Lessons of religion and secular ethics at school

LESSONS OF RELIGION AND SECULAR ETHICS AT SCHOOL:

PROS AND CONS

Алехина К.А.

ученица  11 «Б» класса МБОУ «СОШ №59»

Руководитель: Стригункова М.Д.,

учитель английского языка

Religion has always been a touchy and contradictory subject in today’s society, taking into account the history of religious genesis and expansion. Reports show that nowadays mankind is rapidly loosing virtues, moral principles and responsibility for actions and life as a whole. Public schools are dealing with some very heavy issues in the recent years: teenage pregnancy, school violence, school shootings, and drugs are only a few among a large array of problems that are on the rise in America and Europe and are coming to Russia. In this sense, to prevent the processes of personal degeneration and destruction, it’s vitally important to start from school, where pupils spend most of their day and learn to live in the society and to discern what is good and what is bad. In that context, placing religion into schools would help to instill a better moral compass in students at a younger age, effectively reducing the problems in school systems. Hence, the introduction of religious lessons seems to be a way out of the imminent peril. However, religious competence of children has been a debatable question among alarmed parents, teachers and authorities. There are multiple levels that have to be evaluated when making a decision on religion in secondary schools. Let’s look at all of the arguments for and against.

One the one hand, such lessons are considered to be very beneficial for education and a child’s morals. According to psychologists, students with high levels of religious commitment do better compared to those with low levels of religious commitment; moreover, kids with religious parents are better behaved and adjusted than other children. So they think that learning about different religions and cultures first hand would help children to be more accepting and educated on other people’s beliefs; therefore, lessons of religion and ethics can help develop positive traits of character in students, such as tolerance, honesty, prudence and respect for friends and elder people. Overall, religious children will be influenced by their environment to be good and caring citizens. Using religious reasons to constrict children’s behavior will enable them to learn to care for others, and they will grow up to be desirable citizens who will do their best for the society.

In the meantime, there are opponents of religion in schools. They bring up the issue of separation of church from state, guaranteed in the constitution. So putting a focus on religion in schools is a direct violation of the law. That’s why they back up the idea of leaving the space in school curriculum only for lessons of secular ethics, which will acquaint children with different cultures, religions and breed up in them tolerant attitude to cultural and religious pluralism. They say that besides students of different religions, there may be ones that practice no religion at all or may be atheists. And being in the same class with students who are taught religion, they might feel discriminated. Next to it is the problem of subjective judgment of a teacher, because in that context he becomes responsible for the religious values he shapes in his pupils. And in the case of religion there is a thin line between faith and dogmatism, between teaching and preaching, and many parents feel extremely uncomfortable with their child being preached to about religious matters. Furthermore, science and religion have always had lots of conflicts and the main of them is the question how life appeared on this planet. According to any monotheistic religion, life appeared due to God’s will. In sharp contrast are the scientific ideas of big explosion in the universe billions of years ago and as a result, the dust, which created earth and all living objects on it that were involved in the process of evolution. Being stuck between two theories, students end up confused. M. Willett points out, that “religion relies on authority — from a person, book, or tradition — and its Truth is supposed to be universal and eternal. But in science, the authority is in the evidence and reasoning, which are always open to challenge; so science's truth is relative and tentative”. That’s the root of contradiction, which bewilders students as to what they should believe. Finally, the opponents of religious lessons believe that precious school time should be used to focus on other useful and real-life courses at school.

To sum it all up, we can see that although there are obvious advantages of producing better students with higher morals due to religious lessons, still the issue of religion in schools poses more questions than clear cut answers. Admittedly, we can’t deny the leading role of productive and creative cooperation of teacher and family in shaping moral standards of the growing generation. And as for Russian schools, much has to be analyzed here: when to introduce such lessons, how many hours will be enough, what to include in the program, how to prepare teachers, what books should be used, how to consider various opinions on the topic.

In my personal view, religious and cultural lessons should be introduced after basic lessons of history, when children have learnt at least about the Ancient world and the Middle Ages and thus they will be able to make inferences based on their background. Besides, such lessons should not take away the time and be placed in the curriculum at the cost of other important subjects, like Russian or Math. The aim of this course must be to acquaint students with the main dominating religions and to find more points that unite rather than those which divide, because the literal meaning of “Religion” is “to RE-unite”, that is to unite again what was divided. To my mind, the unifying idea of all religions is love, which is expressed in deep faith, and it should be instilled in the hearts of children at home and at school.