Reconstructing Religious, Spiritual and Moral Education

Clive Erricker, Jane Erricker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135116729
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Religious Education is now identified as a shortage subject as a growing number of pupils in schools opt for it. The growing emphasis on children's moral and spiritual education, the DfEE's hunt for new teachers, OFSTED's calls for improvement and reinforced links with philosophy have pushed the subject into the spotlight. Based on research and partnership with schools this book examines and explains : * the role of Religious Education in the curriculum * the role of spirituality in children's lives * better teaching practice, giving practical examples.

1 True stories and other dreams

Clive Erricker

Knowledge and education

The academic world and the professional world of education have long been held under a particular spell. This spell has an ancient Greek ancestry reinforced by the truth claims of religion, and Christianity in particular; the Enlightenment and its progeny, the project of modernism. Despite the tensions inherent in this uneasy alliance of historical traditions the glue that binds them is the belief in rationalism: a belief that epistemological constructions are the means to human progress. A belief that such knowledge is not only possible but also necessary to our survival as individuals and civilisations in all respects, whether it be metaphysical or empirical. This spell has had tragic effects as unnoticed as the fall of Icarus in Bruegel's depiction. In education, the handmaiden of academic, economic and political life, it has resulted in a lack of concern for the nurture of both the imagination and the individual. It is as if we have decided to construct a giant jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces are already made, but we have to determine the place of the pieces.

As a result we have constructed an equivalent of Escher's drawings, working in two dimensions. Our house of cards cannot take account of our temporal constriction or mortality; thus it poses answers to questions beyond our horizon, as if there were a certainty concerning the existence and specifics of such a further existence. Alternatively, such an existence is denied. These opposing religious and secular visions have one thing in common, they both claim to be knowledge to be passed on to the next generation. The consequences of such a venture, in educational terms, are to ensure that young learners inherit the puzzle we have constructed as though it is a reality to be cognised. Their task is to re-piece it together, as we have, and recognise their learning and progress thereby. This is a mundane and inadequate task, but it ensures social cohesion, the normalisation of morality and the possibility of economic gain. In other words it suffices for rational behaviour. Another way of stating this situation is that it creates a notion of reality that, spurning the waywardness of imaginative possibilities by consigning them to the fictional, allows for a consensus on the factual or objective world, despite the ‘fact’ that, ironically, it is built on the products of human imagination. This irony is the tragedy that underpins, as its substantial foundation, the venture of education as an historical institution. Religious and moral education are regulated according to this premise, despite their capacity to undermine it. It is this capacity we wish to explore in this study.

Despite the history recounted above there has always been an undercurrent of alternative opinion and commitment. At times this has received greater attention and assumed more respectability than at present. But it is still there, despite the label of ‘progressive education’ often attributed to it. Mary Hilton (1997:5) optimistically, affirms its recognition. ‘Learning…in human beings has become recognised as an active process closely organised around affect. We learn because we are emotional beings, and what we learn and how we learn is closely related to how and what we desire, fear, sense and feel.’

This affirmation of the affective aspect of being human, learning and making sense of living has received rough treatment at the hands of rationalism. Education, despite the rhetoric that stresses the importance of citizenship and values, is constructed on the basis of curriculum. Curriculum is constructed on the basis of bodies of knowledge. Knowledge is constructed on the basis of knowing. Knowing, as the creed of rationalism intones, is value free. In other words it is objective, not subjective. This rules out the affective, emotions and feelings, and has always posed a threat to the educational importance of religious and moral education. To legitimate themselves as subjects with some right to educational provision religious and moral education have had to assert their curriculum credentials. Thus they have had to affirm their rational nature. In doing so we might say they have undermined their potential to change the course of education, to undermine the rationalist project; but it is hard to swim against the tide. If it is not too much to claim, this book attempts to do just that, at the risk of being charged with betrayal by those who have done so much to defend the subjects and their importance.

Whilst the aims of the 1988 Education Reform Act declared the importance of addressing spiritual, moral, social and cultural education within the curriculum it has proved to be a lip service that has impacted little on curriculum design, and if anything has worked in favour of a monocultural nationalism. As such it has reiterated the myths of our perceived heritage and traditional values. In effect, rather than being an exploration of difference and debate, these terms are meant to confirm consensus and prevent a perceived tendency for moral fragmentation.

Rethinking the purposes of education

Culture, used in the sense in which it applies to the arts, can, in different ways, attempt to reshape changing lifestyles and economic and social conditions such that values serve the aspirations of community life, without recourse to mono-cultural myths. Ken Loach, the film director, identifies the purpose of his industry as follows:

So what is the function of Cinema? ‘Well, what is anything for? What is writing for, what is theatre for, what is music for? It's to enable you to have a deeper sense of who you are and the place you live in and the people around you, and have a sense of them and solidarity with them, and understanding and warmth. Because those are the only things weve got’.

(Loach quoted in Hattenstone 1997:40)

What if we understood the purposes of education, and specifically religious and moral education, in the same way? Implicit in Loach's view is the idea of valuing each other and what we can bring to a sense of community. This is a way of working from the inside out, from bottom to top, from the individual out, a form of democracy. If we conceive of the needs of learners in the classroom in this way we might do things differently. We might start with what is relevant rather than what is required.

Despite the constrictions in place, this can happen to some degree. The following is an example from the classroom, in relation to religious education and my experience in teacher education.

As this book was being written I was telephoned by a student whom I had taught the previous year, and who has just got a job in a primary school in Essex. She explained what she did with her pupils in her first teaching session. She asked her pupils ‘Who likes RE?’ Five hands went up (out of over thirty). She asked, of the others, ‘Why don't you like RE?’ The replies revealed it was ‘boring’, ‘nothing to do with me’ and ‘I am not a Christian’. She went to the head of the school and explained how she wanted to change the way the subject was taught. She was asked to explain her ideas and it was agreed. The pupils in that school will benefit from a new teacher with child-centred, or rather person-centred convictions, a confidence in her capability to address their needs and adapt her teaching to them, a belief in what the subject can offer them if this is done, a head who will listen to a new, young and inexperienced member of staff, and a refusal to follow inspection requirements as a literal code of prescription.

This is not an anecdotal tale that can be readily applied to the experiences of all newly qualified teachers or all practising teachers. That is one reason for writing this book. We are fully aware that not all students, teachers and Ofsted inspectors are likely to read it, or having read it wish to agree with it, or even find the effort involved in reading it productive and relevant to what they understand as their immediate, practical and day to day concerns. The latter will tend to mitigate against the proposals we are offering insofar as centralised prescription and inspection take precedence for practitioners. But it is precisely this short-termism that is an indication of why religious and moral education and the issue of children's spirituality need to be targeted as a way of indicating the poverty of thinking and underachievement, in relation to the capabilities of children and young people, afflicting our educational system.

But why should children and young people think that religious education is about making you religious or, more specifically, only of relevance if you are Christian? Surely this is a misperception and we only have to inform them of that. Well, yes and no. My own degree students share the misperception of other students that to study religion they must be religious, which is one reason why the name of the degree was changed from religious studies to the study of religions. One interesting consequence of this change of name is that the subject attracts more students who want less Christianity. It is also the case that when asked ‘What do you do for a living?’, replying that I teach religious studies or religious education does not invite an enthusiastic response, but rather an uncomfortable pause. Ninian Smart's (1982) way of dealing with this is to say that he does ‘worldview analysis’. Of course we can also explain to our pupils that the law prevents indoctrinatory RE and that its purposes are quite different. But this does not actually cut much ice. It is, after all, religious education. The point is that having spent many professional years employing the above strategies and attempting to teach in a way that engages learners, it needs to be acknowledged that they have a point. Their gut reaction reveals something more significant than RE teachers are often willing to acknowledge. It reveals something of the affective response to religion, and Christianity in particular, that we find in contemporary society. Despite changes in the law, beginning with the 1902 Education Act, and in approaches to the delivery of religious education, especially those advanced from the 1970s, the ‘religious difficulty’, as Barnard (1961:168, 214–15) describes it, persists. It can be most obviously identified in the 1988 Education Reform Act in the confusion of aims between religious education and collective worship and the continued inclusion of the withdrawal clause. Pupils are not insensitive to the messages this sends out, especially given that the subject is called religious education and that it is often the obvious provider of an unsophisticated moral education.

The purpose of this book is to interrogate a particular question. How can religious and moral education be of greater educational benefit to young people? The outcome, as will be argued to the conclusion of the text, is that we need to revise, retitle and reconceive what we do, in a practical as well as a theoretical sense. The idea of spiritual education can be of service in this respect.

Curriculum constructions tend to be conservative in design because they are structured on the basis of bodies of knowledge. Religious education, being heavily content laden, partly because of the diversity of subject matter at its disposal, is more so than many other subjects. Moral education, not being a curriculum subject, is inserted in various ways, often not particularly imaginative and reflective ways, into religious education and other spaces, notably PSE in secondary schools. With spiritual education, a revised initiative with little if any theoretical framework, the situation is even less satisfactory. The outcome of this is that, in practice, spiritual and moral education are seen as derivative outcomes of a content-led religious education; a result of ‘learning from’ in the parlance of the School Curriculum Assessment Authority's model syllabus attainment targets (SCAA 1994a:5, 1994b:5). This particular attainment, as Ofsted has reported, is insufficiently addressed.

Perhaps the major difficulty that brings about this state of affairs is that religion does not consist of a body of knowledge in the scientific or social scientific sense unless it can be justified on the basis of either theological truth claims or empirical investigation, as with other social sciences and humanities subjects. Either way the existential significance of what religion deals with—faith in that which is beyond such forms of assertion and enquiry—is ignored or at least played down. Spirituality and morality are equally beyond purely rational and empirical investigation unless we restrict ourselves to normative ethics, the construction of rules. These areas of fertile existential reflection, depending on recourse to individual experience, are thus rendered of insufficient importance in an education system that overvalues constructed curriculum knowledge, as explained above. This impasse leaves us with the difficulty of effectively addressing the stated educational aims. In short, what we seek to teach often has little to do with the experiences of those who are required to learn.

Religious education and the role of the learner

As an illustration of the problem stated above we can reflect on the teaching of ‘sacred books’ or scriptures. In certain respects, given that scriptural teachings are most often regarded as timeless truths, the attempt to teach them as being regarded as such by those who belong to the traditions, can mitigate against the way in which learners try to reflect on their own experiences if they do not belong to a religion. Our point here is that we have a more complex problem than might be presumed. Adopting a phenomenological approach we might wish to enable the learner to understand how the believer regards and uses the scripture and to exercise his or her capacity for empathy in doing so. As a result the learner might attain a simple or more complex understanding of the concept of scripture, the sacred and so on, and how such concepts affect the worldviews and behaviour of those who belong to a certain religion and its membership groups. The learner is now more knowledgeable and has developed certain skills and capacities. RE thus reflects the style and aims of learning of religious studies in higher education.

However, for this learning to develop there has to be a desire to learn about such things. This is rare. We seek to develop such a desire as a result of our virtuosity as teachers. Why should education be such that our virtuosity is the basis of the desire to learn? A good teacher seeks to relate the content and method, their pedagogy, to the needs and experiences of the learner. At the centre of the learning process is the learner. Pedagogically this demands close attention to the action that ensues rather than a written script to be learned. A good drama teacher knows that memorising a script and repeating it is not good drama or drama education. For the teacher of religious education the issue is similar. The content must be a vehicle for the development of the learner in a much more significant way than that outlined above. It must impinge directly on the learner's experience and the events and relationships in his or her life, rather than obliquely or tenuously. The good RE teacher knows this and that is why the subject becomes so frustrating. Within the teachings of religious traditions there is much that is useful to this purpose and much that is not.

We arrive at two considerable problems. The curriculum is not so much a vehicle for learning; it is a script for knowing. Concomitantly, the aim of the pedagogy employed is topsy turvy—you might, at points, be able to address the learner's experience and development in a greater sense than those aims that exist academically, but most often you probably will not. The reason for this is principally that we are engaged in religious education and most learners are not religious. If we changed the aims of RE to resolve this issue things would actually get worse, not better. For example, the most obvious alternative approach would be a form of theological education. This would compound the problem. The point at issue is not what approach we should take to religious education but the frame of reference that religious education imposes as a curriculum subject. The problem is hermeneutical. Put simply you cannot, in the fullest sense, learn from’ a subject whose conceptual frames of reference exclude your own. To illustrate using the scriptural example above, if the concept of ‘scripture’ or the ‘sacred’ is not one you employ to interpret experience and construct your own worldview, then the subject excludes you. If we were to change the frame of reference to make it hermeneutically inclusive the subject would no longer be RE. We would have to change the script or, more radically, recognise that the script is constructed in the classroom rather than by predesign. The conceptual issue at stake is not one of scripture but of authority and guidance. Enlarging the frame of reference in this way offsets the centrality of religion. This does not mean marginalising the concept of scriptural authority, for it will be important, in differing ways, for those who belong to religious groups. However this will place the experiences and sources of authority and guidance of the learners centre stage.

Robert Coles was confronted with this issue when talking to a ten-year-old girl from the North American Hopi tribe who, after some time, revealed to him her Hopi understanding of God and consecrated land. Coles then asked if she had explained this to her teacher. She said ‘No’, and then explained why:

Girl: Because she thinks that God is a person. If I'd told her, she'd give us that smile.

Coles: What smile?

Girl: The smile that says to us, ‘You kids are cute, but you're dumb; you're different—and you're all wrong!’

Coles goes on to explain: ‘My job…is to put in enough time to enable a child like the Hopi girl to have her say—to reveal a side of herself not easily tapped even by good schoolteachers’ (Coles 1992:25, 27).

If we were to understand the issue Coles raises as one resolved by introducing diversity into the curriculum and impartiality as the teachers stance we would misunderstand the nature of the problem. The issue is one of children expressing themselves on their own terms and being heard. This is not the same as relating what they say to the curriculum. Indeed the point is that attempting the latter is unlikely to give the impression to young people that we really want to hear what they have to say. This examination of the problematics of religious education can, of course, be widened to a scrutiny of educational design and policy generally, but that is beyond the scope of this study.

Representational complexity

A further issue relates to the problem of representation in RE. To illustrate, when Anees Jung relates her own life and her experience of researching in India, she exemplifies two contrasting Muslim approaches, amongst others, to the purpose of their religion. One comes from her own father, the other from a mullah in Bihar. She relates her father's Shia views as follows:

My father…talked of humanism as the focus of religion. Purdah, my father would say, is a state of mind. He would tell us the story of Zainab, granddaughter of the Prophet, who had the courage to set aside her veil to tell the world of the injustice of the tragedy of Karbela…. To seek knowledge men and women should travel and explore, said the Prophet. My father in his own way pushed the ideal. Stand on your own feet…. He trained me in a world of men to live like a woman.

Included in her account of her encounter with Jalaluddin Changezi in Bihar is the following:

‘Times hav changed but the written word has not’, he intones, in the manner of an oration…. ‘Today you see women walking down the streets with their heads bare, their faces revealed. A woman's place is in the home…. In the Koran she is described as fitna, one who tempts man and brings trouble. She should stay where she belongs, within the walls of her own home’.

(Jung 1987:29–30)

When we compare these two c...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Recontructing Religious, Spiritual and Moral Education
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 - True Stories and Other Dreams
• Section I - Reconstructing the Character and Purposes of Religious and Spiritual Education
• Section II - Narrative, Morality and Community
• Section III - Pedagogy: Putting Theory into Practice
• Postscript
• References
• Bibliography
• Index