D
DL82
Guest
I’m not sure where to post this, it concerns schools, especially American public schools, so I guess it may as well go in a place where lots of people have children at school.
Anyway, I’m doing some research into Religious Education in schools in the UK, and one of the leading critics of confessional Christian education began his attack with the US Supreme Court judgment on prayer in public schools, which led me to look at the lack of religion in American schools.
Anyway, it struck me (and this is an outsiders view) that there is a conspiracy of opposing interests in American society who combine to keep people uneducated about religion. On one side, there are extreme secularists, who want an easy target to attack. On the other side are fundamentalist preachers, themselves with poor knowledge of the Bible and of their own Christian tradition, who like having a docile, uneducated congregation. Both sides have a vested interest in keeping the other going, because opposition breeds community, therefore both sides have a vested interest in a religiously uneducated population.
I can see the same thing happening in the UK, but in a slightly different way. Middle-of-the-road liberal Anglicans have a vested interest in teaching an inoffensive, minimal form of Christianity, and secularists have a vested interest in keeping people’s involvement in religion minimal so that they can ignore it.
The idea of a ‘value neutral’ education is a myth. I posted a thread on here a few weeks back about Catholic Education, and most people who replied were dead against the teaching of religion in public schools. That kind of view amounts to teaching that religion doesn’t matter, or that if religion does matter, then knowledge isn’t important to religion. We need to resist it.
As Catholics, we have some of the richest heritage in Christianity, and it’s ALL important. Wisdom is praised throughout the Bible as essential to salvation, our faith isn’t separate from our education. You can’t strip it down or separate the ‘basics’ from the ‘trappings’. The Athanasian Creed tells us that we must hold the Catholic faith “whole and undefiled”, not bits of it, all of it. Funny how protestants used to criticise us for being uneducated about our faith.
I guess this is just an exhortation to learn more about your faith, not to be sucked in to a culture that tells you that knowledge isn’t an important component of faith, and in a way a lament from a former protestant that the rest of our separated bretheren have lost so much of their understanding of even their own imperfect Christian faith.
Anyway, I’m doing some research into Religious Education in schools in the UK, and one of the leading critics of confessional Christian education began his attack with the US Supreme Court judgment on prayer in public schools, which led me to look at the lack of religion in American schools.
Anyway, it struck me (and this is an outsiders view) that there is a conspiracy of opposing interests in American society who combine to keep people uneducated about religion. On one side, there are extreme secularists, who want an easy target to attack. On the other side are fundamentalist preachers, themselves with poor knowledge of the Bible and of their own Christian tradition, who like having a docile, uneducated congregation. Both sides have a vested interest in keeping the other going, because opposition breeds community, therefore both sides have a vested interest in a religiously uneducated population.
I can see the same thing happening in the UK, but in a slightly different way. Middle-of-the-road liberal Anglicans have a vested interest in teaching an inoffensive, minimal form of Christianity, and secularists have a vested interest in keeping people’s involvement in religion minimal so that they can ignore it.
The idea of a ‘value neutral’ education is a myth. I posted a thread on here a few weeks back about Catholic Education, and most people who replied were dead against the teaching of religion in public schools. That kind of view amounts to teaching that religion doesn’t matter, or that if religion does matter, then knowledge isn’t important to religion. We need to resist it.
As Catholics, we have some of the richest heritage in Christianity, and it’s ALL important. Wisdom is praised throughout the Bible as essential to salvation, our faith isn’t separate from our education. You can’t strip it down or separate the ‘basics’ from the ‘trappings’. The Athanasian Creed tells us that we must hold the Catholic faith “whole and undefiled”, not bits of it, all of it. Funny how protestants used to criticise us for being uneducated about our faith.
I guess this is just an exhortation to learn more about your faith, not to be sucked in to a culture that tells you that knowledge isn’t an important component of faith, and in a way a lament from a former protestant that the rest of our separated bretheren have lost so much of their understanding of even their own imperfect Christian faith.