It's all about God

[andrewducker]

ciphergoth pointed me at the piece here on mandatory school prayer (still a legal requirement in the UK).

[Poll #1396727]

The train of thought presumably goes like this:
1) Children should be trained to do the morally correct thing until they are old enough to make their own decisions.
2) Praying to God is the morally right thing to do.
Therefore) Children should be trained to pray.

I can't see that lasting much longer, when the majority don't believe (2).

Comments

[andlosers.livejournal.com]

I'm obviously against this. But I went to two Church of England schools, and actually enjoyed prayer time; the teachers made no attempt to enforce any religion at all, and it ended up simply as a couple of minutes of quiet reflection.

(Of course, this being Oxford, most of our teachers were progressive atheists. I suspect it might be just a little bit different elsewhere.)

[makyo.livejournal.com]

I think there's a lot to be said for encouraging people to spend a short amount of time (even just five minutes or so) every day just sitting quietly. There's a weekly Quaker meeting at the Chaplaincy here (at Warwick) that I've been to occasionally, and it really is very calming and centring to sit quietly for a while.

(It turns out that one can quite cheerfully be a Quaker and an atheist or agnostic: although the movement itself originated in the Christian tradition, it's quietly and steadily grown beyond that over the past few hundred years.)

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

Assuming referring to Easter services etc, there was an unspoken rule at our school that if it wasn't your thing, you just didn't go. Some teachers insisted that you had to, but for most, as long as you didn't make a big deal of it, it was fine.

[andrewducker]

Mandatory daily prayer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_prayer#United_Kingdom

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

I'm glad Scotland has escaped then.

By all means give teenagers quiet time and support, but I don't think enforcing religion on them is doing that unless they, not their parents, are religious themselves.

[andrewducker]

I agree. Apparently 80% of English schools aren't doing it anyway, so that's ok :->

[e-halmac.livejournal.com]

We had prayer times in my tiny wee school in Fife, but I think it was our teacher's choice and more a reflection of the period (early 1980s but with very old teacher who was very sweet and good and traditional). I liked it at the time.

Perhaps rather than prayer time it should be Five Minutes Quiet Thinking Time, or something. Nap Time would be good too :D

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

Who is this majority you speak of? The majority of pupils in schools are believers, particularly now that 25% of school pupils are now from minority ethnic or religious groups for whom religion forms a key component of their identity. The majority of teachers are not, alas, the progressive atheists your friend from Oxford mentions, but committed to a policy of inclusion that actively seeks to sanction religious bigotry in the name of multi-culturalism.

[andrewducker]

According to MORI 43% of people consider themselves to be a member of a religion, but only 18% of them were actively practising members. Only 12% of people in the UK actually belong to a church.

I think that puts them squarely in the minority.

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

That's a useful broad picture of religion in the UK, but does not ask people what they would like done with their children. Those who are inactive members of a church etc generally still want their children to have some degree of religious input in school.

[andrewducker]

Good point. The question being what percentage of people do want that, and how much they want.

It just strikes me as likely that it will be revisited at some point - especially as apparently 80% of schools don't actually manage it at the moment.

[makyo.livejournal.com]

According to MORI 43% of people consider themselves to be a member of a religion, but only 18% of them were actively practising members.

Hmmm. "According to MORI, 25% of people incorrectly consider themselves to be a member of a religion".

[henriksdal.livejournal.com]

wow, that used to drive my dad mad when I was at primary school. Our secondary school didn't bother with it, but instead got some guys with a guitar in to sing about Jesus twice a term.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

It does vaccinate some people against religion.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Heh. The idea of a vaccine so that you can't catch religion is a wonderful mental image. Maybe that's what the R is in the MMR jab....

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

There's a similar argument for having state-supported religion. It does seem to have worked that way in modern Europe.

[likeneontubing.livejournal.com]

I was one of those very annoying children who refused to pray at all once I realised I was being forced into it. Basically when I was 8 I had some kind of mini epiphany and decided I was an atheist vegetarian hahaha!

My poor parents....

[davidcook.livejournal.com]

*blink* Wow, I'm glad the Australian schools I went to didn't do that sort of thing ...

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

1) Praying to God is the morally right thing to do. Therefore) Children should be trained to pray.
2) GOTO 1

is probably more accurate.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite getting how you get from the requirements of the law, which say nothing whatsoever about prayer, to 'mandatory school prayer'. It is, obviously, nonsense; there is no prayer in either of my children's schools, there has not been in any school they've attended, and I'd be astonished if more than a tiny handful of non-faith state schools have any prayer at all.

The junior school, in particular, used to have a profoundly Christian head, to the extent that they did a passion play as well as a nativity play. But no prayer; and as far as I can tell they reacted to the multicultural nature of the school by having equally respectful and thoughtful assemblies for the special holidays of every other faith represented in the school as well. None of which had any prayer in them, needless to say.

Don't get me wrong. My kids have been taught all sorts of rubbish at school. But it's not, by and large, been in the religious part of the curriculum. Johann Hari's article is complete tosh; at this point, I've seen so many articles by him that have had zero factual content that if I believed something he wrote I'd make sure I had another source.

[andrewducker]

"each pupil in attendance at a community, foundation or voluntary school shall on each school day take part in an act of collective worship."
and
"the required collective worship shall be wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character."
Does worship not mean the same thing as prayer here?
I may well be misunderstanding here, but that's what it looks like to me:
http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk/content.aspx?activeTextDocId=2281166

According to OFSTED 20% of schools do actually follow this.
http://www.archive2.official-documents.co.uk/document/deps/ofsted/170/05-secondary.html

Certainly the schools I went to as a child did on a daily basis, and it seems to be the legal standpoint, just one that's thankfully ignored more than it's followed.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

It's meaningless without the current guidance, which now clarifies that 51% of assemblies should have 'broadly Christian character' -- and then goes on to explain that discussions of virtues which are typical of Christianity count. So if you get people in a room and talk about giving cans of soup to old people, that will do, no discussion of actual religion required. So. Harmless. If your child at one of the few schools that actually requires prayer, then discussion with the governors is probably the way to go.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I don't think it makes sense there to equate worship as prayer. In that context I'd expect 'worship' to be singing songs (what many Christians actually call praise).

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

I am bemused by your hatred for Christian-based schools - in my experience they do more to promote atheism than any other system in the world...

[andrewducker]

I have a dislike of the mixing of education and religion. They seem to me to be entirely opposite in purpose.

Of course, this could be because I went to one for four years :->

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Look at the US, where the schools rigorously eliminate anything religious and the population has a high proportion of demented religious loons.

[matgb]

Population density. Complete lack of welfare system meaning many join churches as alternative welfare network. Many schools in less diverse areas are non-religious in theory but work on the assumption everyone's religious, etc...

[matgb]

Tell that the the atheist parents of a 5-year-old who's utterly convinced the world was created by god because that's what school says.

This is a 5-yr-old who's great-grandmother insisted on a humanist funeral.

There are no non-faith schools in our area. I at least managed to get myself transferred away from the CofE school in my village to the next one along when I was 7, that's not an option where I've moved to.

[cybik.livejournal.com]

We had religious assemblies in both my schools. I didn't enjoy it particularly and found it very boring (although it seems that I can remember the Lord's Prayer, so I clearly paid some sort of attention).

Small children are liable to start believing in things they are told.. Trouble is that once it gets a grip it's not necessarily something that can be got rid of easily..

Actually, in primary school I remember singing the lyrics of "2 Minutes to Midnight" to the tune of the hymn we were supposed to be singing, though, so my parents obviously made sure I wasn't indoctrinated.. ;)

[daisyflip.livejournal.com]

I'm spending a lot of my time in primary schools with current job, and it's interesting on the huge variance between them. Generally, the schools which have saints and Jesus plastered all over the walls contain kids with a really bad understanding of science. I should point out, of the very many schools I have been to, this only applies to about five very Catholic schools. However, those five had nothing but religion on the display walls and had very strict, miserable teachers who made the children have lengthy prayer/Christian training sessions every day.

I like the idea of a quiet, reflective period - I think that can help hyper-kids who'll have no time away from noisy technology at home - but generally education which over-emphasises religion is wasting precious time which could be spent learning how to give each other electric shocks. Mmm...batteries...

[xquiq.livejournal.com]

I do wonder how much scientific teaching in schools may be influenced (positively and negatively) by the prominence of the 'evolution debate' in recent times.

I went to a Catholic school & you certainly wouldn't have heard the word 'God' in the science classroom (unless someone was uttering an oath). Even in primary school, religious education didn't generally feature more than the UK requirement, except when we were preparing for a sacrament (P3 & 7 in my case).

That said, Old Testament literalism was pretty-much non-existent in my upbringing. Even in my most religious primary school classes, we were always taught the old testament was allegorical.

I have an interest in religion, despite being an atheist (or perhaps because of...), so I'm never quite sure if there is a genuine resurgence in biblical literalism, or if I just happen to read about an exceptionally noisy minority on the internet.

[andrewducker]

I'd love to know the answer to that last bit myself. I wonder if we're losing the moderating multitude, leaving only the literalists behind.