We should do away with Religious Studies.
Those who have written to you in defence of religious studies, and in opposition to the philosophy GCSE proposals that I and Dr John Taylor have put forward, do it not on intellectual and pedagogical grounds, but because they have a vested interest in keeping RS going.
They only do it for the big money from Big Theology! I am quite happy to see that argument turned around — we get so many accusations that science is propped up by Big Science or Big Pharma or whatever, and that we’re only in it for the cash. I don’t think theologians are actually in it to get rich (like scientists, there isn’t that much money in our philosophies), but religion would die a little faster if there weren’t so much interest in paying people for affirming silly beliefs.
But Grayling’s argument isn’t just that we need to kick out the moneygrubbers: it’s that there are better, more universal disciplines that cover the field more effectively and with less bias, history and philosophy.
They have one or both of two motives: to keep themselves in a job and to keep religion appearing to be the main game in town when it comes to world views. In light of the fact that religion is to philosophy what astrology is to astronomy – and to science what astrology is to astrophysics – the main interest that religion has, to an intelligent mind, is sociological and historical.
This is why I proposed in a TES article last autumn that instead of the parochial and tendentious study of religion, there should be a more inclusive and ambitious history of ideas course. In such a course, mythologies, religions, philosophies and the rise of science would all figure, thus putting the beliefs of our less-knowledgeable forebears into perspective, and showing how humankind has progressed from supernaturalistic to naturalistic understandings of our world and ourselves. This, alongside proper philosophy GCSE and A-level courses providing critical in-depth study of concepts and theories across a wide range (and not just on the supposed topic of deity and narrowly related moral views) would be a real education of mind.
Many RS teachers would love to be able to teach proper philosophy and the history of ideas, and to be freed from having to purvey the highly misleading impression that religion is the main resource for thinking about life. Indeed, if RS focused principally on the mayhem that religions have unleashed on the world throughout history and still today, its defenders would doubtless be even more up in arms than they are about the view that it should be replaced by history of ideas and philosophy, based on the following simple fact: that religions consist of false beliefs about the world and distorted views about ethics.
That is why we must seek to educate our youth more responsibly and truthfully, more critically and appropriately, than can ever be offered by RS.
That’s a reasonable and rational argument. He’s not saying that we shouldn’t study religion (We should! It’s a human phenomenon that has had major effects on culture), but that basing the study of religion on bogus ideas is a bad way to start.
The article ends with links to a couple of rebuttals:
'AC Grayling is wrong: the humanity of Christ speaks to the nature of true humanism': Oh, really? That’s the problem. Are people who don’t believe in Jesus Christ doing religious studies wrong?
‘AC Grayling is wrong. Religious education and philosophy are complementary, not alternatives’: A more interesting reply, but vague. The author agrees that philosophy is important and that asking questions is essential, but insists that religion needs some kind of special approach. What that specialness would involve, he doesn’t say.
But completely independently, I found another source for a defense of religion. Would you believe their argument is AGAINST CRITICAL THINKING? R.R. Reno thinks this whole business of being skeptical and asking questions is a bad idea.
When it comes to the intellectual life in our day, the fear of error—believing things as true when they are in fact false—far outweighs a desire for truth. Whether it’s the big questions of religion and morality or those concerning history and literature, we have developed an intellectual culture of exaggerated circumspection in which large, long-standing truths are questioned and only small, fashionable truths affirmed. “Critical thinking” has become an end in itself for many educators and has taken on a new meaning in recent decades, one more associated with critique than with constructive criticism. We put a great deal of emphasis on learning how to interrogate, challenge, and criticize. But, while these are all useful skills, and in many cases necessary to help us avoid falsehood, first and foremost we need to be trained in assent. To do this in a reliable, responsible way requires a pedagogy of piety, for we can only hold as true those things we believe to be true.
Join First Things editor R. R. Reno in exploring the ideas behind the current cultural fixation with critical thinking as the highest intellectual good, and learn how a pedagogy based on piety provides a more successful roadmap for the pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
You heard the man. We have to teach our students to be agreeable and pious.
I think I’m feeling nauseous now. First we have to get people to humbly accept our arguments, and then we can argue for them. This is a standard theological approach, to first demand faith and belief in order to accept a string of nonsense.
It doesn’t work on anyone who expects a better explanation. Witness how George Bush tried to convince the French to join in the Iraq war. This wasn’t going to work.
I may regret posting this, but here’s an account of how George Bush tried to talk French president Jacques Chirac into supporting the invasion of Iraq:
Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their
common faith(Christianity) and told him:Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.This bizarre episode occurred while the White House was assembling its “coalition of the willing” to unleash the Iraq invasion. Chirac says he was boggled by Bush’s call and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”
Hey, Jacques, he was just practicing a pedagogy of piety!
And here I thought that Bush and the Bushites sold the Iraq War to the U.S. (“Weapons of mass destruction!!! 9/11!!! Fight them there so we don’t need to fight them here!!! Why don’t you love Amurkka!!!”) was frighteningly irrational and incoherent!
Oh my fucking god, the sheer inanity almost hurts. Agreeing uncritically with something doesn’t need training, it’s one of the few things we’re good at from birth. Parents telling their kids that Santa exists is a prime example of this – a trusted adult said so, therefore it is true.
But even apart from that rubbish, critical thinking remains not just a tool for tearing down bad ideas, but is also vital for confirming things to be true. Subjecting a claim to critical scrutiny, but then failing to find a fault with the claim, is a major boost to the credibility to that claim: we tried, and failed, to find anything wrong with it. The claim is accepted with much more justification than if it were not subjuected to that examination.
Of course, the religious probably know this just fine, but shy away from it because reason is quite simply the bane of religion; religious apologetics requires disinginuity. That’s right, disingenuity: ingenuity in the pursuit of being disingenuous. It’s a word, now.
Theology != Religious Studies
Maybe it is different in the UK… All the RS dept. at the Unis in the US I know of take the approach that is being proposed, not the one they are arguing against.
But that’s exactly backwards. Assent, by and large, comes naturally to people; what requires training and cultivation is the ability to recognize when what people are telling you, or what everyone around you seems to think, or what you yourself find intuitively obvious, is suspect.
There’s a case to be made, I suppose, that knowing only how to criticize without learning how and when to say “okay, we’ve got a reasonable basis on which to take action now” leaves one with an unbalanced skillset; certainly, spending all your time second-guessing everything without getting anything done isn’t good. The only way that could be the higher priority in general, though, would be if far fewer people were spending their time lying to us for their own benefit and counting on our unexamined assent.
D
I don’t know who are proposing is unaware of this.
It isn’t Grayling, because in the article he proposes this:
He wants Religious Studies expanded to (or perhaps more accurately, to become a subset of) History of Philosophy, essentially.
As for PZ’s mention of Big Theology, look closer:
I would say that Theology relates to Religious Studies in a very rough, broad sense in the same way that “Pharma” relates to Science.
FT is the new PC?
@ anteprepro
Too many people. And I don’t get the impression that PZ or Grayling are really making the distinction (and I’m sure in some places there isn’t one.). As I already said though, the RS I’m familiar with is already the mixed approach of history and philosophies (as well as sociology, psychology, literature, anthro, etc etc.) So criticizing it for not being that doesn’t make sense to me.
From the “humanity” response:
Apparently Congar is alleging that theology actually takes into account facts about the world we know today. “Take them as a new ‘given'”. I imagine that somewhere the translation from French to English was messed up, because I’m sure the word “mangled” should be in there somewhere.
It is like clockwork. The instant a religious apologist starts saying something reasonable, they immediately to cram some strained bullshit about the Bible in. Apparently the Bible is the best place to learn religious divisions and conflicts, to learn about critical thinking and finding why we believe what we believe, and how to have a dialog and form good relationships. Great work, Sophisticated Theologian. Same song and dance as your bog standard Bible thumper, just more polished and wisely hiding away the fire and brimstone for later use.
Philosophy and Science aren’t purely objective pure truth, ergo religion is just fine!
It’s like saying Fox News is perfectly fine, because even the Associated Press has biases. Or that Conservapedia is credible, because even print encyclopedias have authors with a political leaning.
Italics are mine. I thought the author was gonna say that the students would START mistrusting the educators if they made these assertions. But no. He basically just says Grayling is wrong all over again, like he did throughout his piece, without actually arguing the point. He mostly just appeals to the existence of smart religious people as if it is impossible for those people to be superstitious or believe something blindly, or as if it is simply too rude to phrase it that way.
This is why theologians are mocked.
The other “Grayling is wrong” post is far, far better.
That is an excellent example of how religious education can be beneficial and be more than just teaching dogma and apologetics.
D:
Fucking Christ. The critique is that there is no need for a fields specifically dedicated to religious history and religious philosophy, and those elements should be incorporated into something broader so as to not give added significance to “religious” qualifier. I don’t agree with that critique, but there it is.
re 10
borked html, 2nd inner blockquote should have been a “pop” not a “push”.
twas brillig (stevem) #10:
That’s the way I read it, yes. The obvious follow-on question then being, what if I believe that your belief is false and vice versa?
How do you give an exam about the imaginary?
What was Aphrodite’s favorite color:
a) Blue
b) Pink
c) Aphrodite didn’t exist
When Thor wasn’t working what did he do:
a) Thor didn’t actually “work” because he was work
b) Farmville
c) Thor was in meetings doing goddy stuff
Jesus liked:
a) Simplicity
b) We don’t know what Jesus liked, but we know what people who claimed to know Jesus claimed he liked
c) We don’t know what Jesus liked but we know what the winners of many religious wars claimed he liked
There isn’t a single thing about theology that isn’t open to question without a response based on authority. So you’re not studying anything, you’re studying to conform with doctrine; i.e.: memorization.
Sadly, R. R. Reno’s opinion on Critical Thinking is not new. It’s been a topic for the far-right for a while:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html
This mentions this case and previous instances: http://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2012-08-18/half-true-what-politifact-got-wrong-about-the-gop-and-critical-thinking/
Piece from American Conservative in 2013: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/beyond-critical-thinking/
(I will admit it might have a point in some cases: It alludes to the Fallacy Fallacy without calling it that)
As for R. R. Reno himself, from his wiki page:
Yeah, pretty much a right-wing asshole.
Here is an article of his I found on the front page of First Things: http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2007/02/the-closing-of-the-american-mi
Also on the First Things front page:
Slimy bullshit about the Terri Schiavo case
And slimy bullshit about reclaiming marriage:
Sophisticated Theology, truly.
Fuck theology anyway. At least the study of modern fiction gives us insight into the psyche of their authors, which can have relevance today. Do we need “academic” departments of pseudo scholastic wankery over Bronze Age fiction? Are the prejudices and supernaturalist beliefs of desert nomads from 3000 years ago even slightly relevant, beyond the millions of deluded people who live their lives by them? What a waste of resources and time. :/
I had always thought that university-level Religious Studies already stood in philosophical/sociological/anthropological/psychological contrast to Theology and was going to make this point — till I looked at the link in the Grayling link and saw that he’s addressing a rather different issue. The General Certificate of Secondary Education is “a public examination in specified subjects for 16-year-old schoolchildren.”
This is not about a college major in “Religious Studies” which would presumably include many courses and need carry no implication that the student is or will become a theist. Grayling is complaining that teenagers in the UK are required to take “Religious Studies” when they should be taking a philosophy course that imbeds religion into larger ideas and concepts so that it can be properly understood. Otherwise, it privileges faith.
Well hell yeah.
Has theology ever established a single supported theory of anything?
Sastra:
Ah. So that’s what GCSE stands for.
More on the original proposal for those don’t want to link dive: https://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=11006441
Marcus Ranum:
What, several unsupported theories of everything aren’t good enough for you?
I don’l know if this column refers to a particular case at a particular institution, and I’m writing from a European rather than an American context, so this may be irrelevant: I suggest it’s important to distinguish between the academic disciplines of Religious Studies (aka Study of Religion, formerly Comparative Religion) and Theology. The latter I have no use for, and don’t think it belongs in a university at all; the former is a very respectable field of study and scholarship, incorporating approaches and methodologies from Sociology of Religion, Cultural Anthropology, History and many others, to identify and examine what causes religious beliefs and behaviours, and how they affect present and past societies. At present, approaches based on cognitive science seem to be especially common –certainly here in the Scandinavian countries, where I live.
In any case, I hope this wasn’t totally off-topic.
I like the idea of a “history of ideas” course for what would be high school students here in the USA.
Privileging faith over other cultural trends could be included in the history of ideas course as a bad idea. (Not likely, but maybe the conclusion would be obvious to some students.)
Anyway, I am irritated by the disrespect currently shown to Thor.
There’s a problem here, though. We DO expect piety and acceptance in our classrooms, and that’s a good thing.
I teach physics. There’s a few things you can do: (a) tell ’em what the answer is and build up their intuition with lots of examples reinforcing the right way of thinking… or (b) go on the defensive and prove with evidence and argument that your way of thinking is right. The problem is that (b) is terrible pedagogy. Every time I dip my toe into it even a little it confuses students and muddies the waters.
The fact is that students CANNOT take the time to question everything and follow the logic that led us to our current understanding: it would take too long. Centuries, if we’re careful; we’d have to go through the same problems that the original thinkers did.
So, we have to teach in good faith. The student has to agree to conditionally believe everything the professor says, monitoring the argument for inconsistencies. When the inconsistency is encountered, the student must accept that it is probably either the student or the instruction that is in error, not the fundamental principle.
So I’m torn on this. What I’m asking my students for is very much like what a religion teacher is asking their students for; I don’t know how to tell them apart.
Except that I’m right and they’re wrong.
AC Grayling is, IMO, woefully under-appreciated. We would do well to trade both Richard Dawkins, the shade of Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris for Grayling. And keep the Shermer as spare change.
From the link to a critic:
Okay, this is a pet peeve of mine. While humanism of course includes the values of “compassion, ethics, humane action and human dignity,” so do many other philosophies and religions so this is not a good definition. Humanism =/= humanitarianism. Humanism as understood today is defined as ‘an approach to life which uses reason and science in order to understand a purely natural universe (with no supernatural component)” — and the compassion, etc. are all derived from that approach.
You can’t take a spiritual world view which rejects the natural world, reason, and science and claim that people have worth because of a top-down supernatural hierarchy — and then call that “humanism” (let alone “true humanism.”) Not consistently, and/or not so that you’re being accurately understood. Doing this, consciously or unconsciously, is a verbal game designed to make it look like the advances which came directly from secular humanism really did come from God.
nathanialtagg #22 wrote:
You and your students can tell them apart because when you teach physics you don’t make a big song and dance about faith being a fundamental moral virtue and mathematical proofs being unnecessary if you’re just willing to believe.
Yes, it may look similar on the surface, but the different epistemic foundations really do matter. We don’t accept the Theory of Relativity because we trust that Einstein was being truthful.
I always thought religious studies would make a good specialization in anthropology, rather than being a field all by itself, because religion is very important to understand if you want to understand the majority of people and their cultures, but it is a study of people. No more, no less.
I always thought religious studies would make a good specialization in anthropology
Or just history. As in “History of Ideas”
…filed under ‘Imaginary’ along with dragons, geocentrism, and flat earth.
nathanieltagg:
Well, being right really is a big factor. Telling well established facts and expecting acceptance of them with only a minimal explanation of the underlying reasoning isn’t indoctrination, or at least it isn’t BAD. You can’t say the same for teaching poorly established facts, teaching opinion as fact, or teaching distorted facts/lying by omission.
Yes! For example, gravity is so lame, let’s replace it with something else, like invisible flying monkeys. Much more fun and easier to understand.
This suggestion is absurd. Religious studies can’t be replaced by a ‘history of ideas class’ any more than South American history can be collapsed into a World History class. For better or worse (well, for worse), religion and religious superstition has had a massive impact across the board, from philosophy and politics, to geography and anthropology; the fact that it’s based on superstition doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of academic study.
I mean, you work in academia, right? You should understand why ‘history and philosophy cover it’ is absurd, because there are a *ton* of academic specialties that fall under the general rubric of ‘history and philosophy.’ Do you want to get rid of Women’s Studies or the history of science, too?
“Or just history. As in “History of Ideas” …filed under ‘Imaginary’ along with dragons, geocentrism, and flat earth.”
But none of those ideas have had nearly as significant an impact on human history as religion. Without religion the borders of the modern world would be unimaginable different, to pick one example out of dozens.
Look, I get that none of us *like* how important a role religion plays in the lives of most people (believers or otherwise), but closing our eyes and pretending it doesn’t matter isn’t just silly, it’s self-defeating.
If one wonders more about R.R. Reno’s arguments against critical thinking, here is an article he has written on the subject:
http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2009/05/teaching-in-the-twenty-first-c
Oh boy. You know you have a right-wing asshole if they are whining about Marxism and favorably citing David Horowitz.
amblington, read the link to original article all the others respond to: https://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=11006441
I did- I still don’t think the idea of getting rid of the study of religion as an academic specialty has any merit, whatsoever.
Reno seems to be confusing rational skepticism with extremes of postmodernism. Has he not read AC Grayling?
Or maybe he has but he’s willing to distort him to win a point.
amblingon #34:
The study of the historical effects of religion would be part of the study of history. The study of the philosophical parts of religion would be part of the study of philosophy.
You’re quite right that it is possible to study religion as an academic speciality. Such specialisation should take place in college or university though, not as part of a basic school-level education.
Getting rid of the study of religion. Right. Okay, way to read the article.
Here, I quote it again:
It’s about ALSO teaching regular philosophy and putting more weight on that than about just facts about two major religions.
The story of the conversation
Well, as long as religion is still a “thing” (as in Daylight Savings time still being a “thing”), I think it’s wise to know what those people are saying. If only to be able to build arguments against their faulty logic in advance, rather than have to assemble it on the spot.
If religion were a minority (20% or so), then Grayling is right … who cares? But it’s the other way around, and they’re infused into every corner of our lives. And most especially the political corner, where their whims seem to take precedence.
[…] provides a more successful roadmap for the pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Which, I grow more convinced, is the wisest and best.
“The study of the historical effects of religion would be part of the study of history. The study of the philosophical parts of religion would be part of the study of philosophy.”
You could say that about literally any cultural phenomenon. The idea that studying religion is the same as endorsing religion is absurd. This type of proposal is literally how I expect the Onion to satirize atheism.
“You’re quite right that it is possible to study religion as an academic speciality. Such specialisation should take place in college or university though, not as part of a basic school-level education.”
Why? I took classes in high school every bit as specialized and academically focused as the classes I took at university, and I’m better educated for it. Hell, I credit a Gender & Sexuality in Modern Fiction classes I took as a 9th grader for the fact I’m a feminist.
“It’s about ALSO teaching regular philosophy and putting more weight on that than about just facts about two major religions.”
Except that’s not what some of the people in this thread are arguing for.
Are you criticizing those people or Graying then, amblingon?
I’m criticizing the idea that we should do away with Religious Studies, and I guess by extension anyone who subscribes to that idea.
Okay well that it would be great if youd acknowledge that that is not Grayling and not his proposal.
@nathanieltagg #22
If you make a mistake in your class and a student finds it, you celebrate. When an error or contradiction is pointed out in a Bible class, the teacher must find a way to explain it away, or else just say “I don’t understand it but that’s the way it is.”
The Nicene Creed does exactly this. Was Jesus all man or all god? Well, of course he was both! How do we know? Because the scriptures are confusing on this issue and although it seems illogical and no way of thinking can reconcile it, they seem to imply both things! It can’t be different writers with different opinions because we decided beforehand that these writings were inspired by the other god, or another part of the same god, or something, so… well, they must agree, even though they don’t appear to, so both things must be true at the same time!
amblington:
Grayling isn’t saying that religions aren’t worthy of academic study — far from it. The question is something like whether these GCSE-compliant courses are meant to study only religion, somehow independently of all of these other related issues (which are a bit hard to define in one sentence). There are non-religious philosophies which need to be understood for a “religious studies” course to avoid being “parochial and tendentious” as he puts it. It does not look like you could properly understand (or accurately represent) the facts to be studied about religions in such a course (at whatever level), if you don’t take a perspective from the outside as it were, which puts religion into a broader context.
…Anyway, Grayling is totally right, as usual. There is a lot to learn about metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, politics and aesthetics (if you care to divide philosophy up that way), both as a modern subject and as philosophical history. All kids should learn about that. The fact that in many places none of it gets taught, except as an elective in college or in a highly-specialized degree program, is simply awful and mind-boggling to me.
Of course, I’m not really sure what the scope should be. You don’t teach advanced quantum physics to high schoolers, for example. Instead, you give them “the basics,” ease them into the subject, try to make sure they can understand the limitations with what they are given, allude to open questions and outstanding problems (as well as resolved ones that the course won’t cover), and so forth. So, I don’t think it’s a special problem here, but how exactly you should do that with a general course in philosophy is totally beyond my pay grade.
About 30 years ago, I had a comparative lit course in mythology at a large state university, covering for instance Babylonian, classical, Norse myths (notable Western emphasis). My section was taught by a religious studies professor, and I felt that she did an excellent job in explaining the significance of mythology as “sacred history” that served as a vehicle for cultural values. None of this requires accepting any particular religious beliefs as true, and I have no idea what this professor’s religious beliefs (if any) might have been.
Religious studies in the sense of trying to understand why people attach importance to religious belief is not analogous to philosophy in any way. It’s an entirely independent thing. Maybe it could be folded into sociology or anthropology. Regardless, there is indisputable empirical evidence that societies are organized around beliefs of what has value and what is sacred. There is also indisputable evidence that these beliefs are for the most part not rationally grounded (though they may or may not be valid anyway). It would be convenient to ignore this fact, since many of us would like to think people are rational. But to do so is itself a kind of wishful thinking.
The false analogy “religion is to philosophy what astrology is to astronomy” suggests a misunderstanding of religious studies more than anything. Religious practices indeed occur. They are observable and have significance to many if not most people.
Grayling’s suggestion is to “do away” with the study of something real because we’d prefer it didn’t exist. In what way is this “sensible”?
anteprepro
amblingon
anteprepro
Now I’m really confused.
Note: I don’t mean to misrepresent Grayling, though I disagree with PZ’s capsule summary as well as Grayling’s comparison to philosophy, which is not analogous to religion. Philosophy is interesting insofar as it is actually true (or poses questions to the rational mind), whereas religion is interesting mainly because of the importance it holds for human beings, independent of any rigorous basis.
Grayling:
Yes, but based on my admittedly brief brush with a class taught by a religious studies professor, that’s what I thought RS already was, or is at least some of the time. It is not theology, and it’s definitely not philosophy.
And now we get the rationalist triumphalism. What about the the beliefs of our “less knowledgeable” contemporaries? Aren’t these also worthy of study? If I call myself a humanist (which I do, enthusiastically) don’t I about those things that are important to human beings? Whether or not I think they “should” be important?
Oops, typed too fast. What I meant was:
If I call myself a humanist (which I do, enthusiastically) don’t I care about those things that are important to human beings? Whether or not I think they “should” be important?
D: The quick answer is I was wrong and had not dived one link further to see the initial argument in its initial wording. Not sure how that improves your initial argument of people not getting the division between Religious Studies and Theology, but there ya go.
anteprepro:
My issue stems from PZ’s usage and the confusion I have run into in many other circumstances between RS and theology. In this specific case perhaps there is no distinction. But I read PZ as not just referring to the specific case. I might be wrong in that. Given that he is an USAian academic, I would not have expected his usage. I’ll at least take comfort that some others seem to have had similar concerns.
The GCSE curriculum seems to treat Philosophy as a subset of RS when it should be the other way round. Grayling’s proposal seems to be that Philosophy should be its own discreet subject which would obviously have RS content.
But RS can also still be its own subject if pupils still wanted to take it.
At the moment it seems that RS is a gatekeeper subject that you must study if you want study any philosophy at this level in secondary school.
Just for some context for non UK folk.(Scotland has a slightly different system but the basics are the same).
GCSEs are taken as individual subjects which are studied usually over a 2 year period. (Usually at age 14-16).
Pupils receive a final grade for each subject based on coursework and exam results.(Exact ratios vary per subject)
The number of GCSE subjects sat various from pupil to pupil. A range of between 8-10 subjects studied is fairly typical.
The results of GCSEs will heavily influence what A-Levels a pupil will study. Studying 4 A-Level subjects is fairly typical.
A-levels being the normally required qualifications to get a university place.
Since I’m not in the UK and don’t know anything about GCSE, I am probably missing Grayling’s point. I thought I had some idea of what Religious Studies is at the university level in the US (and still think I do). But I wouldn’t consider it a suitable subject to require of high school students, even as an elective, and that would also hold for whatever it means in the context of GCSE.
Marcus Ranum @ 17:
Numerous practical proofs of the axiom “a fool and his money are soon parted.”
There are aspects of how at least some British schools teach RE that would likely not be covered in a philosophy class, but are useful to people living in a society where many people are religious; stuff about routine religious practices that people have, or common dietary restrictions. Knowing the basics of what constitutes halal or kosher food, and that you don’t need to freak out about the halal sticker on your vegetable soup, seems like a pretty good idea. That wouldn’t come up in a philosophy class, but it could be taught in a sociology class, which I would be in favour of but is not currently common, or in the Personal & Social Skills classes (or whatever they’re called at the moment) that are compulsory but not examined, and cover things like employment, education and sex ed.
RE in Britain can be really good, covering quite a lot on what people believe and how it affects their behaviour, and on broader moral and philosophical topics. The problems are that 1. Calling it Religious studies and then teaching about general morality gives the impression that they are inextricably linked when they really aren’t and 2. It is massively variable in practice. In my school, it was taught in a secular, factual way by someone who refused to give her own religious views, and learning religious perspectives was along the lines of “most Christian sects believe X, although some believe Y. Muslims generally believe Z”. In other schools, it’s overwhelmingly a defense of that school’s religion, and taught as if religious doctrines are undeniable facts. It’s worth preserving the good things, but I don’t think we can do that consistently while still calling it religious studies, especially with the recent proliferation of religious schools, which get extra freedom in setting the curriculum.
Agree w jefrir, plus also too –
even the schools who do a reasonable job tend to encourage the notion that religion is ExtraSpecial!!! and must get ExtraSpecial RESPECT!!!. Removing it from the headline slot and treating it as a subset of sociology, history etc. would help with that.
…
…yeah.
Or literally scholastic for that matter.