Withdrawing DD from RE?

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I want to see if anyone’s had any experience withdrawing their children from PE? How did the school handle it etc.

My husband and I are both atheists. Our DD is 5 and is extremely interested in the universe and science. She’s now coming back from school very confused thinking that god created the world and asking if he made the Big Bang happen! This is too confusing for her, she naturally believes what her teachers tell her (why wouldn’t she) so naturally she’s taking RE as fact and it’s confusing the hell out of her.

I’m happy for her to learn about god in her own way in the future and find her own path but she’s much too young right now.

I’ve read we have the right to withdraw her from Re so simply want to see if people have had experiences with this.

YetAnother - I didn't mean to suggest that anyone on this thread was a militant atheist. I was thinking of Dawkins and my PIL, who are members of the Secular Society and who seem to have compensated for their utter failure to become teenage rebels (in London, in the 1960s!) with an incredibly tedious tendency to scoff at anyone religious in their geriatric years. I object on two grounds: firstly, the intolerance of it, and secondly, the equation of a boring middle-of-the-road uncritical atheism with being mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Heaven knows, they'd be way more interesting if it actually were rebellious.

Militant atheism to me is atheism that is as evangelical as any church in its tendency to proclaim itself at any moment (however inappropriate) and in its ambition to convert others.

As I said, I'm an atheist myself.

Where do you see militant atheism?

I already said: people like Dawkins, the Secular Society, people like my PIL who feel the need to tell random people they are atheist with the same enthusiasm as a newly converted teenage vegan.

You mention Dawkins- when has he been inappropriate in his atheism? Obviously I can’t speak for your parents!

I’m not being a dick, I promise- but you’re calling the Secular Society militantly atheist? You do know that there are lots of religious secularists?

I see Richard Dawkins as the worst kind of pseudo-philosopher. The man needs to stay in his lane as a scientist and stop talking about social and philosophical matters he doesn't understand. He is pretty much universally regarded with derision in academic philosophy and social science departments at university, though he's managed to gain quite a popular following amongst the type of people (like my PIL) who think they are educated precisely BECAUSE they are atheists. His tweets, btw, are awful - and have bordered on the islamophobic at times, see the Winchester Cathedral posts, for instance.

I agree re Dawkins.

Why shouldn’t general taxation fund those schools?

Because it is impossible to do it equitably and in a non-discriminatory way. Because discriminating against five-year-olds is reprehensible. Because segregating children by faith, rather than supporting integration, flies in the faith of all other policy. Because state services should be neutral. Because the historic basis of this service provision means it is hugely out of sync with the demographics of the population. Because we should spend state money on evangelising certain faiths.

Do the parents of children attending those schools not pay tax? I imagine if the government stopped funding religious schools entirely, but then offered parents the option to not pay income tax/VAT etc proportionally to what gets spent per child that they have in school I imagine they probably wouldn’t care because it would essentially come out the same.

Your argument doesn’t stack up - parents who prefer private education don’t get a tax rebate. They make a choice that they want something different from a neutral, universal service, and they fund that choice.

Why should parents who prefer to get a state school to teach their kids their faith get a rebate? Where it’s parental preference to deviate from the ‘neutral’, the parent (or a sponsoring non-state institutions) should fund it.

But here’s a halfway house - state-funded faith schools can have places reserved for children of their faith based on how much money they put in. Or the Australian model, where all schools, get per pupil funding. The state tops it up for secular state schools. Churches, parents or a combination top it up for faith schools, all of which are in the private sector.

I don't have huge issues with the National Secular Society, btw - I just think it's weird to spend so much time campaigning against religious privilege when there are many more egregious inequalities in society. Also, if you started with a more pressing issue, like reforming land ownership, you'd end up hitting religious privilege alongside other, more significant types of wealth inequality.

Our children both had RS from nursery (attached to school, they joined them for assemblies which were mostly Christian).
16 and 25 now, both atheists (and have been since 7/8 years). Both thoroughly enjoyed the subject, particularly when it broadened out to to a comparative subject and covered all religions. Youngest chose it at IGCSE because it’s so interesting.

Tolerance and understanding of each other and where we’re coming from is never a bad thing to learn (ok, so most religions don’t put those ideals into practice but the theory is good!).
I think it’s all a fairytale but never had any objection: they were intelligent people perfectly capable of sifting through the “facts” and drawing their own conclusions.
Don’t agree with withdrawing kids because it’s not something you personally believe. A lot more is taught in RS than ideology. They have science lessons too. They’ll make up their own minds. Don’t be afraid of something you don’t understand, learn about it instead.

I loathe Dawkins personally- but I find it hard to see how expressing unpleasant views on Twitter makes him a “militant atheist”

Prof Dawkins has proposed such a concept and Michael Gove (then education secretary 2010) said that is precisely what was intended with the introduction of free schools. If people want to set that up, they may.

Unfortunately Gove didn’t follow through when he passed the legislation and regulation. The result is that if people want to set these up, they may not.

Is it unfair that religious schools have a kind of default historical advantage? It’s simply to do with the fact that atheism is a relatively new thing, and therefore has something of a historical disadvantage.

When you apply that logic to ‘women’ or ‘people who aren’t white’ in terms of access to state services based on historical disadvantage or marginalisation, you see exactly how dreadful it is.

Non-belief in the Christian god isn’t a ‘new thing’. You just hear more about it now that you don’t get burned at the stake for it.

However we are talking here about secularism, which has a very long (and not always perfect or tolerant itself) global history.

IHeartKingThistle

I know it's a long way off but RE is still a compulsory GCSE”

By here, where do you mean? It’s not at our School (English independent).

And the Secular Society is militant because it’s campaigning for. A secular society when you think it should be campaigning for something else? Sorry?

“I know it's a long way off but RE is still a compulsory GCSE”

By here, where do you mean? It’s not at our School (English independent).”
Studying RE to GCSE level is compulsory in English State
Schools. You don’t have to take the exam, but you have to study it.

I don't have huge issues with the National Secular Society, btw - I just think it's weird to spend so much time campaigning against religious privilege when there are many more egregious inequalities in society

But many issues are not mutually exclusive. For example, one of the main reasons I am politically atheist as well as simply having 'beliefs' is the power that the church(es) still have socially in terms of swaying lawmakers around different issues and educating children into false belief. And different churches really do need to be brought to account for what they did to young single mothers and their babies as well as perpetrating and covering up child sexual abuse. To me, these are pressing issues.

I think we should be campaigning for an educated, tolerant society. It is perfectly possible to be an atheist and to respect people who have faith, which means not trying to stamp them out as old-fashioned or ridiculous or crazy. I have learned a lot from a whole range of writers and thinkers who identify strongly as religious, and my life is all the richer for their faith. Equally, I stand against those who insist on thrusting their religion down everyone else's throats as the only true faith, or on not teaching things like evolution because they aren't in the Bible. I think we should be campaigning not just for pluralism but for an attitude that welcome exploration of and contact with other ways of being and thinkins.

My problem with the secular society is that I think all that time and effort would be better poured into other causes. Ending religious schools is less of a priority for me than the fact that many kids are growing up in poverty and don't have enough to eat, or the fact that schools are no longer able to fund basic resources. I think a lot of people join these campaigns in a kind of identitiarian spirit, because they want to bore everyone senseless with their own views, rather than actually working to improve society. But, like I said, my experience of that organisation is largely through my PIL, who are the type of people who will tell a grieving Christan widow that she's stupid thinking her husband is in heaven. So I am probably being unfair to other NSS members.

Surely all children should be taught RE?

My family are all atheists, I went to a village primary school which was a church run school, (the majority of parents of the pupils were atheists) so we were only taught about Christianity in school..I wasn't confused..
And then in secondary school, learnt about all religions and beliefs. Didn't do me or anyone else on school any harm?!

Children should be taught, that other people might have different beliefs to you, and how to respect that. It's no big deal!!

We did have to do an exam at GSCE (even though I didn't pick it to study)

It still infuriates me to this day that every question was 'In your opinion blah blah blah..'

I wrote my opinions and still got an E 😂

Bertrand

Didn’t know that, that’s interesting.
Not sure how ours will do with his, mind you. In a practice paper they had to list some adjectives one might apply to god/s. One of his was “imaginary”. We await the grade with interest 😁

All the members of the NSS I’ve known have shared your goals and aren’t like your PILs at all.

For me, the idea of secularism is that everyone can have a neutral experience of their interactions with the state. That they are neither preferenced nor disadvantaged. That the provision of those services makes space for their beliefs, or lack thereof, to flourish in an inclusive way.

For me, secularism is one path to dealing with some of the other structural inequalities you mentioned. One route out of poverty for children is education. The current system allows those schools that select by faith to recruit a disproportionately middle-class intake with a greater number of involved and committed parents. That means other schools in that community will have a disproportionate number of children from deprived backgrounds and in particular those from the most chaotic homes. Those schools therefore have a much greater challenge - meaning the kids are less likely to have outcomes equal to those at the ‘nice’ (religiously selective) school.

Children of different or no faiths who have to attend a CofE school because it’s their only local option may feel ‘othered’ in the context of the school, harming social cohesion. If they are removed from assemblies because of religious content, it is not going to help them feel their faith is respected and equal.

Putting children of the two main Christian faiths into one set of schools and ‘the other kids’ into community schools is also not doing anything to promote tolerance and cohesion. I went to a Protestant faith school. We were never, ever taught that the Catholics were different, but it was part of our DNA. People of other faiths were even more exotic and ‘not like us’. Absolutely nothing our teachers ever said, but a natural result of segregation.

Achieving equality in school admissions may seem like a small piece of the puzzle, but to me it’s quite important.

I really don't know why, but something about this thread has been reminding me of this

“But, like I said, my experience of that organisation is largely through my PIL, who are the type of people who will tell a grieving Christan widow that she's stupid thinking her husband is in heaven. So I am probably being unfair to other NSS members”
That’s not an atheist. That’s a dickhead. And, were i the sort of person who took offence, I would be pretty passed off at the characterisation, frankly.

RE is not just about Christianity. I did it years and years ago and it was very much an introduction to all the major world faiths

In some schools yes this is how it is taught,but not in every school. The RC school I went to we learned only RC teaching.

Now the school has to teach another faith, the area is one of those northern towns with a muslim population that is parallel to a white British population, so they teach, Judaism.

The text books used in RC schools are different to those in other schools.

"Wish that's how DS was being taught" - With all due respect, that's literally the most important job of a parent after providing unconditional love.

@downcasteyes, of course that's what we're trying to do at home as parents (ie encourage DS "to encounter things critically, to ask questions, to be genuinely interested in a world that differs from their own upbringing, mores, and assumptions, and to evaluate any claims presented to them on their own merits"). But us doing so at home doesn't mean the schools needn't, surely?

I think I've said upthread, I live in England but my DM is Scottish and my DF's family is Northern Irish, I've seen the reality of sectarianism and I feel very strongly indeed that it's important to avoid segregation by religion in schools. @JassyRadlett sets out much better than I could have, all the reasons why this stuff matters. Until a few months ago I would have said, without thinking too hard about it, that only bigots would withdraw their children from RE (a very black and white, uncritical and uninformed position which I now feel very bad about having held). I'd have fallen off my chair if anyone had suggested the notion of withdrawing my child would even seriously cross my mind.

But what do you do, when your 4/5 year old is waking in the night screaming because of what they've done in RE that day, and says he's too scared to go the Easter service? And the school is only offering withdrawal as a solution? We haven't withdrawn DS... but I have done some serious wrestling with my conscience about whether that is putting principle above, right now in this moment, emotional welfare. And I think it's appalling that we're having to go through these contortions as parents because of the way RE is being taught and collective worship is being run. Does that make me a bad parent, or a militant atheist? I don't think it does.