Religious Education is not being taught in more than a quarter of schools. Kenneth Primrose discusses why the subject is essential.

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If students were for some reason deprived of their English or Maths lessons for a period of time, you would expect their command of language or numeracy to stagnate. If this wasn’t the case, why bother employing the teachers in the first place?

This week new data from NATRE, the National Association of Teachers of RE, revealed that RE is not being taught in more than a quarter of secondary schools in England. The story was quickly parodied by the satirical website The Daily Mash, in an article of faux lament that we are not preparing our students for life in the 1950s. The story is also drawing on the recent research which reveals that religion is… (wait for it)… on the decline in the U.K. The news of sub–standard or absent RE has drawn comment from the National Secular Society, that “If so many schools aren’t valuing this supposedly compulsory subject, that tells you that it either shouldn’t be compulsory at all or that it needs serious reform”.

Perhaps the relevant question in all of this is, what are students actually deprived of when they are not taught RE?

Some people would conclude ‘very little’, or else RE would not make such an easy casualty when school purse strings are tightened. Of the various virtues of RE that I am tempted to extol in response to this view, I would just like to draw out two. Firstly, that RE is a necessary and useful preparation for life in a complex world of competing truth claims. And secondly, that it teaches students to think independently about questions that really matter. Without this provision, we do injury to both the individual and society.

To take the first point, how does RE prepare students to deal with the complex beliefs and identities that traffic in society? Perhaps counter–intuitively, it does so not so much through learning about different worldviews, but rather through troubling conventional and facile assumptions about religion. Good RE should not amount to learning the 5Ks of Sikhism or indeed the 5 Pillars of Islam, but rather understanding that the lived experience of believers is dynamic and contextual, and therefore often defies neat pigeon–holing. Done well, RE should work to combat tendencies to reduce religion to a blanket set of propositions and practices, and should help young people to begin to understand the complex negotiations that people of different religions and beliefs are involved in. For evidence of how widespread generalisations about religions and beliefs are, look no further than a recent Guardian article highlighting the widespread (and erroneous) assumption among many atheists that most Christians reject evolution. Indeed, quite the opposite appears to be true.

As for the second point, where else do young people get to ask, explore and study big questions, not to mention the wisdom of the ages that has been brought to bare on them? ‘Is morality entirely relative? When could an AI robot be considered human? How controversial are three parent babies? Are people who have religious experiences deluded?’ These are all questions that haunt us, yet we seldom get to explore. Through RE students are expected not only to think for themselves about such issues, but to understand and evaluate how great thinkers and traditions have reasoned on such issues from different perspectives. As a subject, it teaches both empathy and scepticism – surely two of the most needed skills today.

This begs the question, how does impoverished RE provision in schools impact on broader society? That is clearly difficult to measure, though if the above is true, then we should expect to be delivering students into the outside world who have given little thought to ethics or big questions. We should expect oversimplifications and caricatures of different religion and belief traditions to be the norm, with little genuine engagement or understanding as conventional narratives go unchallenged. Perhaps more significantly, we might actually find direct implications for the prevention of violent extremism. If dangerous ideas and narratives are not critically scrutinized in a safe environment, how can one hope to deconstruct them and hold they have on young people?

A defense has been given by some educators and headteachers that RE may be being delivered through assemblies or through conferences. Even if we take it in good faith that it is not just lip service to legal obligations, it presupposes that there is so little worth doing that it can be done by, say, a ten minute talk on Divali, or whatever other festival du jour there happens to be. Students are told some subject–related gobits, and the duty to provide Religious Education is then discharged, job done, box ticked. This not only patronises the subject, but also supposes that it is not something one does, merely something one is (briefly) a passive recipient of.

Done properly, RE demands that students themselves develop the capacity to think and discuss. To smuggle in ten minutes here and there, if at all, will not achieve that. Moreover, it seems like a tacit admission that one does not really understand the subject. I would argue that now is the time to address these misunderstandings about RE, rather than passing them down to the next generation.

Kenneth Primrose is Head of Religion and Philosophy at Robert Gordon’s College, Aberdeen. He is a former research assistant at Theos.