MY wee sister will never forgive me. In the early 2000s, you apparently couldn’t have a school assembly without involving God, prayers and Bible verses. The rector was an ordained Anglican minister, and I guess enjoyed combining his new head-teacherly duties with a bit of old-time religion from his past life as a vicar.
And so every week, we were sat down for a banal homily, mandatory recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, and if that wasn’t enough to sour you on religion for good, an appallingly bad reading from the Old or New Testament.
Every assembly, a new student was shoved on stage with a copy of the Bible in their hands. Every morning, another plooky, often self-conscious teen was directed to recite their allocated chapter and verse, favouring row on row of indifferent adolescents with a stumbling recitation of whatever parable had moved the Reverend that week.
My turn inevitably came around. I got lucky, at least, on the verse, being asked to read out one of the more dramatic passages from the book of Exodus, as Moses menaces Pharoah with the prospect of frogs if he didn’t “let my people go”.
Confronted with the absurdity of having to read this out to my fellow pupils, I may have delivered the verse with rather more gusto than was entirely necessary. Well, you’ve got to give it life, don’t you? And thus it is, my sister still flinches when she hears the phrase “go Moses, go!”.
From the earliest stages in primary school, I had a rather strained relationship with all the compulsory Christianity built into the school environment. Quite why we were saying grace at lunch wasn’t obvious to me. I had a memorable row with my first teacher in Argyll about whether the story of Moses in the rushes was true or just another story, little suspecting Moses would come back to visit me again 10 years later in another context.
As I remember – and I grant you, baby atheists may not be the most reliable witnesses, more than 30 years on – she took the view that the seven plagues and Moses’s neat bisection of the Red Sea was the real deal.
She was naturally welcome to her personal views, but it confused me – then and now – what precisely this kind of teaching, if that is what it is, has to do with state-funded education in a secular state. Fostering mutual understanding and tolerance across communities didn’t seem part of what was happening at all. The only real lesson seemed to be about the social consequences of non-compliance with the dominant ideology.
In secondary school, if anything, things got worse. I enjoyed religious and moral education because I liked arguing with my teachers about the issues, but could never accommodate myself to the educators prowling around the edges of the assembly, threatening you with sanctions if you weren’t enunciating the Our Father properly, or at all.
This interested me. The inquisitors who made it their business to notice such things seemed entirely uninterested in whether or not I believed a single word I was saying – concerned only with the outward signs of submission.
All of this should be about to change. After almost 50 years, the Scottish Government is finally revisiting the rights of children and parents to opt out of religious observance in our state schools. But somehow, the Scottish Government has managed to bungle what ought to be a basic question of children’s rights.
The rules on all this are currently set out in the Education (Scotland) Act 1980. First, it provides that every public and grant-aided school in Scotland “must be open to pupils of all denominations” – so far so good. But it also puts religious observance and religious and moral education on an oddly privileged footing. RO and RME are the only parts of the whole Scottish curriculum which are given protected statutory status.
Recognising this might sit uncomfortably with the rights of religious minorities, the 1980 Act also says that “any pupil may be withdrawn by his parents from any instruction in religious subjects and from any religious observance in any such school”, with the kids in question not to suffer any detriment from this decision.
What the drafters seem to have had in mind here are religious minorities attending a broader non-denominational institution, allowing a Jewish or Muslim family to opt their children out of
the compulsory Christianity required of everyone else. That too looks like a good accommodation, as far as it goes, but not so much help for the agnostic child, the atheist, or the youngster at odds with their family’s religious orthodoxy.
But reading these rules with the benefit of 45 years of legal development, you might think something else important is missing. Where are the rights of children in this? Notice it is mum and dad who can pull the child out of mandatory religious instruction. Even older children have no legal rights to object in their own terms, based on what they do or do not believe.
You don’t need much creativity to imagine scenarios when the interests of children and parents don’t converge, either. What happens if the family want their child to have a friend in Jesus, and the child isn’t interested? And inverting the story, what happens if the parents are diehard atheists and want to insulate their teenager from the spells and bells of religious instruction, but their kid finds themselves being drawn to a faith of their own?
Under the existing legislation, the child has no rights to speak of. Unhappy teens asked to mouth prayers along with the rest of the class are still forced to rely on the forbearance and tolerance of their teachers – if either of these attitudes happen to be available in their school – to exercise what adults would take for granted as part of their basic rights to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including the right not to be forced to play along with religious ideas they don’t accept.
The argument for reopening the 1980 legislation in the light of modern understandings that children also have basic rights seems obvious, but somehow, the Scottish Government has sneaked out a solution which is half as bad as the problem it aims to solve.
MSPs began hearing evidence about the Children (Withdrawal from Religious Education) Bill last week. Under the Scottish Government proposals, if parents lodge an application to pull a child out of religious worship or RME classes, schools will need to ask the pupil if they agree with this. If they don’t, schools will be required to give effect to the child’s views instead.
But what happens if a kid doesn’t want to engage with compulsory religious worship but their parents insist? Then, under the Scottish Government’s Bill, the child will continue to be ruled by their parents’ wishes.
One result is that these proposals are obviously lopsided. Why should a child be able to choose to keep attending religious observance in school over their parents’ objections, but not to disengage from it if mum and dad insist they have to go?
The explanations the Scottish Government have given for failing to incorporate an independent right for pupils to make up their own minds into the Bill are feeble. Ministers point to concerns about how children being able to exercise their own freedom of thought, conscience and religion “would be balanced with parental rights”.
“For example,” they say, “some consultation respondents expressed a view that parents are the first and best educators of their children, and noted concerns about the potential for disagreement between parent and child, including where a child wishes to withdraw when a parent wishes them to participate in RO or RM.”
A little unpacking shows how inconsistent this approach is. Couldn’t conflict also arise where the parents don’t want the child to participate in religious observance, but the child wants to? Why are we alright with enshrining that right in law, but come over suddenly anxious about irreligious kids falling out with their religious parents? Are the parental rights of religious parents more important than irreligious ones? Why treat the two scenarios differently at all?
Educating children on the key features and tenets of other religions, fostering in them a broad cosmopolitan view about different faiths and pantheons – who could quibble with that? Given the stresses and strains on our culture, this is critical work.
Almost all of the religious panellists invited to talk to MSPs claimed there was essentially nothing to see here, and that if kids objected to being obliged to attend religious assemblies, resolutions ought to be “pastoral”, complaining that any legal reforms or recognition that children might have rights they could directly and independently enforce could result in a more “adversarial, confrontational, divisive approach” to resolving these issues.
But speaking on behalf of my younger self, what exactly is the “non-confrontational” version of forcing a child to say prayers they don’t believe in and engage in the worship of a religion they don’t accept? The opposing interests don’t disappear if you fail to write children’s rights into law – only children’s autonomy does.
