religious studies

[quofan]

Hi Can anyone tell me if Religious Studies are compulsary in Middle School. My dd is baptised Christian, and as yet, they have covered other religions and when she asked the teacher when they could do Christianity, she was told off for being rude. All comments appreciated.

bump

How did she ask? Was she rude?

It seems a bit of an odd response if she wasn't.

this link
might help?

It's for 7-11 year olds.

Message withdrawn

But more importantly, what does your daughter want ?
If she's serious about Christianity she's not going to learn anything much from the short once a week session. Given that they school has to assume that a good % of the kids have no real knowledge of any given superstition, it's not likely that it will reach the level of knowledge achieved by 9 year old who actually was raised in any given system.
If she can't cope with hearing about things that contradict her faith, then biology and history GCSE are going to come as nasty shocks.

Given that leaders of the various superstitions have started to get worried that the people who pay their wages might start thinking for themselves, I suspect the school is coming under pressure to take more kids out, hence the rather abrupt reply.

I opted out of RE at the first opportunity. Unless the law has changed recently you can request this.
School may not like it, not least was that when I got my mother to sign the relevant piece of paper there was no-one to supervise me. But you have this right.
Nowadays part of the justifcation for teaching superstition is that it turns out kids who understand each other's beliefs and respect them. No I don't follow that logic either, but a lot of teachers believe it.
By some bizarre coincidence my old RE teacher is chaplain at my kid's school. I think he & I both know that nothing he says is going to get my kids giving up their free will. Thus I have no objection to what appears to be a patronising superficial skim of every major religion.

pmsl dominiconnor

RS at any stage is not compulsory. You have the right to withdraw (on religious grounds) at any time... but if you do, you have to ask what will your child be doing during those times and will it preclude him / her from joining in any other 'RE' events such as a trip to the church / nativity play etc? Some schools can be quite strict that if you withdraw, then you withdraw from everything - you can't pick and choose what bits you want your child joining in with - and that can include being withdrawn from the RE stuff all mixed up with the Christmas festivities!

Anyway, Your school will be following an LEA which should give guidance on what it should be teaching (there is a locally agreed syllabus). The rules are that the RE syllabus, should be in the main Christian Although this can be changed if there are very few Christians locally. However, in practice, what you find often in primary RE is death by festivals. Namely because this is the easiest to teach. Unfortunately, we are in the position today that very few teachers specialise in RE and so are not comfortable teaching this subject (particularly when the stduents might know more about it than you!) and so it tends to be badly done. Which is a shame.

However, things may change at secondary, when your child will have specialists and a lot of LEAs these days have more of a philsophical focus to it. For example, I used to teach modules on 'Does God exist?' 'Who was Jesus?' 'Is there life after death?' Whereby we'd say look at the evidence for life after death - ghosts, NDES, accounts of reincarnation, different religious beliefs about what happens after death including Humanism, and arguments against life after death. Then students would ask their own questions and draw their own conclusions. (This was Year 9 - 15yr olds!) But many of the students really enjoyed these lessons and got a lot out of it, including the chance to really think for themselves for a change (although, in reality most students concluded what their parents thought!) But encouraging this sort of thinking wheteher about religious beliefs or ethics is valuable, and is not merely about learning about others (although DommiConnor, there has been a lot of academic research on this, and it has been shown that when students of different beliefs explore their similarities and differences together in such a way, it can help multi cultural relations) But RE is so more than just this... Learning about other people's religions (AO1) should only make up 50% of the teaching - getting the children to think for themselves (AO2) should make up the other 50%. Personally, I think it is the AO2 which is worth its weight in gold and for that reason I'd urge caution in simply withdrawing.

HTH

P.S. Sory about Typos - been a long day!

I know that you can help kids to be more tolerant, but you used the word "explore", and I see RE as more like the parade of festivals you cite.

I'm interested in how RE might be taught "well". A large % of people who do it have religious beliefs themselves.

As for kids thinking like their parents, that's more than a little sad. If my kids turn out not to be ableto think better than me then I've failed as a parent. That necessarily means they think differently.
2.0 has been taught that Jesus was a historical figure like Mohammed or Caesar, which has been a tricky one to deal with. I could simply say this is rubbish, but is turning into a more complex argument on how we work out what is true.

My core problem with RE, is not that it promotes superstition, since we live in a (slowly) increasingly rational society, possibly because when people see lots of relgions they realise that there is no common truth to be found.
RE promotes the idea that there isn't objective truth, and that an idea is valid merely because a lot of people believe it. Often kids take away the idea that the more believe it,the more true it must be. Maybe there is God who has sleepness nights if you drink goat's milk or wear brown shoes, but the fact that billions of people believe or don't believe it does not affect the reality.
I'm not saying that you or other RE teachers push that idea, but as we all know, what you say to kids is nt the same as what they hear.

Thus we get people saying things like "homeopathy must work, so many people believe in it". When in fact it is merely an artifact of the way most people struggle to even achieve dumbed down GCSE maths.

Well I am in the middle of an RE degree and plan on teaching, have no religion (Humanism) and am doing it for precisely the tolerance reasons.

Do I think an idea is valid because it is believed in? I don't think it gives any credence to the religion per se, BUT I do think ANY person or belief system deserves respect and knowledge is inherent in that. If you look at the effects of religion on the culture of people in say India or Tibet, if you don't know about the religions how can you understand the people? And we do live in a highly multi-cultural society.

I think ignorance = fear and intolerance, and knowledge = acceptance and tolerance (acceptance of diversity, not of the religions perceived 'truth'; as long as racism, societal intolerance and suchlike are in our society, then RE (although could equally be named cultural education) is important.

ANY belief system? I doubt it.

Quofan-shame the teacher was so impatient with your dd. Doesn't sound as though she was rude. Could you have a chat with the teacher and ask for a copy of the syllabus for the year? I talked to my dds teacher about my concerns about RE and she was great.
Rarrie-you sound like a wonderful RE teacher. I have doubts about whether Re should be on the curriculum but if it were all taught as you describe I would be very much in favour

"If she can't cope with hearing about things that contradict her faith, then biology and history GCSE are going to come as nasty shocks. "

huh?? Unless they've changed the sylabus considerably since I was at school I can't think of anything that would contradict my Christian beliefs in either of those subjects.....

No, I believe any pe3rson deserves respect until evidence suggests otherwise. The same applies to a belief system. So, if you came to me and said you were a- I don't know, somethng imaginary like WANGA- then I would respect that. I might change my opinions if evidence was presented to show direct harm, but that would require me gaining some knowledge wouldn't it? And gaining the knowledge of something before you make a judgement of it is respectful in itself.

I get grief at Uni for being a Humanist, most people on my course are Christians- certainly those I know best. They assume that because I am without a God then I am without morals or ethics. In fact, Humanism is preceisely the absence of that need: the idea is that I have ethics based on humanity, not on some God theory for which I personally see no evidence. I get a lot of negativity from the others, but if they'd only read the Humanist website they might understand.

The problem became so severe I almost left, with people handing me pamhlets on why god wouldn't forgive me (I blasphemed by denying him, apparently) and getting lots of stuff e-mailed to me. I respond by e-mailing the Humanist website address every time, to let them discover the reality of my philosophy.

Now, at least I am the same colour / class / approximate IQ as these people. What would it be like to be in my position otherwise? Pretty horrid, I would imagine.

Unfortunately the class has dropped Humanism from the syllabus due to time factors .

I would wholeheartedly support the removal of RE from the syllabus as long as it was replaced by something else which general knowledge of peoples, faiths, lifestyles, etc could be delivered. upgrading citizenship would do it, or as I said before having a cultural studies option. I didn't particularly want to teach RE per se, but I wanted to work in schools delivering the whole tolerance thing. RE seemed the most sppropriate route.

DC - with respect, I do find your views to be typical of the stereotype about RE teachers, and not the reality! I am an atheistic RE teacher, and there are a lot of us out there. In my experience, out of 9 the RE teachers I have worked with only 4 have a religious conviction... and that is typical of the make up of RE teachers, it is usually half and half, with agnostics being the main "group" ifswim!

I am not quite sure what you think the problem with RE teaching is... you say that it is because "RE promotes the idea that there isn't objective truth" But this leads me to ask you, what is the objective truth? The fact is, that not everything can be proven... and are we really ready to go back down the route of the logical positivists? In my view, this would lead to a very narrow view of life, let alone religion...

However, even this view misinterprets what RE should be about. Part of it should be about students finding out the answers for themselves. Yes, often there are no definite answers in RE.. but then we cannot prove whether there is life after death or not, neither can we prove whether capital punishment is right or wrong - what counts is having reasoned opinions, based on knowledge and thought! But isn't this is exactly the point you are making? In too many of our school subjects these days, with so much emphasis on knowledge, students are often not given the opportunity to think for themselves / make their own opinions, and as you say, that leads to the very sad outcome that people do fall foul of 'bad thinking'. However, RE often asks questions that do make children think and consider their justifications for why they think what they think. Typical exam questions might ask students whether they think capital punishment / abortion / euthanasia is right or wrong and to give strong foundations for their opinions. Isn't this the kind of thinking that you want people to do?

Also, I'm sure why you think Jesus was not a historical figure. Have you ever read the 8 indisputable facts by EP Saunders? Even as an atheist, I recognise that there was a bloke called Jesus - only I differ on who I think he was!

However, I do agree with you that we need to encourage more people to think for themselves, and it is sad that too often kids don't. TBH, we need more kids to do more philosophy (whether that means RE changes to incporate philosophy more) or whether it should be taught as a separate subject, I'm not sure... but like you I despair at the poor and illogical thinking I see in my students, but then I also teach Critical Thinking, so I guess I would

Peachychair, sorry to hear that you are having a rough time. Hope it gets better! Just wanted to say though, if you ever want anything I've got on RE just CAT me. I only teach 'A' level now, but still have some of my old stuff, and there is too much reinventing the wheel IMO!!

Thank you Rarrie! Appreciated . Im doing religion and philosophy at Newport, so sounds like you'd be handy, esp for the philosophy stuff which I am dreading!!

Doing Buddhism at the mo, which I rather like, although some of the Tibetan stuff is more complex. Also Islam which is so pertinent to the world right now. So it seems topical which helps.

Can I hijack slightly please? DD1 (almost 8) had an RE lesson last week and the class were asked to draw a picture of what they though god looked like.

I was somewhat miffed because this implies that there is a god and dh and I are athiest/humanist. DD1 believes in the Christian god because of what she is being taught in school, even though I challenge what she is being told and give her the alternative point of view.

Am I right in thinking that the school should not be teaching the existence of a Christian god as a fact?

Yep, I'd also say a dodgy homework. Muslims and Jews would be offended as they are not allowed to 'draw God' or portray him in that way. So its not something that sould have been done.

Perhaps a better way of asking it, would have been to have said 'what do people mean by the term 'God'?' I'm just thinking off the top of my head here, but the task itself is not bad, just the way it is worded.

I'm not too sure on what the actual law states, but yes, the done thing is to be ambiguous and leave it open to interpretation.

Peachychair - Ask away, philosophy was my area of specialism at uni, so am relatively confident in that

No, it shouldnt be taught as fact and I agree with Rarrie about it better being as how believers might see God and perhaps portraying God in a way that demonstrates beliefs some people hold.

Can anyone recommend an introduction to Islam as feel I should understand more about the main issues?

I also know lots of atheist/other religion RE teachers.

RE as a subject is taught as fact, because what it teaches are 'facts'. It does not teach that God exists, or that Jesus was the Messiah, or that Mohammed ascended on a cloud. It teaches that 'this is what Christianity believes', 'this is what Islam believes'. Of course there ARE facts. Jesus the man existed. This is historically proven. Part of RE is examining the historical sources to gather the evidence, and then to analyse what is fact and what is belief. The same with Islam etc. Part of RE is sociological - who were the gospels written for? What does that tell about the society of the time - given that they were written at 4 different times, for different readers, it is interesting to compare the differences.

I think it is ESSENTIAL that RE is taught, given the predominance in our world of misunderstanding and suspicion based on religion. I wish I had a better understanding of Islam. That doesn't mean I want to become a Muslim, but would like more knowledge. At the end of the day that is all RE is teaching - knowledge - it doesn't try and teach faith/belief.

Can't understand the comment about history/biology - RE certainly isn't creationism if that's what you mean. In fact that's a good example of how a text can be analysed in a historical light - clearly creation didn't happen like that, so who is the writer writing for? Why have they written it like that? Given that there are two differing OT accounts anyway, I don't think even the bible is trying to say it's how it happened!

Unfortunately, some schools Do teach creationism- my kids are at one.

Rarrie- really hate to ask- Tibetan Lamas- role of? (especially in Gelupke tradition) Do you know any good resources? Preferably web based. We have a presentation next week , one of our group left, one has ahd her daughter admitted to hospital and one is so lazy I'm having to do her part at short notice in case she doesn't arrive! I'm not prepared to fail though so have to do it.

PeachyClair - I wouldn't term that as 'RE' though - more as 'spiritual education'. RE as I see it is a thoroughly academic subject. Even as a Christian I wouldn't be happy if creationism being the end of the story was taught.

Sorry, Buddhism is not my strength.

Have you tried these general RE sites?

www.restuff.co.uk
re-xs.ucsm.ac.uk/
www.reonline.org.uk/

The last two has lots of links - you may find something on them

HTH