Indoctrinate or educate: the role of religion in schools

Do we value education? a report by a Christian organisation published in 2013, presented a detailed snapshot of the beliefs of 1377 Christians about education  – their own, their children’s and their views of the role of faith in education. The National Secular Society’s sound bite headline? ‘Evangelicals put indoctrination ahead of education’. So, do faith schools educate, or indoctrinate?

I’ve some experience of this. I went to a Church of England primary school, not because faith education was particularly my parents’ choice, but because going to any other school would have entailed a long bus journey and considerable expense. Where I lived, nobody embarked on that enterprise until secondary school made it necessary.  I was certainly educated – I left primary school thoroughly grounded in core skills, with a strong command of language and an ability to think that served me well during my secondary school life and beyond. But was I also indoctrinated?

Here are three definitions of indoctrination:

• only one point of view is represented as true and all others are diminished or ignored
• someone is taught to accept a set of beliefs without questioning them
• to imbue with a partisan or sectarian opinion.

According to these definitions, I was very definitely indoctrinated. Every morning for 6 years, I dutifully recited the Apostles’ Creed. Every Wednesday morning the Vicar would stand, sombre, silent and fully robed, while we recited our Catechism. I have other recollections of daily hymn singing, long prayers and even longer readings from the Bible. Lest we were in any lingering doubt about the importance of religion, we also went to church for every festival.

But here’s the thing. Even though I must have recited creeds and catechisms hundreds of times, I don’t remember a single word. I remember books I read just once. I remember the day I mastered long division. I remember the satisfaction of understanding speech punctuation. I remember recorder club, music lessons, a project about how chocolate is made and the day the electricity meters caught fire – but I don’t remember any of the religious stuff. Somewhere along the line, I used my mind, the same one that was being effectively challenged by my wider education, and rejected it all. As an exercise in religious indoctrination, my education was a miserable failure. I was taught, but I didn’t learn. The faith I have now had nothing to do with my religious schooling, and everything to do with my understanding of the person of Jesus I met in the Bible – an introduction not effected by my education.

The problem with the charge of indoctrination is that people want it both ways. I am well educated, able to think, teach, analyse, write books, conduct research and formulate strategy. Yet over the issue of belief, I am indoctrinated, as if I somehow terminate my ability to think and enter a brain-washed enclosure elsewhere in my mind when it comes to matters of faith. Worse still, I make those I teach do the same.  It’s a charge beloved of liberal secular thinkers – Professor Alice Roberts’ views on the teaching of creation are a typical example.  But it makes some false assumptions – one being that mere exposure to a disagreeable idea ensures that students will swallow it hook, line and sinker.

Anyone who thinks that really needs to spend more time with students. But the assumption plays well to the seductive concept of neutral spaces in learning – the idea that any deviation from secular neutrality equates to indoctrination. Just because an eminent scientist finds the concept of Biblical creation disagreeable, it doesn’t mean that everyone should be banned from exploration of it or forbidden by its censorship  to form their own conclusion. And the same goes for all other ideas, including faith.  In my experience, dialectic outweighs prohibition every time, and allowing the free and open discussion of any belief (even a dangerous political one) is much the best way to achieve balance.

In fact, far from removing religion from the public square, we should be talking about it, analysing it and seeking to understanding belief more, not less. Instead of forcing everyone to wear the corporate uniform of secular neutrality, we should be encouraging dialogue about the shared human values which each of us derives and works out through our own culture and belief. Schools are safe and ideal places to do that. To remove religious belief and all that it informs from the education arena is to endorse a form of illiberal intolerance that amounts to … indoctrination. Education will become the imparting of the single worldview of secular neutrality with all other options banned. And as an unnamed spokesperson for the Department for Education once said: ‘Only countries like North Korea ban the teaching of religion in schools.’

I don’t know about you, but I’m not willing to don the corporate uniform any time soon. Diversity is much too important to the future of our society.