A day at the Religious Education Council AGM

I spent a day at the Religious Education Council AGM last week. the REC is an interesting organisation. It is a charity comprised of very many organisations, some religious , some professional and some academic that are all committed to the subject of religious education or religion values and ethics (RE /RVE, using the England and Wales names for subject). We were in the Waldegrave suite of St Mary’s University, in Teddington, where I began my RE life in 1997 when I did a PGCE.

To explain the REC, let me describe the room. In one corner around a table I saw reps from the Catholic education service, which looks after Catholic schools, and those from UK Humanists, an organisation that campaigns for the end of faith schooling. At another the Baha’i rep and the Zoroastrian reps were sat together chatting. Now multiply that by 10.

The REC is an extraordinary gathering of people focussed on making RE better, from as diverse a moral and religion and belief perspective as you can imagine. Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Christians of many denominations and many many more . The REC cannot oblige its members to share the same belief. There cannot first be a shared ritual pattern or commitment to creed. It does, however, aim and try work for the good of the subject, talking to government and gathering information about what is going on in schools about RE/RVE.

This sense of a room full of difference and plurality mirrors, in a sense, what I think should happen in every classroom as far as this subject is concerned. That is a space where plurality itself is the sacred value. Whether the subject matter is an ethical principle, or an existential claim about the ultimate nature of reality, a plurality of the space is necessitated. This is obvious, in curricular that specifically engage with multiple traditions, but it is just as true in tradition education more focussed on one account. Anyone who has been on a talky retreat within a particular tradition (as opposed to a silent one), will know that even within a single tradition people bring their particular stories and experiences that contour their expressions.

The REC manages to do what seems impossible. It brings together when elsewhere we see polarized views and bubbles. What I find striking, when I think about it, is how different this is to many public organisations which require allegiance to certain views of reality, certain rituals and behaviours. Organisations have increasing prescribed values claims about the world beyond, beliefs about the moral principles that matter most. Employees who did not accept the conduct of the workplace that emphasised these rituals and behaviour might find themselves in trouble.

RE teachers would be very cautious of proscribing such things. Even my teachers in the Jesuit comprehensive school I went to in north London reminded us about the importance of tasting conscience first, even before the Pope, as Cardinal Newman once said. RE teachers work hard to maintain an open plural space in their classrooms. Even RE in a faith context needs to be sensitive to the different ways of seeing things that can be within a tradition, and the diversity of pupils present in the room. I remembered, in the meeting in the Waldegrave suite, how my PGCE tutors had taught us not to use “We believe” suggesting instead that “we” language needed to be about the whole class, or the whole school, not just those on “the inside”.

The REC meeting heard a presentation about the extraordinary collapse in numbers doing the subject of RE over the last decade and of the opportunity to think again about the place of RE in relation to the curriculum. Is it time for a change?

Regardless of that question, perhaps a country as diverse and plural as this one cannot afford to be happy the opportunities to learn lessons about moral and religious plurality in English schools have reduced over time. Maybe it is time for an RE/RVE refit . If we are going to be able to step out of our bubbles, we will need to attend to others ,respect difference, and develop a flexibility of mind that can understand plural and diverse understandings. And we need a bigger “we” than the one that is defined by those who agree with “us” on matters of existential and ultimate meaning.