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WillowOne's Positions

Religious Education

My Positions

  1. I oppose religious instruction in state-funded schools. The state should not promote or endorse religious doctrine.
  2. Education should be secular, evidence-based, and inclusive, fostering independent thought rather than faith-based belief.
  3. I support increased public investment in science and education generally. A well-informed society is foundational to progress. We should in particular prioritise the teaching of philosophy and critical thinking, equipping citizens to reason clearly, challenge misinformation, and engage meaningfully in public discourse.
  4. I distinguish between religious instruction (teaching children that a religion is true, and leading them in its worship) and religious education (teaching children what religions are, what they claim, and what their history is). The first has no place in a state school. The second is essential, since one cannot understand history, literature, art, or the modern world without it, and since the best inoculation against religious claims is an accurate and comparative account of them.

Notes

  1. The current position in England. All state schools are legally required to provide a daily act of collective worship which, in schools without a religious character, must be "wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character" (School Standards and Framework Act 1998, continuing the Education Reform Act 1988). This requirement is widely ignored, which is the only reason it is tolerated, and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has twice (2016 and 2023) called for its repeal. Around a third of state-funded schools in England are faith schools, which may select pupils and staff on religious grounds and teach religious education according to their own doctrine.
  2. Faith schools. State funding of faith schools means the public pays for children to be sorted by their parents' religion at the age of four, and taught that their religion is true. This entrenches religious identity, segregates communities (most visibly in Northern Ireland, where over 90 per cent of children attend schools segregated by religion), and permits discrimination in admissions and employment that would be illegal anywhere else. Faith schools should be transferred to secular control or should cease to receive public funds.
  3. Why philosophy and critical thinking. Most of the errors catalogued in my Thinking Tools notes are not errors of knowledge but errors of reasoning, and they are made by people who are otherwise well educated. The ability to recognise a Straw Man, a False Dilemma, or a Motte-and-bailey fallacy, to ask what evidence would change one's mind, and to notice when one is being asked to accept a claim on authority alone, is more valuable than any particular body of facts, and is at present taught almost nowhere. The Philosophy for Children (P4C) programme has good evidence of improving reasoning and attainment, and should be universal.
  4. Why science. Public investment in science has the highest return of almost any public spending, and the UK's research base is one of its few remaining world-class assets. Scientific literacy in the population is also the only durable defence against the anti-vaccine, climate-denial, and pseudo-medical movements, which prosper wherever it is weak.
  5. The objection from parental rights. Parents are free to raise their children in a religion, to take them to a place of worship, and to teach them at home. What they are not entitled to is the use of public money and public institutions to do it, nor to exclude their children from an accurate account of what other people believe. The child has interests too, among them the interest in reaching adulthood able to decide for themselves.

Personal Context

  1. My own primary school led daily Christian worship, in the manner described under Atheism.

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