School RE classes are failing to teach children about Christianity - Education News, Education - The Independent

Quote:

Schools are failing to teach pupils about Christian beliefs in religious education lessons, inspectors said today. Too often they focus on Jesus's parables to explore pupils' personal feelings and principles, but ignore any religious significance they may have. The report, by the education watchdog Ofsted, said standards of teaching in the subject are falling. Christianity is a core part of the compulsory course and is taught alongside other major world faiths, including Judaism, Islam and Hinduism. Compared with a survey carried out three years ago, the number of lessons classified as inadequate in secondary schools has doubled. The figures show the quality of teaching to be inadequate in nearly a fifth of lessons over a three-year period. In the past year, though, this had risen to one in three. Inspectors visited a total of 183 primary and secondary schools in 70 authorities to compile the report. They singled out the way Christianity is taught for particular criticism. "Primary schools were often uncertain whether Christian material should be investigated in its own right as part of an understanding of the religion – or whether it should be used to consider moral and social themes outside of the context of the religion," it said. In one example given, a primary school used the story of the healing of the blind man to get pupils to try to understand what it would feel like to be blind rather than to gain any understanding of miracles. "In many cases, the study of Jesus focused on an unsystematic collection of information about his life, with limited reference to his theological significance within the [Christian] faith," the report said. However, it added that schools are making progress in teaching about comparative religions, which helps to promote a more harmonious society. But they are neglecting the study of humanism, despite a directive that they should include it on the syllabus. Some local authorities failed to include non-religious beliefs altogether, despite clear guidelines. The report also highlighted the increasing use of non-specialist teachers to take RE lessons, resulting in a tendency to focus on their own subjects in topic work – ignoring RE. In one school which was failing to get 30 per cent of its pupils to obtain five A* to C grade passes at GCSE, the short course in RE was dropped altogether to make more time available to boost performance in the core subjects. Ofsted urged the Government to review the way RE is taught in schools. The chief schools inspector, Christine Gilbert, said: "All young people should have the opportunity to learn about religion, as well as learning from religion. This requires good teaching based on strong subject knowledge and clarity about the purposes of religious education." Dr Stephen Parker of the University of Worcester said: "The real problem is not having enough qualified RE teachers. You need to have a sophisticated understanding of the subject to be able to properly convey it to pupils."

They should divide this stuff up between history, geography and Eng. lit. It'd avoid all the tiptoeing around PC sensibilities and allow the teaching of facts rather than sentiments.

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What you said. This is ridiculous. Oh and lol at "Dr Stephen Parker of the University of Worcester said: "The real problem is not having enough qualified RE teachers. You need to have a sophisticated understanding of the subject to be able to properly convey it to pupils."

What you need is to make up your mind as to whether you want to indoctrinate the children or give them an utterly agnostic look at world religions. It cannot be both.

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Originally Posted by Gilles de Rais

What you said. This is ridiculous. Oh and lol at "Dr Stephen Parker of the University of Worcester said: "The real problem is not having enough qualified RE teachers. You need to have a sophisticated understanding of the subject to be able to properly convey it to pupils." What you need is to make up your mind as to whether you want to indoctrinate the children or give them an utterly agnostic look at world religions. It cannot be both.

can you imagine the result if a teacher likeminded to Gilles were hired to teach comparative religion?.......instead of "harmony between", the students would be indoctrinated in "hatred for"......

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Originally Posted by PostmodernProphet

can you imagine the result if a teacher likeminded to Gilles were hired to teach comparative religion?.......instead of "harmony between", the students would be indoctrinated in "hatred for"......

You're just projecting what you think I am about. I can be perfectly calm about religion. But, in the case of Jesus and its miracles, either you treat them as stories being part of a character in an overall story-arc or you treat them as real. There is no really any middle ground.

And, if you treat these as real, what do you make of Mohammed's visions of the archangel? It's going to be tough treating them all as real...

OTOH, you can give a totally dispassionate, agnostic account of all these. That's what "comparative religion" is. But that's not going to please christian parents, that much I can guarantee.

Comparative religion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

... is written in a perfectly agnostic fashion. People can get to know about all the religions but, at best, for the religiously minded, it can advocate some kind of ecumenism. It's never going to be good for "my religion is the correct one" school of thought.

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go to church yourself if you need christian lessons.

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Originally Posted by LiberalNation

go to church yourself if you need christian lessons.

Definitely my favoured solution. But some parents are unhappy about that (it'd ruin their sundays, i guess) and yet still want their kids to be somewhat christian.

I believe this RE non-sense is very specifically British with the anachronism of the Church of England as an established official religion i.e. a state religion... but with no teeth or much impact anymore.

Like the rest of the Royal or more generally UK institutions, it is a mess but it kinda works...

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We had to plan our own weddings in RE. Even at the time it felt like an implausible scenario (funerals would have been more interesting).

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If you don't know anything about Christianity - and the vast majority in Britain don't now - you are not going to understand anything at all about European history. What we need to be teaching is 'people believed this, and therefore did that', which works for all religions. We wouldn't deal with classical paganism as if it might or might not be true - just try to understand where it came from, what if anything people got out of it, and why they moved on. It is the same for Islam or Buddhism: just give the basic ideas and how they affected people. The lack of clear belief/unbelief, I reckon, produces only totally superstitious bullshit like what the silly stars foretell and the like. We need to teach children to think, not just react.

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Originally Posted by Iolo

If you don't know anything about Christianity - and the vast majority in Britain don't now - you are not going to understand anything at all about European history. What we need to be teaching is 'people believed this, and therefore did that', which works for all religions. We wouldn't deal with classical paganism as if it might or might not be true - just try to understand where it came from, what if anything people got out of it, and why they moved on.

That's Zichao's solution and that's how it's dealt with in France - Not as a specific topic but it gets mentioned whenever you get to the relevant topics.

Explaining the 15th and 16th century upheavals without explaining the clashes between Protestantism and Catholicism would be pretty hard otherwise. But we are not asked to comment on whether the theory of transubstantiation is gospel-correct or not...

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you can also send the kid to a private religious school if you really want the prayer ever lunch type religion.

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Give unto Caesar that what is Caesar's, and lie like hell to keep as much of the rest of your shit as you can.

"If you want something said ask a man...if you want something done, ask a woman" Margaret Thatcher