of this invalidates Dawkins’ desire to set up an atheist school. Indeed, such a thing might be welcome if only as a way of dragging atheist presuppositions from the skirts of secular neutrality and exposing them to a little more public scrutiny. The only test it would need to pass would be to show that it was capable of dealing with other views and positions with respect and grace. And of this, I have my doubts.
