On Teaching Religion in School

Extract

Cardinal Heenan’s pastoral letter on the importance of retaining Catholic schools even at an increased financial burden to the Catholic community has provoked these reflections on religious education.

The bible or major talking point in religious education today is the Schools’ Council Working Paper 36 put out by the Project on Religious Education in Secondary Schools based on the University of Lancaster. Many teachers, including Catholic teachers, have been working on this project. The fundamental premiss of much of the thinking of this group, and of such pioneer groups such as the SHAP working party on world religions, is that an adequate understanding of religion can only be achieved in the context of learning not only about the child’s own religion (if he has one) but also about other major world faiths. The rationale for this stance varies from one apologist to another: we live in ‘one’ world; we are part of a multireligious society—these are commonplaces. A more valid reason is, perhaps, that we have now reached a stage of self-consciousness in the West such that, even those souls who are naturally religious, let alone the majority who are not, are no longer content with understanding religion only from the inside: they seek also to understand it from the outside, from the stance of the anthropologist, the sociologist, the psychologist, and the philosopher. Another important movement in a related field is that which seeks to understand how schools can best perform the task of the moral education of children.

These new approaches to religious and moral education have made their impact on Catholic education as much as anywhere else. Cardinal Heenan assumes, somewhat naively, that the purpose of Catholic colleges is to produce teachers capable of teaching the Catholic religion to Catholic children in the context of a Catholic school. There are different ways of understanding this proposition as can be seen by recent disputes in the field of catechetics.