Norwood (1943)

Notes on the text
Preliminary pages Membership, Contents, Introduction

Part I Secondary education
Chapter 1 Nature of secondary education
Chapter 2 Secondary education as it is
Chapter 3 Secondary education as it might be

Part II Examinations
Chapter 4 Existing examinations
Chapter 5 The reorganisation of examinations (i)
Chapter 6 The reorganisation of examinations (ii)
Chapter 7 The Inspectorate

Part III Curriculum
Chapter 8 The curriculum in general
Chapter 9 Physical education
Chapter 10 Religious education
Chapter 11 English
Chapter 12 History
Chapter 13 Geography
Chapter 14 Mathematics
Chapter 15 Natural science
Chapter 16 Modern languages
Chapter 17 Classics
Chapter 18 Art, music, handicrafts
Chapter 19 Domestic subjects
Chapter 20 Education for commerce
Chapter 21 Wales and the teaching of Welsh

Conclusions and recommendations
Appendix A Note on the Central Welsh Board
Appendix B List of witnesses
Index

Report of the Committee of the Secondary School Examinations Council appointed by the President of the Board of Education in 1941

London: HM Stationery Office 1943

Chapter 10 Religious education
[pages 84 - 91. In the printed version this is Part III Chapter III]

It will perhaps make for clearness if we begin with an attempt to estimate the conditions as they are, first, in the nation as a whole, and next m the Secondary Schools. If at first sight these appear to be profoundly discouraging, there are rays of light to be discerned in the darkness, and it is not wisdom to make ourselves out to be worse than we are. There is an illusion, for instance, that we have suddenly become a nation of unbelievers, and that two or three generations ago we were thoroughly Christian. But no one who weighs the evidence of history in this or any other country can suppose that the political and economic systems have ever been effectively Christian; indeed it is a common cry today that Christianity cannot be called a failure because it has never been tried, and there exists an almost instinctive desire, particularly among the young, that it shall be tried both within and between the nations, and in no formal and conventional manner. This is an element of real promise for the future, and it is the foundation of the present genuine demand that there shall be an opportunity for religious education in all schools. There is a general feeling that something has been missed which ought not to be missing, and we have to admit that of the three agencies which shape the child's religious consciousness, the home, the church, and the school, the home has very generally ceased to be the place of religious instruction and simple Bible teaching, and the churches, particularly in the towns, are often, but not always, very scantily attended. It is true that children are sent to Sunday schools, but it is alleged, not without truth, that this is frequently done in order to give to their elders a period of Sunday rest. Despite recent improvements the teachers are too few and sometimes too unskilled to be helpful, and their pupils are glad to leave what they regard as a childish phase behind them. Nevertheless it is misleading to paint the picture in dark and unrelieved colours. People in general, it must be repeated, are very conscious that there is something missing, and that their lives lack purpose and meaning. There is a general acceptance of Christian ethical standards as the highest teaching known to men. There is a vague but widespread desire that the young people shall not miss that which somehow their elders have missed, and which does give value to life. And there is evidence from the high schools, the universities, and various student and youth associations that among the young there is a movement of minds impatient of bare formularies yet eager for the truth, a feeling after God if happen they may find Him.

It is surely therefore an hour of opportunity and not of discouragement. If there is little home teaching and scanty attendance at the services of the churches, there remains in the educational system an influence which no boy or girl can escape, and which may establish a clearer vision in the future where now there is so much confusion. We begin therefore by accepting as fundamental and true the position taken in the admirable chapter on Scripture in the Spens Report, the whole of which indeed we should wish to be read in conjunction with this chapter, 'No boy or girl can be counted as properly educated unless he or she has been made aware of the fact of a religious interpretation of life. The traditional form which that interpretation has taken in this country is Christian, and the principal justification for giving a place in the curriculum to the study of the Scriptures is that the Bible is the classic book of Christianity, and forms the basis of Christian faith and worship.' It becomes pertinent, then, to ask what is the present position in the schools, and particularly in those that are Secondary.

There is a strong hope that a way may now be found for religious instruction to be given, subject to a conscience clause, in all grant-aided schools on the basis of agreed syllabuses. At the primary stage of education little difficulty is likely to arise, since such syllabuses are, and should be, concerned with very simple elements; but at the secondary stage the problem before the teacher is more complex. For those schools which have a leaving age of 15 or 16 an agreed syllabus will be found of general value, so long as freedom to make reasonable variation within it is preserved. The problem for them is mainly how to present the subject suitably to pupils who are disposed to learn, if they are interested and see the purpose of the teaching, and to be idle, if they are bored. For those schools, however, which teach pupils up to the age of 18 or 19 the issues are more complex and difficult. They have to deal with fully awakened curiosities, with the impatient intolerance and the eager idealism of youth: a conventional syllabus may mean that when they are asking for bread they may receive a stone. Such being the hard task of those who give religious instruction in Secondary Schools, what is the present adequacy of the teachers of the task? The Spens Report in the emphasis which it laid upon the various methods by which the teachers might become more adequately equipped, by implication declared them to be at present unequal to the demand made upon them. But it is well to face unpleasant facts explicitly. The time given to this important subject is nearly always confined to one period a week, and there are many schools in which it is dropped altogether when the shadow of the School Certificate examination begins to loom on the horizon of the pupil. We have important evidence from trustworthy witnesses, who have very special knowledge of a field in which they are doing valuable work, that the cause of the great disparity in the interest in religious teaching shown by the pupils in different schools is the disparity in the knowledge of the subject on the part of the teacher; their experience tends to show that only a minority of those who teach religious knowledge in Secondary Schools are even fairly well qualified for their work. This is a strong opinion, but it ought to be qualified by recognition of the fact that the standard in girls' schools is definitely higher than in those for boys. They say explicitly 'We are constantly told by masters wishing our help that they have had no religious teaching themselves since they ceased attending Scripture lessons when they began to prepare to take the School Certificate examination, and men who say this are not men who take one form of Scripture but, in many cases, those who have been put in charge of Scripture in the school as a whole, being required to teach several forms, to provide a Scripture syllabus, and to select such books as are used in class.' Truly, if the hour of opportunity is here, the need for improvement is urgent.

Having considered these facts as they are, and having concluded that the Secondary Schools as they are cannot even generally be regarded as equal to the demand which in this field is made upon them, we pass to broader considerations. We begin by drawing a distinction between Scripture knowledge and religious education. The first is definitely a subject of the curriculum, but the second is not, and we believe it to be very much the more important. For this reason we place religious education in the sense which is indicated below, with physical education and English as outside and above the curriculum, being the concern of all teachers at all stages, and from this point of view we do not believe that the schools show up so badly as they do on the side of formal instruction, though they would themselves be the first to confess that they fall short of perfection. The development of the religious consciousness is not, and cannot be, the subject of a syllabus: it grows from the environment, favourably and naturally if the environment is favourable and natural, atrophied or distorted if the environment is materialist in its values and purely competitive in spirit. It is a growth from a life that is lived. There can be and there are schools in which you are effectively taught that you find happiness by unselfishness and by helping your neighbour, and the ideal forms itself naturally from the life that is lived in them. There can be, and there are, schools in which truth and knowledge are sought for their own sakes, and there exists a jealously safeguarded tradition of sound learning, in which again the ideal of goodness lives in the standards of the school so that its members strive not to fall short of them, and beauty is felt to be relative to everything that is studied or made or done. If none attain perfection, and few approach it, yet the strength of our secondary education is that on the whole, when measured by these standards, the schools incline more to the better than to the worse. There is a tradition that there can be inspiration in the dwelling together of the teachers and the taught, that the head and the staff, the sixth form, and the main body of the pupils can and often do find a common life which has a spiritual basis, a fertile seed-ground from which do naturally spring the love of God, and the love of one's neighbour.

It is obvious that these intangible spiritual values come not so much from what teachers say and teach, from curricula and examinations, but from what they are, and what they are seen to be, inside and outside the classroom. A wise and famous head master once said that the rules for a schoolmaster were as simple to state as they were hard to fulfil: they were only that he should know what he wanted his boys to know, that he should be what he wanted his boys to be, and that he should add enthusiasm. On this depends mainly the religious life of the school. It is, however, fair to ask whether there are any specific pieces of planning which will promote the fulfilment of this end. In some ways it is easier of fulfilment in the boarding school than the day school, because the boarding school commands the whole life of the pupil, waking and sleeping, work and leisure, because it has in chapel a place in which spiritual truths can be naturally and explicitly set forth, and because it has in its preparation for confirmation or for church membership an instrument of great power in developing the spiritual awareness of young people. The day school has not the same chances, and too often, though not always, it may be fighting a battle with conflicting standards or with indifference in the home. But it can do much. It can make of school prayers something of which the school can be proud, if the pupils are trained to take part, and to give their best in speech and music. It can arrange, where goodwill exists, that every year there shall be a service of rededication in some convenient central place of worship, which may be the local cathedral or abbey, parish church, a Free Church place of worship or some secular building of sufficient inspiration. There can always be at least one, and perhaps several, to be chosen from forms of social work which can be supported or pioneered by the school: as a rule these should be concrete and local in character and of a kind in which the pupils can take some active part. In all these ways religious education can be made more real.

Having laid down these conclusions which we regard as fundamental because they affect the whole school life from start to finish, and touch not without inspiration every subject that is studied, we turn back to religious instruction or Scripture knowledge or divinity, which take its place among the other subjects of the curriculum. We find ourselves here in general agreement with the Spens Report, which we do not wish to supersede but to supplement. We agree that the proper approach to the study of Scripture in school is historical and objective, and that the best teacher is one whose interest in the subject and desire to teach it proceed from religious faith. We recognise equally that the three main departments into which Biblical study at school are likely to fall are ;the religious ideas and experiences of Israel, of which the record is to be found in the Old Testament, the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, and the beginning of the Christian Church'. At this point we remind ourselves that the usual allowance of time in a Secondary School is 45 minutes a week, or 27 hours a year, and that, even if this is carried continuously for five years, which in a good many schools is not the case, this allowance yields only 135 hours, for the whole school life. Even for the second only of the main departments specified above it is insufficient, and for any other subject of the curriculum such a tiny allowance would be regarded as ridiculous. We strongly endorse the recommendation that the time allowance should be not less than the equivalent of two periods a week, and we believe that if the rigidity of Certificate examinations be modified, and the schools given greater control of their own curricula, this arrangement can easily be made. The Spens Report goes on to consider the weakness which causes so much of the difficulty, and leads to so much neglect of the subject in the schools, and finds it in the lack of sufficient professional knowledge on the part of the teachers. Teachers are unwilling to take Scripture because they are timid, because they know that they do not know enough about it, because they think that formularies must be followed and because they are afraid that questions will be asked to which they think that they are not free to give a sincere answer. They are also unwilling to take Scripture because they are themselves specialist teachers of some other subject, and it is not their business to travel outside it; some even feel that they lose status if they do. Since nearly all teachers in the Secondary Schools today are specialists in the sense that they teach a subject or a pair of allied subjects, it follows that there is no one left to teach Scripture. It is usual to meet this difficulty by the proposal that Scripture must be 'specialised' also, and there is no doubt that in a large school a specialist teacher of Scripture has a very useful part to play. It is much more doubtful whether the difficulties of the small school can be met by the visits of a specialist from outside, who gives his services to two or three schools. It is in the nature of the young not to regard the efforts of the visitor from outside as worthy of as serious consideration as that which they find it expedient to bestow on the efforts of the regular staff. The subject becomes, to use a common phrase, a 'frill on the curriculum', and, if we are right in finding a close and vital relation between religious education and religious instruction, the result would be unfortunate. This undue specialisation on the part of teachers is the cause of some serious trouble in secondary education because it has gone too far: the child is in danger of not being known as a human being by anybody, but only as being good in French, bad in geography, weak in science, and so on, so that we hear increasing talk of the disintegration of the curriculum and the chaotic state of secondary education. We believe that it will help the schools generally, and the teaching of Scripture particularly, if a teacher of the type of the old form master can be reintroduced into the schools, a man or woman qualified to teach two or three subjects. A problem of serious importance for secondary education therefore arises, which can be solved only by and in the universities. The Spens Report looks for the introduction of specialist teachers of religious knowledge on a wide scale, and we seek to supplement this by bringing back into the schools in much larger numbers teachers qualified in several subjects. But in neither case do the universities supply the need. They do indeed give degrees in theology, but this is not the qualification for which we are looking in the specialist teacher: the approach of the trained theologian to his subject is far too academic and technical for the schools. If on the other hand a would-be teacher wishes to combine his main subject with religious knowledge, he finds that he cannot offer this course in any university. He can indeed obtain a diploma in religious knowledge, but it will take him an extra year which he cannot afford. Moreover while the schools do not want more than one specialist, they do require a number of teachers who are equipped with the necessary knowledge. Not here alone, but here perhaps more keenly than anywhere else, we feel the need of a General Honours course at the universities (1), and, as at several of them the arts side is largely recruited from future teachers, it is not unreasonable to ask that they should pay more special attention to the future vocational requirements of their pupils, and to the needs of the schools which are expressed in our evidence from many quarters.

It is not fair, however, to cast the whole of the blame on the universities. Even as things are, the women teachers have surmounted the difficulties better than the men. It has been put to us in evidence that the head mistresses take this subject more seriously than head masters, speaking generally, and give more personal attention to it, that the enquiry carried out by the Head Mistresses' Association a few years age has proved fruitful, and that women teachers have found a way in which to qualify as specialists, largely by way of the Lambeth Diploma in Theology, to a much greater extent than the men. More can clearly be done than the boys' schools at present think possible. We are of opinion that more use can be made of short courses and refresher courses in religious knowledge of the type of which the course provided by the Board of Education and managed by the Dean of St Paul's and Professor SH Hooke has been now for some years a successful example. But the education authorities should promote such refresher courses for their teachers, and should include religious knowledge among the subjects that can be taken.

Something may also be expected from the development of school libraries, of which there should always be a section in each school for the use and benefit of Common Room, which should not be allowed to fall out of date. This is a topic which need not be dealt with here; but it may be observed that teachers need not be at a loss what to buy for themselves, or for use by their pupils, since they have in the Institute of Christian Education a skilled body, largely the creation of their own profession, ready and able to advise them.

It may be felt at the end of this discussion that the homely proverb seems to apply, that at any rate so far as men teachers are concerned 'You can take a horse to the water, but you cannot make him drink'. It is a perfectly good reason for refusing to teach a subject that you do not know enough about it. But the answer to this is surely that enough can be learned by anyone who regards the subject seriously and is willing to take trouble. It is a perfectly good reason for refusing to teach the subject that you reject the validity of any spiritual interpretation of the universe. But how few do this! Most teachers believe in God, and in the revelation of the Divine in man by his response to the standards of truth, goodness, and beauty. Thereby they do find a point of contact with the generally accepted teaching of Christianity. There are many, we suspect, who do not take part in religious instruction because they think that narrower demands are made upon them than actually are made. Serious enquiry, if they would undertake it, would remove much misconception, and reassure many who have hesitated to take the subject.

Behind all the other misgivings lies the genuine fear of the introduction of tests for teachers; to these we are strongly opposed. No sensible person suggests that a teacher, whatever his subject, should not be allowed to teach in a Secondary School unless he was ready to teach Scripture. But a local authority or head of a school would be perfectly justified in advertising that a teacher was needed, capable of taking a form in Latin, English and Scripture, and no one could feel that there was any intolerance in what would be an action of plain common sense.

We feel therefore that this fear, though real, is not based on substantial grounds; at the same time we assume that the right of particular children to 'contract out' will always be safeguarded. The requirements which we would make of the schools are very few and simple. We would lay on each school the duty of using a syllabus designed to meet the needs and capacities of its own children. Apart from any special arrangements which need to be made for denominational instruction in accordance with the requirements of the trust deed or other definite obligation, such syllabuses could be framed for pupils up to the age of 16 by common agreement, as in the case of the primary schools, but with this difference that they should be wide enough to admit of some differences of approach and some variations of treatment. In the sixth form stage we believe it to be the truest wisdom to grant as much freedom as possible from formal requirements, laying down merely that the teaching must be on a definite plan, and not of denominational character, and that the responsibility rests, as indeed is true of the whole course of religious instruction in the Secondary School, primarily on the governors and head master or head mistress, subject to the authority under which they act.

Here, as elsewhere, we believe and trust in diversity of practice. We would require that the subject should be taught with proper equipment and with a due allowance of time, and that it should extend throughout the school course. We think finally that it should be subject to inspection, by the officers either of the Board, or of the local authorities, as may be most appropriate, because we believe that such inspection would be carried out with sympathy and a desire to help in what is, in its higher levels, a difficult task. We do not believe that this is a subject which, if it is taught in the spirit which we desire, can properly be examined, save in the cases where the teacher sees fit to examine his own pupils.

We would assign this large measure of freedom to the Secondary Schools because we believe that religious instruction is but a part of religious education as a whole, and that, if there is life in it, it will grow, and meet a genuine need of the young. But if there is no life in it, and it is not in the hearts of the teachers, neither agreed syllabus nor inspection nor examination nor any machinery whatever will have power to make it other than a dead thing.

Footnote

(1) At the university college of North Wales, Bangor, courses in Biblical history and literature have recently been arranged. Designed primarily for intending teachers and not available for ministerial students except by special permission, they may be taken as subjects for an arts degree during the first two years. They are also available as an Accessory Course for Honours Students in the departments of Greek, English, Welsh, history and philosophy.