Rite and Reason: Is it plausible or appropriate to expect neutrality from teachers presenting religious education subjects, asks Kevin Williams.
The response to a recent article in this newspaper on the treatment of religion within the French and Norwegian systems of education showed me there is great interest in the issue.
Unsurprisingly, some respondents considered the piece was too concerned to affirm the claims of tradition, while others felt that it was too sensitive to the claims of diversity.
Both religious traditionalists and their opponents do well never to underestimate the robust resistance of young people to the proselytising designs of adults. There is a memorable scene in Tessa de Loo's novel The Twins which captures this resistance very well.
Lotte, one of the eponymous twins, is sent to a Calvinist school in the Netherlands because she cannot be accommodated in the state school. Having had a non-religious upbringing at home, she is intrigued by what she is learning from her teacher of religion. By contrast, her peers have no interest whatever in the subject; for them religion is "like a daily dose of cod liver oil".
Lotte gets the highest marks in the class in religious education but her knowledge does not encourage her to make the transition to religious commitment. What the school principal invites her to accept as "profound truth", Lotte finds profoundly unpersuasive.
My intuition is that opponents of formative education in religion (although in France we find objections even to the study of religion) seriously exaggerate the susceptibility of young people to indoctrination in this area.
My experience leads me to conclude that indoctrinatory designs are not only morally and educationally reprehensible, but their manipulative intent is rejected by the alert questioning of young minds, whose common sense and intellectual independence never cease to impress me.
This perception has led me for a long time now to question the primacy given to the rights of parents, either, on the one hand, to withhold their children from religious education, or, on the other hand, to insist on their participation in it. The eagerness with which parents assert their rights does not do justice to the capacity of young people, especially at senior cycle at second level, to make these decisions for themselves.
This experience also prompts me to raise a philosophical point about demands for neutrality in religious education and related areas. This is the view that the teacher should not promote any particular substantive worldview. It is one thing to promote tolerance of, and respect for, particular worldviews, but the notion of refusing to confer privileged status on any particular viewpoint at the very least needs further examination.
In the first place, I wonder how psychologically plausible it is to expect a teacher to be completely neutral when making presentations on these matters. Secondly, I wonder if it is educationally or pedagogically appropriate for a teacher to invoke neutrality in order to refuse to answer direct questions about his/her own views about, for example, whether God exists, whether Jesus was divine, or whether there is an afterlife.
Thirdly, the securing of apparent neutrality, or a "view from nowhere" can imply that there is no ultimate criterion of truth or even of relative compellability that can be invoked in choosing between worldviews. This is a defensible viewpoint but it is not neutral.
There is a parallel in the teaching of history. I am not persuaded that teachers of history, any more than teachers of religion or morals, can be neutral but this does not mean that they have to be partisan. What is required is a considered, non-partisan, personal perspective and an attitude that is non-defensive, honest and prepared to entertain questions.
A willingness on the part of teachers to consider other viewpoints does not mean that they have to tolerate obstructionism from children of parents with different beliefs. But this is something that applies across the curriculum. For example, pupils may have strong views about republicanism but the tiresome rehearsal of these views cannot be allowed to disrupt the normal teaching of history.
In giving content to the notion of openness on the part of the teacher and willingness to listen to other voices in the RE classroom, I was struck by the evocation of this process in Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart. The Christian missionary, Mr Brown, "spent long hours" with the village chief discussing religion. Although neither "succeeded in converting the other", both "learnt more about their different beliefs".
This kind of non-defensive honesty is what works best in dealing with children. Neutrality is not the answer to concerns about proselytism. Candour on the part of their teachers best prepares young people to form personalised views of their own.
Dr Kevin Williams works in Mater Dei Institute, Dublin City University. This article is based on research supported by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences