(no subject)

[lavendersparkle]

Let me tell you a story. A new head teacher arrives at a school and changes the way the school does assemblies. Some parents are annoyed at the change and complain. A bit later the head teacher resigns for reasons unrelated to assemblies. Usually this sort of a thing might fill a few columns of a local newspaper next to a description of a local fete. However, if the story involved Muslims, suddenly it's national news. It seems somewhat reminiscent of the school pantomime rescheduled due to rehearsal schedule clashing with some children's days off scandal last December.

School assemblies in England are a bit odd anyway. Officially assemblies are supposed to be a "daily act of worship" either involving the whole school or divided by year group. Neither I nor any of my friends experienced anything quite like this at any of the schools we attended. For a start, it wasn't daily. For most of my school career I'd be required to attend about two a week. Secondly, the only time my secondary school assemblies approached collective acts of of worship were the Christmas and Easter assemblies which the school Christian Union were allowed to be in charge of. The rest of the time there mainly consisted of the head teacher reading out school sporting results and any other announcements, briefly preceded by a 'thought for the day' style anecdote, the moral of which was invariably "and that's why you need to do well in your exams/don't do drugs/don't bully each other". Generally the whole enterprise was seen as a colossal waste of time by staff and students alike. They seem to usually be a pointless remnant of a bygone era but any attempt to officially abolish them would be accusations of causing the moral decline of the nation, so instead we keep them on the statute books but do them in the most half arsed way possible. Compared to that, surely allowing some of the children to engage in a collective act of worship which is relevant to their family's faith is a vast improvement.

It reminds me of an idea I had for multi-faith schools, the aim of which would be to have the things people like about faith schools without the segregation. You'd have a few faiths club together, say Jews, Muslims and Catholics, and the children would have most of their classes and play time together, but separate into their respective faiths for worship and religious education. The school would take into account the needs of the faiths of its different pupils, so, for example, the canteen would be kosher and halal and the school would shut down for all of the holy days of the religions it was made up with. I think this is a modern, mature approach to integration. It accepts that we can work together and interact in most things but that we are different in some ways and it's OK for us the be separate for those things. A bold statement that people shouldn't have to pretend to be secular Christians to feel at home here. That's the kind of school I'd like to send my children to.

Comments

[amphibian23.livejournal.com]

Shouldn't religious education, if not worship, be broad? There is more reason to learn about religious practice and belief than you practice it yourself

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

I think that there are two issues with that. The first is that religious minorities live in a world in which they are constantly bombarded by the concepts and values of the dominant culture, and I think the desire to counter-balance this in school as well as at home is very reasonable. The second is that some religions strongly encourage members to have quite a high level of knowledge of their faith. If a Muslim child isn't getting that at school she may well have to spend a lot of her evenings and weekends in madrassa. Given that religious education can incorporate key skills, I think it makes sense for Jews to prefer schools where Ivrit and Biblical Hebrew are language options, just as French and Latin are in most schools. None of that prohibits teaching children about other religions, but it makes sense for a community to want to teach them most about their own culture and faith.

In terms of worship being broad, I find that problematic. The issue is that it's very difficult to come up with a form of worship which really is neutral. In most British schools the communal act of worship is just a watered down Christian act of worship with the words 'Trinity' and 'Jesus' removed. It's nothing like how Jews or Muslims or Hindus worship. I'm not convinced that many non-Muslim parents would be happy if the 'broad' worship involved kneeling and prostrating to say vague religion neutral prayers. If we did manage to get to something in which no faith dominated that is inoffensive to everyone I imagine is being a bit like the holidays play in Southpark. I also think that, on a deeper level, it's representative of a philosophy of how multi-faith societies work which I disagree with. It says 'we're all basically the same' and then tries to mush up our faiths together to make something bland and meaningless. I think it's better to be open and celebrate our differences and show that we don't have to be the same to be able to cooperate in a vibrant mutually beneficial society.