Rupert Wegerif
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Re-inventing Religious Education for the Internet Age

29/8/2021

3 Comments

 
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Martin Robinson (@Trivium21c) recently shared on Twitter a report by the National Secular Society (https://www.secularism.org.uk/opinion/2021/08/its-time-to-move-on-from-religious-education). Martin asked the question: ‘Is it time to ditch Religious Education?”. Having trained as an RE teacher (Bristol, 1990-91) I felt challenged enough to reply. I wrote that we seem to need ‘a shared frame’ so maybe we should revise RE rather than scrapping it altogether. In this blog I unpack what I meant by this and put forward a suggestion for the future of RE.

Why we need ‘religion’
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This uplifting quote came into my facebook feed the other day. As a frankly ‘troubled’ young man, I read Camus, especially his books ‘The Outsider’ and ‘The Rebel’. I recall his line ‘je me revolte, donc je suis’ (I rebel, therefore I am). I was a little surprised then that Camus might have written such sweetly positive lines. I googled and found that it really is by him, from ‘Return to Tipassa’, which can be found  in the collection, Lyrical and Critical Essays 2012.

Reading this took me back. In the Autumn of 1983 I found myself cycling down the coast of Spain towards Morocco. All that I owned was wrapped in black bin-bags on the back of the bike: a cheap bike that I had bought in a supermarket in France about a month before. I was alone. I slept rough or in campsites when I found them. I had no home to go to, no money in the bank, no job, no plans – I was just drifting. And it was raining. It rained a lot. I had been cycling all day and as the rain poured down I looked for some shelter. All I could see were flat fields of corn. I kept thinking that if I just kept on a bit longer I would find something. But nothing, not even a tree. Before the day faded completely I turned off the main road onto dirt paths across fields and, after some anxious searching, I found a sort of circular concrete drain big enough for me to shelter in. I was cold, I was wet, I was hungry, I was uncomfortable. I sat and watched lightening play over the fields. I listened to the thunder. Then suddenly it hit me. The Camus experience. Waves of joy welling up from inside. It was a feeling, not a theory, not something easy to express, more from the guts and the heart than from the head. A feeling that, despite all appearances, things were good. Not just a little bit good but really good.
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Tipassa, Phoenician and Roman ruins in Algeria, where Camus had his ‘invincible summer’ experience in 1948
 
I was not brought up in a religion and I did not think of my experience as meeting God. However, I can easily understand why others might have interpreted such an experience that way. The feeling of joy had bundled up with it a kind of emotional warmth, as if I was not alone, as if I was loved and had always already been loved. In return I felt love also for everything in my odd life, even the dark night and the pouring rain. ‘Born again’ Christians tend to use similar words to describe their conversion. They hit rock bottom, then they are ‘surprised by joy’. ‘Surprised by Joy’ is the title C S Lewis gives to his autobiography, words borrowed from a poem by Wordsworth which could also apply to my experience or to that of Camus.
 
If you do the research you will find that ‘religious experience’ of this kind is common in people of all faiths and none. Camus was mostly counted as an atheist. (Although he did once say, ‘I do not believe in God, but I am not an atheist nonetheless’). Nietzsche went as far as to write a whole book called ‘the Antichrist’ and yet he clearly knew about the kind of experience that Camus describes, writing: 
 
“Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death—our life, our happiness.... We have discovered happiness, we know the road, we have found the exit out of whole millennia of labyrinth. Who else has found it? Modern man perhaps? 'I know not which way to turn; I am everything that knows not which way to turn,' sighs modern man.... It was from this modernity that we were ill” (in Twilight of the Idols)

I tend to agree with Nietzsche – modernity made me ill. I was good at school but it was not good for me. I left school with qualifications and a feeling of desperate emptiness. The meaning I was offered at school and that I gleaned from the TV growing up in the UK felt like very thin gruel: Insipid, anaemic, bloodless stuff. The secret of my eventual stability and relative usefulness was the discovery that I made on that cold wet sleepless night in Spain. That I am part of something much larger than myself that sustains me and flows through me, that is me, as I am it, even though I do not fully understand how or why. Not a verbal meaning, not a creedal faith but a gut meaning, something we should perhaps investigate through physiology more than through philosophy.
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The biggest cause of death of young people in the UK is suicide. But a far greater number suffer from so called ‘mental illnesses’ such as addiction to drugs, self-harm and depression. I say ‘so-called’ mental illnesses because the symptoms look to me suspiciously like what you would expect of anyone who has no deep sense of meaning in their life. 
 
This experience in a field in Spain was the opening of a source of rich nourishment for me. Nourishment that, after that night, I found that I could always regain when I really needed it using simple meditation-like techniques such as listening to my breath. All I have to do is to put myself on hold as it were, wait hopefully, and this other thing, this energy that is not me, comes in and revives me.
 
Now you might say that this is not religion but ‘spirituality’. Maybe so. Spirit is a good word. I associate it with a kind of dialogue – or perhaps a kind of lightning – a relationship or connection between the ultimate context of our lives and the here and now. When all the everyday ways of framing experience fall away then that which we call ‘spirit’ enters into play.  
 
But for me religion is also not a bad word. Re-ligare – to tie again – to reconnect. Rituals like Muslim prayer or Buddhist meditation are meant to be a remembering of what is most important. With religion the spirituality, which might be thought as purely personal moments, takes on form and becomes cultural and collective. A kind of guidance, an educational technology perhaps. 
 
In my opinion, religious faith is not about, or should not be about, propositional knowledge. It is more fundamentally, a relationship. A relationship of trust. Trust in the world. Trust in life. 
 
Reinventing ‘Religious education’
 
I was disappointed by the practice of Religious Education that I experienced in the UK. There was no actual teaching of religion. In place of the real stuff there was mostly teaching about religion.  I had to get children to list facts like what Jews put on the table at the Passover or what Sikh’s wear and why. Vaguely interesting in a pop quiz kind of way perhaps, but not something  that will open a channel of nourishment for young people. 
 
Given this experience I am not surprised that the National Secular Society write that: ‘It is time to move on from RE and ensure that the established curriculum requirements, especially citizenship education, are enhanced to provide children with a secular schooling which prepares them to consider and understand their future rights and obligations as citizens’. 
 
The report offers arguments as to why RE has become unnecessary. The main one is that, in a diverse society, RE has no longer any raison d’etre: 
 
‘RE in the 1940s essentially said to children "you must accept the Christian worldview because it is the only truth", but in the 2020s RE says almost the exact opposite, telling children "you must respect each person's different worldview because it is true for them"’. 
 
They do have a point here of course but from my experience and that of many, we still need religion. The ‘secular’ worldview of rational autonomous individuals interacting in regulated markets with rights and obligations, pretends to be free of religion but it is, in fact, I suspect, just another world view or way of life and probably not the last one or the only one that we need. Maintaining the kind of individual identities required for secular rationalism, selves separate from each other, separate from the tribe and separate from the cosmos, does not come easy for many of us and seems to make a lot of young people anxious and sometimes very ill. 
 
In re-inventing RE for the Internet Age I think that it is possible that we have something to learn from indigenous oral societies.  If I may generalize from many cases, the induction of young people into the shared way of life in indigenous cultures often involves rituals that help them step aside from their individual physical selves and acquire a more collective spiritual sense of self. In a visit to Waikato, to give one example, I learnt from a Maori woman, a religious educator, about how the elders guided her through rituals to the point when she could hear for herself the voice of the main ancestor of the iwi or tribe speaking to her, walking with her and guiding her. Her presentation of this story was more than just verbal, the emotion and security that she felt now that she was not alone but always guided by an ancestor was evident in her glowing eyes. There was love in her eyes as she spoke about her experience of religious education.
 
Successful induction into a single cultural tradition is increasingly difficult to achieve. Children are exposed to many voices on the Internet. It seems as if there is no shared worldview or way of life to induct people into such that they could have a rich experience of belonging of the kind the Maori religious educator described. On the one hand that is a problem that we all face, the unsettling challenge of the death of God, precisely as Nietzsche described it, but on the other hand, maybe this is an opportunity for us to create something new together, something that has not been seen before, a genuinely nourishing religion that has no cultural boundaries.
 
Instead of a single curriculum document we could have a living dialogue. A carefully designed and moderated platform for all those in the world who have something to share about what gives life meaning for them. Of course, this must include the secularists, the rationalists, the humanists, the communists as well as the more obviously ‘religious’ voices. It should include ordinary people, living ordinary lives who are willing to share with others what they have found that gives their life meaning and enables them to get up in the morning, carry on and maybe even feel joy in the midst of anxieties and tears. As well as a willingness to share, the other condition of participation would be a willingness to listen to others and to be open to the possibility of learning from them. Benevolence would be expected and ruthlessly enforced!
 
In RE classes young people could be invited to participate in facilitated dialogues with others from the locality as well as from around the world asking and answering the question ‘what gives life meaning for you?’. The aim of the course would not be propositional knowledge, it would not end with an exam, it would seek to facilitate each child in the personal development of their own meaning of  life, their own inner guiding voice. If that proves too ambitious for some then at the very least having a better understanding of the different ways that people seek to make sense of their lives will be valuable for anyone and everyone. Imagine how useful such awareness might be for the head of sales in any multi-national for example. 
 
My simple proposal then is that we reinvent RE as a social media platform supporting a guided global dialogue about what gives life meaning. This would not only be a journey of discovery for individual students carefully supported into joining the dialogue. It could also potentially be a useful journey of discovery for all involved, perhaps all of us. Is there a shared basis for values?  Is a shared ‘religion’ possible with a real sense of community and perhaps even shared rituals and initiation ceremonies? The best way to find out is to start a global dialogue inquiry into what gives life meaning. And maybe that shared experience of going on a journey together, of seeking to understand each other without abandoning cultural differences, will prove to be, in itself, all the answer that is needed.  

3 Comments
Mohamad Faazeli
30/8/2021 07:00:59 pm

Until about 17, I was practicing Islam and was inducted deeply into this religion with having 'religious experiences' which gave me freedom and meaning on the one hand and enforcing some biases on the other hand.

I can say your suggestion of how to re-invent RE was what happened to me when I entered the internet world. My faith changed to something shared between more people; I reconciled with LGBT+ ppl for example.

I went through this process, though pretty much messy and without some order and guidance. There are some drawbacks I suppose this messy way has. First, I think it took much more time for me than when it is carefully planned in curricula; I also experienced many insecure moments to handle my differences with other faith (or life) styles. Second I see everyday young people like myself who are still in some religious dogmas. Even the internet hasn't helped them sufficiently yet (perhaps it is related to the degree of fluency in a second language and the extent to which they contact other cultures too).

Altogether, I appreciate your blog, and I think it's a noble way to go through because that's what I do, and it works.

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Judith
22/9/2021 11:34:26 am

Your blog is interesting and persuasively written, and certainly got me thinking (so thank you for that!) but I do disagree quite strongly with the main argument. I feel you are conflating religion (perhaps not in it's literal meaning, but at least in what it means to most people) with a 'sense of belonging' or meaning. You seem to start from the premise that secularists are somehow individualists who see themselves as neo-liberalist nihilists 'separate from one-another', which is, in my view, a straw man argument. As a secularist and atheist, I neither see myself as devoid of meaning in life, nor do I see myself as individualist. However, I am not attracted to any form of 'spiritualism' as I would argue that one can marvel about the world and feel one with 'the cosmos' (as you say it...), without resorting to metaphors that invoke some spiritual force or deity.

As someone who was raised in a (strongly) religious environment, it is very clear to me that, despite perhaps your more broad view of religion, to most people being religious means not just a shared sense of meaning, but an ultimate belief in some sort of 'higher power' who controls at least some part of their/human life on earth - and often they believe in some form of divine control after their lives too.

While I agree that many people probably need to have a sense of belonging, and that people would probably benefit from engaging in dialogues about what gives life meaning to them, I completely disagree that this needs the guise of religious education or, indeed, that this can only be done within lessons that are based in religious education.

Why could a subject that addresses mental well-being (which is what I think you are actually talking about) not be re-invented as 'philosophy' or indeed, as 'wellbeing lessons' - like PE for the mind - instead of RE? In fact, I would go as far as saying that education 'about' religion should be done within social studies and/or history lessons (as it is useful to understand some of the historical and social processes), and suggest that all children should engage in some form of philosophy - which can also include philosophy of science for that matter. In that sense, I think I do agree with you, that engaging (young) people in facilitated dialogues with others and giving them an opportunity to engage with questions around ‘what gives life meaning for you?’ is important - just that I strongly feel that this should move out of religion - as religion (or indeed spirituality) is not what gives meaning to life at all, in my view. It is engaging with the world and with others that gives meaning to life, as your anecdote of your cycling experience seemed to demonstrate. In a biological sense, you were cold and hungry and had exerted yourself, your body released endomorphins, which made you feel very good. Combined with the nature around you, this made for a powerful experience indeed.

This obviously does not sound as exciting or sexy as saying that you had a profoundly spiritual experience, but the experience nevertherless is the same, however you describe it and without resorting to some form of 'there-must-be-something-more-than-this-ism'. This begs the question, why do we not engage our students in more of these, potentially life-changing experiences? They obviously do not necessarily need to include misery, hunger and coldness, but I think engaging with nature, with others around the world (through facilitated dialogues and experiences) and actually allowing students the space and time to think, are a good step in the right direction.

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Rupert Wegerif link
29/9/2021 05:26:22 pm

Thanks for engaging with this idea of mine Judith. I disagree with you of course but that is the whole point of dialogue! I am really glad to see someone defend contemporary secularism and challenge my negative view of it. And perhaps this is an example of what I am proposing - each of us thinking about how we find meaning in life and sharing that.

I understand why many do not like the word religion. If we really develop the global 'what gives life meaning for you?' platform I think that we would have to avoid the word religion. So your input is helpful. But I still like the word myself because it points to a necessary tacit faith element behind the experience meaning. My intuition is that, while many think we have gone beyond religion, we have not really.

You advocate promoting better mental health but reject faith in a 'higher power'. However there seems to be very good empirical evidence for the value of the established 12 step (AA) mental health programme for dealing with addiction which relies on faith in a higher power. The reason for this is obvious. Some people find that they cannot trust the authority of their own self, it leads them astray, and so they find that they have to put their own self to one side and trust something else, something bigger or 'higher'.

The real experience many then have of the saving grace of a 'higher power' does not need to be conceptualised as the effect of a person sitting outside the universe and intervening in it - like some sort of judgemental and meddlesome father figure. I do not really know what is going on myself, hence my lack of atheism, but I prefer to think in terms of synergies within systems. I mean that 'meaning', like agency and desire, is not the property of an individual self but is something that arises within relationships through participation in systems that seem to call us out of ourselves into a larger or 'higher' sense of identity. Like participating in a communal dance for example. Only, for my understanding of religion, the dance is not just social or political but includes everyone and everything. All space and time. Unbounded in fact. Like the kind of dialogue I propose.

Thanks again for joining in!

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    Rupert Wegerif. Professor of Education at Cambridge University. Interested in Dialogic Education, educational technology and teaching for thinking and creativity.

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