Readiness for Religion

A Basis for Developmental Religious Education

Ronald Goldman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429509056
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this study, first published in 1965, the author explores the implications of research for an alternative approach to religious education. The book deals with the psychological bases of religious development, reviewing the natural limitations as well as the basic needs of the young, and how religious education should be affected by educational theory and practice.

The author also examines what content and methods of teaching are consistent with the healthy development of children and adolescents. Teachers in schools, students in training, lecturers, clergy and ministers, and local education authority committees will welcome the book as an important aid to the task of rethinking syllabuses and the need for more child-centred methods of teaching.

PART ONE

The Psychological Bases
of
Religious Education

‘God is the World’

1

Why This Book Was Written

MOST CHILDREN in state schools in England and Wales attend morning assembly and receive religious instruction as a requirement of the 1944 Education Act. The indications are that a new Education Act will be drawn up about 1970 or soon after that date, and the debate is already beginning in public and in private as to whether the religious clauses of the 1944 Act should be continued or abandoned.

The debate is not due entirely to pressures from humanist, agnostic or other groups who are opposed to the teaching of religion compulsorily and who wish for a completely secular system of education. Nor does it seem to be due to the continuing decline of membership of the churches of all denominations and the fact that, in outward observances at least, we are ceasing to be a Christian nation. These factors contribute to the discussion but do not appear to be the major causes. The major cause is simply the ineffectiveness of much current religious education. After twenty years of this kind of teaching the results achieved are depressingly meagre.

Various surveys have indicated that at the end of secondary schooling knowledge of the Bible and even of what Christians believe is appallingly poor. Ignorance of many of the Christian festivals, the parables of Jesus and the nature of the prophets, and an incredible vagueness about the chronological order of well-known events in the New and Old Testaments, all indicate that despite the Bible teaching received after ten years or more under the Agreed Syllabuses, little of it seems to have registered. Moreover, research into the attitudes of adolescents indicate a serious deterioration in their feelings about the churches and the teaching of religion in school after the age of thirteen. Compulsory assembly and religious teaching has not apparently led to any increase in Sunday school or church attendance, or an improvement in confirmation or membership figures; indeed, the situation is quite the opposite, since the drift from the churches appears to have increased in the last four years.

It may be that the results of religious education cannot be calculated at all and that there are positive results of the 1944 Education Act which benefit individuals and society in an intangible way. It is difficult, if not impossible, to assess whether maturer relationships, greater moral determination, an increase in private devotions or a development of character have been the fruits of religious teaching. The increasing numbers of young offenders, larger numbers of illegitimate births to adolescent girls and reports of turbulent adolescent groups at seaside resorts are unreliable guides. The figures can be misleading and involve only a small proportion of the adolescent population. Yet those with high hopes of the 1944 Education Act at its inception are already thinking of these faults in terms of cause and effect and are wondering what use religious teaching is if it does not result in better morals.

The blame for this present state of affairs cannot be Why This Book Was Written laid at the door of the teaching profession, nor at any one particular door, for that matter. It is true that many teachers, not always committed Christians nor feeling themselves competent to teach religion, have taught it because they knew other colleagues would have to do their work if they contracted out. The result has been, to put it mildly, a considerable amount of poor, uninspired teaching simply because the teacher has been basically uninterested. By far the greatest number of teachers have shown a fine sense of commitment and have worked hard and conscientiously to make the subject a success. Many of these, however, confess to a lack of knowledge and training, and despite the increase of supplementary courses for religious specialists there is still a chronic shortage of teachers qualified and trained to take religious education in our secondary schools.

This secondary school shortage of specialist teachers has rendered many headteachers so desperate that they have eagerly accepted the offer of any teacher ‘keen’ to take the subject. Unfortunately, these are sometimes fundamentalists who teach the Bible with a complete disregard for informed biblical scholarship, encourage a crude literal belief in biblical narrative and make little or no impression on older, more intelligent, adolescents. They are rather like teachers of Biology teaching a pre-Darwinian syllabus completely unaware of post-Darwinian developments. Where this occurs in religious education a whole school population for many generations may lose the opportunity of knowing that people can be Christian without accepting beliefs which are an insult to their intelligence. Better training with more places for specialists would help this situation, but the principal reasons for most of the ineffectiveness of religious teaching in schools lie in something much more basic. The root of it all lies in the assumption that religion can be taught as a body of knowledge to be absorbed by pupils, as other facts are learned. It is not regarded as a frame of reference, a cohesive principle, covering the whole of life, but as a series of facts or events mainly to be learned from the Bible. I would not dispute for one moment the centrality of the Bible for Christians and I regard it as the major document about which any informed Christian must be knowledgeable. But one may learn ‘the Bible’ and not be religious, since religion is a way of life to be lived, not a series of facts to be learned.

The results of this assumption can be seen in the many Agreed Syllabuses which may be justly described as Bible-centred. Syllabus writers have been concerned that pupils shall cover the Bible through their school career, starting with nursery school children right up to the sixth forms in grammar schools. The bulk of the material recommended for every age group is biblical and it is only rarely that non-biblical sources are recommended. Where they are it takes the form of Church history, Christian saints and heroes and similar ‘religious’ material.

It is true that in later syllabuses attempts have been made to relate them to children’s experience and further efforts have been made to grade the material in what is thought to be ascending order of difficulty with increasing age. But the main weight of biblical teaching has remained as the solid content of syllabuses. For reasons outlined both in this book and examined in detail in my previous volume, most of our pupils find this content far too difficult. Parables for infant school children, the narrative of the Exodus for juniors, and teaching of the prophets to pupils in the early years in secondary schools are items of an intellectual diet which research demonstrates as unsuitable for children.

This unrealistic dominance of the Bible in teaching religion to the young is simply because when syllabuses were devised there was very little data available about children’s religious development. In the last ten years a considerable amount of data has been added to our knowledge in terms of the thought, attitudes and behaviour of children. What it reveals is that the Bible is not a children’s book, that the teaching of large areas of it may do more damage than good to a child’s religious understanding and that too much biblical material is used too soon and too frequently. What it also confirms is that the content and methods used in religious education are out of step with educational practices in other subjects.

Implicit in the presentation of this kind of syllabus is the general idea that if only Bible stories or narrative are encountered often enough and attractively taught throughout a child’s schooling, some meaning will rub off and stick, even though the details will be forgotten. In defiance of all sound educational practice it is assumed that understanding is not too important and that the sheer beauty and power of the narrative will leave some lasting impression. At this level religious education is reduced to conditioning, for by constant familiarity with certain stories we hope that suitable associations will be built up, much as Pavlov taught his dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. Conditioning is not education; it is mere habit formation, and it is a poor foundation for a belief capable of growing to maturity.

I have deliberately over-stated the case, so that we may see it in extremis. It helps us at least to be aware of how far removed all this is from the real needs and capacities of children and adolescents living in the twentieth century. All the indications point to the fact that the answer lies in the needs of the children themselves. These criticisms are not criticisms of hard-working syllabus committees nor of individual authors who wrote much of the material. They were working in the dark, trying to provide intuitively what in more recent years we know to be an inappropriate diet for the young.

To return to the current situation, we can now see some of the deep-rooted reasons for so much ineffective religious teaching. It is difficult enough, over a long period of study, to understand the Bible for oneself. It is even more difficult to be able to translate what the Bible has to say to the limited experience of children of varying ages. I suggest that it is an impossible task to teach the Bible as such to children much before adolescence, and that we must look for another approach which offers a more realistic alternative to our present ills.

We have not very long in which to try this alternative, for unless religious education becomes more successful in our schools there is a strong possibility that a new education act will radically curtail, if not call for an abandonment of, the subject. I believe we have no more than ten years in which to demonstrate that an intelligent programme of Christian education, rooted in the children’s experience, can lead to their more satisfactory religious development.

The situation does not call for the abolition of religious education, nor handing it over to the churches as is the practice in France, the United States and other countries. The current situation is one of unrealised opportunity where younger pupils are eager to understand, adolescents are hungry for spiritual guidance and teachers need help in their concern for the future of their pupils.

A number of books denouncing the present appalling situation have appeared and no doubt there will be more.¹ Their analysis of the problems are often cogent and penetrating but they offer no comprehensive or valid alternatives which teachers feel they can understand or accept. The time is ripe for a critical reappraisal of religious teaching but one which is positive rather than negative.

There has been some recent revision of syllabuses. These revisions unfortunately have, in the main, not radically altered the Bible-centred selection of materials for most schools. The sole claim to revision in some seem to be a redesigning of the cover while the content remains almost the same. The greatest help which our hard-pressed teachers need is not a mild revision but thorough-going reform of syllabuses in the light of evidence now widely accepted. The major finding supports a move from a Bible-centred content of religious education to a content which more closely approximates to the real world of children, using their experiences and their natural development rather than imposing an adult form of religious ideas and language upon them.

It is my belief that if syllabuses can be reformed in this way, religious education can have a new lease of life and teachers can be rescued from the discontents and despair they often feel when faced with present syllabuses. If reform rather than revision can be the aim of most education authorities, their teachers will be profoundly grateful, and even those previously lukewarm will be attracted and encouraged to teach in ways which they clearly recognise try to meet the needs of their children.

This book is therefore written with some sense of urgency, not only outlining a programme of Christian education which research indicates should be the basis of reforms, but offering alongside it materials to be used with children which will implement such a programme. I would stress that this is not another scheme or gimmick which is going to result in the conversion of our nation to Christianity. Too much must not be expected from it, for there are deep social forces at work within our society, reflected in mass media and present in the life of many families, which create conflicts and tensions about religion. For this reason I have spent the first few chapters providing the reasons for my programme. Eager though the reader may be to see what I put forward as a new type of syllabus, my conclusions cannot be fairly understood without reference to both these early chapters and the researches which support these conclusions outlined in my earlier book.

2

The Children and Adolescents We Teach

RELIGION is a life-long search, always incomplete. Even those who achieve a firm commitment to the Christian faith continue with many doubts, some beliefs being held more firmly than others. Always we are striving to understand more clearly, believe more strongly and behave more in accord with what we feel to be God’s will. There are times when we wish to give up this search, and sometimes we do give it up and in periods of crisis we may start again with renewed interest. No one can give us religion, manufacture our belief or change our behaviour for us. Fundamentally we must grow as persons towards God, and although many things external to us can help or impede our development our religious growth is an individual and personal encounter with the divine.

If this is true of adults, it is also true of the young. In our concern to build a spiritual foundation for our children we have often been over-anxious to provide a ready-made religion, a complete system of beliefs and ideas, which we impose upon them. This is often done with great sincerity and from the best of motives, but in the long run it may impede a child’s spiritual growth because passively acquired information is more quickly forgotten and ready-made religion is more easily jettisoned than where truth and belief have been the result of personal growth.

We find it difficult to accept an infant’s religion as infantile and children’s beliefs as immature when we have no such difficulties about children’s mathematical or literary immaturity. In the past, until research enlightened us, we expected far too much of children and set them incredibly difficult tasks in arithmetic and reading at a very early age. We even punished them for misunderstanding what they were basically incapable of understanding. Perhaps the most striking achievement of child psychology has been the education of teachers in the intellectual, emotional and social development of their pupils, so that the content of what is taught and the methods by which children are taught are now more in accord with the real capacities and needs of children at the various stages of their development.

Until recently little was known about the ways in which children matured in religious development, so that it is not surprising that religious education has lagged behind the teaching of other subjects. In the last few years, however, a considerable amount of research has been made in this field, with some far-reaching implications for religious education.² We now know more about how children understand, and misunderstand, religious teaching, about the growth and deterioration of attitudes to religion and especially to the teaching of religion as a school subject. More also is known about children’s limitations and their possibilities of spiritual growth. Rather than discuss this in general terms we shall look at some fairly typical pupils of varying ages, quoted from research material.

PORTRAIT OF A SIX-YEAR-OLD

Caroline is 6:2 years old with an estimated intelligence quotient of 105. She lives on a council housing estate and goes to an infant school which uses informal activity methods. The only subject not taught in this manner is religious education. Caroline’s father is a building trade teacher in a local technical college and her mother does not go out to work, having a younger child to care for. Neither parents go to church, describing themselves as lapsed Church of England’. Nevertheless, they encourage Caroline to go to Sunday school. Her attendance is fairly regular in winter, but on fine days in spring and summer the Sunday family trip in the car has priority.

She is a gay little girl, often very thoughtful and greatly interested in everything around her. Her friendships are typically used to exploit other children, and she is in turn cheerfully willing to be exploited by her friends. She is on her first reader and is just mastering the skill of reading. She can write simple sentences with effort, and she enjoys drawing and painting. Dancing, in music-and-movement, is what she likes best in school.

Sunday school is enjoyed, especially the drawing of pictures, and hymn-singing when she knows the words. But she expresses dislike of having to read out in class and church services which go on for a long time—’I got so sore and tired.’ She says that going to Sunday school helps her to do her day-school work, such as drawing. She feel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Part I: The Psychological Bases of Religious Education
• Part II: The Content and Methods of Developmental Religious Education
• Notes
• Index