I stumbled another article on the teaching of religious ideas in schools. Apparently the Swedish government has made it illegal for schools, both private and public, to teach religious doctrine as if they were true. The entire article is reposted below with a link to the source.
I support this decision in the case of public schools. If you are attending a public school, managed by a government run board of education, then the separation of church and state should be maintained. The only fair way to do this is to remove all religious teachings from the classrooms except in the case of classes devoted to studying world faiths or literature. However, in the case of private schools, I cannot support this move. It is a clear violation of the spirit of free speech, and that is dangerous territory.
One argument put forth for this law is that it helps combat the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, the logic here being that Islamic schools indoctrinate children at a young age, before they have the mental ability to properly assess ideas. I recognize that the same argument can be against any religion. As many people have noted, religion is generally not learned later in life, but rather passed on to children at an early age by their parents. So, if preventing the induction of young minds is the goal, then the precedent set by this law sets is a terrible one. The law won’t do much to prevent the teaching of religion to young minds since this will still occur at home. The next step would be to ban the teaching of religion all together, violating free speech for the majority of the people in the world.
The way to combat religious fundamentalism is not to silence the opposition. Instead, you have to open the door to real criticism and discussion. What if the rolls were reversed? What if they outlawed the teaching of evolution as truth in secular schools? The whole reason atheism is beginning to take root is because of free speech and this is an ideal we should hold dear even if we don’t agree with what is being said.
By Andrew Brown
Original SourceThe Swedish government has announced plans to clamp down hard on religious education. It will soon become illegal even for private faith schools to teach religious doctrines as if they were true. In an interesting twist on the American experience, prayer will remain legal in schools – after all, it has no truth value. But everything that takes place on the curriculum’s time will have to be secular. “Pupils must be protected from every sort of fundamentalism,” said the minister for schools, Jan Björklund.
Creationism and ID are explicitly banned but so is proselytising even in religious education classes. The Qur’an may not be taught as if it is true even in Muslim independent schools, nor may the Bible in Christian schools. The decision looks like a really startling attack on the right of parents to have their children taught what they would like. Of course it does not go so far as the Dawkins policy of prohibiting parents from trying to pass on their doctrines even in their own families – and, if it did, it would certainly run foul of the European convention on human rights. It does not even go as far as Nyamko Sabuni, the minister for integration – herself born in Burundi – would like: she wanted to ban all religious schools altogether. But it is still a pretty drastic measure from an English perspective.
The law is being presented in Sweden as if it mostly concerned fundamentalist Christian sects in the backwoods; but the Christian Democratic party, which represents such people if anyone does, is perfectly happy with the new regulation. There is little doubt that combating Islamic fundamentalism is the underlying aim, especially in conjunction with another new requirement that all independent schools declare all their funding sources. This would allow the inspectors – whose budget is being doubled – to concentrate their efforts on those schools most likely to be paid to break the rules.
In the background to these announcements comes the release of a frightening documentary film on Swedish jihadis, which follows young men over a period of two years on their slow conversion to homicidal lunacy.
The question is whether we in Britain will come to see this as a necessary move in the struggle to contain Islamist ideologies. Can a defence of freedom convincingly be mounted by a state that takes such a firm view of what is or is not true? Or can freedom not be preserved without such measures? The dilemma makes no sense from a completely liberal position, where it is assumed that the truth will always win out in fair competition, and that the state is almost always to be distrusted. But Swedes have never really been liberal in that sense, notwithstanding the fact that the two ministers involved here are members of the Liberal party.
Superficially, the British position could not be more different. The British government’s strategy with Islam or protestant extremism in Ulster has been – so far as we have had one – flattery and corruption, or what Microsoft, in another context, calls “embracing and extending”. Find the leaders, flatter them, and draw them into the ruling class in the hope that they will then cooperate and see that their followers do too. The gamble that the government is taking on faith schools is that if religious groups are given their own schools to run, they will do so in ways that will turn out for the benefit of society as a whole, as well as of their pupils. Certainly this works quite well with the Church of England. Anglican schools are happy, by and large, to teach religion as if it were not true; to put it in a more flattering light, they concentrate more on the fruits of the spirit than on dogma. However, no one supposes that society is threatened by a terrorist movement nurtured in C of E primary schools.
Demanding that Muslim, Jewish, and Catholic schools stop teaching their own religions as if they were true, which is essentially the Swedish position, looks an impossible task for a British government. But I think it might also be a necessary one. It is certainly the only way to discover whether the parents of such schools really want the “ethos” or the pseudo-factual beliefs and what exactly it is that the people who fund them think they are buying with their money.
I’d have to go ahead and disagree with you on this one Steve. Most developed countries already expect and require students to obtain a minimum level of education in certain areas. They of course have the option of obtaining that education at private schools instead of public schools. One example of something that should be learned by all students is evolution. Creationism, one of the biblical teachings that would no doubt be forbidden, is in direct violation of evolution. So in essence, teaching creationism as true is equivalent to teaching that evolution is not true which, in my mind, would not give students that mandatory minimum level of education. I also don’t believe that free speech should apply rigorously to teachers in the classroom. Free speech allows white supremacists to spread their ideas in various ways, but we should not expect them to be able to teach those ideas in schools. Finally, I find it unlikely that there is any such thing as a completely private school — I’m sure there is often a small level of government funding, some slight tax benefits, background support in terms of curriculum development, etc.
Thank you for posting the article.