Civitas

A historian without a sense of chronology? A mathematician without an understanding of trigonometry? It’s all hilariously miserable. But surely a common language is one thing all accept as valid? Well, for making the rather innocuous and sensible point that English should be taught as a first language in schools, and that promoting Asian languages would lead to the relegation of English and the ghettoising of communities, the headteacher of Drummond Middle School in Bradford, Ray Honeyford, was, in 1985, vilified by left-liberal commentators and local politicians, condemned as a racist and suspended. The celebration of ethnic particularism is becoming more and more risible. Last year, Bill Crosby was forced to point out that West Indian children should not be taught slang in London classrooms since it would do them a disservice. The same applies to mathematics: the numbers will not change; there’ll just be more people who cannot add them up. Lazy, unrigorous thinking has sold short a generation of pupils who desperately needed education as an engine of social mobility. After such a catalogue, is it any surprise that according to Sunday’s news the government is hoping to recruit religious education teachers with no necessary knowledge of any religions?

Religious education is compulsory in schools, but it is not a national curriculum subject. In the Sixties and Seventies, the pressure from secularism, humanism, and the evident presence of multi-religious classes in many schools gradually led to an educational consensus that religious induction was to be outlawed. In time, ‘indoctrination’ became the favourite taboo word of educationalists. This, in a pluralist society, is reasonable. But now religious education has been hijacked by the multiculturalists. Despite all the QCA's talk of provoking ‘challenging questions about the ultimate meaning and purpose of life, beliefs about God, the self and the nature of reality, issues of right and wrong and what it means to be human’, the fact that the Teacher Training Agency has written to humanities graduates to reassure them that teaching RE is no longer about learning the Bible merely serves to emphasise the extent to which religious education has become more about promoting diversity and an antiracist environment than about religion. How, if teachers are ignorant about the Bible, is religious education going to fulfil the QCA’s ambition to develop ‘pupils’ knowledge and understanding of Christianity, other principal religions, other religious traditions and other worldviews’?

It seems to me there are two points to consider. The first concerns the composition of our population. The second concerns culture and acculturation. Firstly, then, is the fact that 70 per cent of white British people (40 million) described themselves Christian in the 2001 Census. This is not even a race thing, given the high proportion of ethnic minorities who subscribe to the Christian faith: majorities of Black people and those from Mixed ethnic backgrounds were identified as Christian (71 and 52 per cent respectively). It would be fair to say that these people are being shortchanged by not being taught about the culture to which they adhere. Secondly, Britain has a strong history and tradition of Christianity. It really is bizarre to think that students should be encouraged to know more about Muslim or Sikh festivals than Pentecost or Christmas. Added to which, the Bible is the single most influential book in the entire canon of western literature, and readers with no knowledge of it will be severely disadvantaged. Likewise, philosophy students would have difficulty reading anything post-classical without at least a passing familiarity with scriptures, and Nietzsche, for instance, the great iconoclast, riddled his books with biblical references. An atheist needs to know what he or she is revolting against. Without that, there is no revolt, only that which Nietzsche so despised, the herd mentality.

Yet it is the herd that is running amock, a herd of anythingarians. And this, in Joseph Ratzinger's phrase, is the ‘dictatorship of relativism’.