http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/m...requestid=2903
Christianity is outclassed
(Filed: 16/02/2004)
'Let the little children come to me," said Jesus. He did not add: "... but only after they have been encouraged to question their faith and made aware of the arguments for atheism." That is the proposal from the Institute for Public Policy Research, the New Labour think tank that is attempting to refashion RE lessons along progressive lines. Depressingly, it may succeed.
Education ministers are currently reading the IPPR report, entitled What is Religious Education For?, as they draw up national curriculum guidelines on religious teaching. The document wants children to be "actively encouraged to question the religious beliefs they bring with them into the classroom", and taught about fashionable alternatives such as paganism and environmentalism.
Its supporters argue that updating religious education in this way is a very different proposition from the militant secularism currently being imposed on French classrooms. But that is disingenuous. In reality, the report's proposals and the headscarf ban are both coloured by the bossy prejudices of the European intelligentsia.
This is, admittedly, a delicate area for liberals. How do they reconcile the desire to talk children out of their religious beliefs with their policy of genuflecting towards the cultural traditions of ethnic minorities, most of which are explicitly religious? It would be interesting to watch a right-on primary school teacher attempting to explain to a devout Muslim father why his child should investigate atheism. But that is unlikely to happen. The proposals are not directed at Islam: the impulse behind them - like the decision to ban prayers from graduation ceremonies at Edinburgh university, which we report today - is anti-Christian rather than anti-religious.
It is also authoritarian. It reflects the belief that parents who pass on the Christian faith are guilty of indoctrinating their children, and that it is the role of the state to stop them. The IPPR and its allies in the Government are not so much interested in promoting diversity as in replacing one set of orthodoxies by another: the joyless ideology of cultural relativism.
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