Unmasking the Idols

The Case for Christian Schools Part 2

“Teaching must renounce the authority of the teacher… The teacher must aspire to be neutral.”

— The Discussion of Controversial Values in the Classroom, 1969

Thus spake the influential educationalist Lawrence Stenhouse, back in the swinging,  freedom-loving sixties. And so, relativism has not just crept in. It is actively promoted in schools.

For some decades now, we have taught our children that there is no absolute truth which cannot be demonstrated by science. Anything which cannot be reduced to numbers - including morality, the question of what is good - is purely a matter of personal taste. A matter of individual choice. And on what constitutes a right or wrong choice, schools must remain “neutral.”

Stenhouse's lofty aspiration to neutrality remains a commonplace in schools. In particular, relativism remains the preferred modus operandi of many Religious Education teachers. Religions, whether Christianity, Islam or whatever, are not taught as a whole, in anything like a systematic way. Their own voices and teachings are not presented. Rather, they are presented as rival “opinions” on otherwise neutral subjects: all editorially selected by whatever “neutral” person it is who devises the curriculum.

A topic – say, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, women’s clothing, the afterlife – is introduced from the supposedly neutral perspective of secular modernity. Examples are then given from one or two religions, along with snippets from their respective scriptures, which the pupils are expected to evaluate and employ to furnish their arguments.

Imagine for a moment that English Literature classes were taught like this: not by reading books, but by offering snippets of literature thematically arranged. The pupils would study not Shakespeare or Milton or Harper Lee, but love, or tolerance, or diversity, and be given two- or three-sentence extracts from the great authors as proof texts to demonstrate the relative position of those texts on the topic in question. They would then be required to express their opinion on the relative merits of the texts they have glanced at. We would hardly deem pupils subjected to such a pedagogy literate. Yet this is the approach advocated by the Religious Studies orthodoxy.

Mark Lehain, former Headteacher at Bedford Free School and Director of Parents and Teachers for Excellence, is at the forefront of a movement to restore knowledge-based curricula to British schools. Drawing on studies by E.D. Hirsch, Lehain argues that as skills have replaced knowledge in curricula throughout Europe, the results to pupils' examination success have been generally deleterious, but most markedly so among the poor: you can read his findings and recommendations for free here. Middle-class children benefit from the cultural capital of their parents, transmitted as knowledge through the books in their homes, visits to museums, plays and concerts, foreign travel, dietary habits and etiquette, and conversation with them and their fellow university educated adult friends. Working class children enjoy far fewer of these benefits, which in the end amount to knowledge, from which they are completely cut off. The only place where they might learn such knowledge would be schools, but as we have seen, schools have for some time been ideologically opposed to the imposition of such (or any) knowledge, for fear of being partisan or “brainwashing.” Leftist class warrior educationalists also fear forced gentrification. Yet in so doing, they are hobbling working class children before they can even learn to walk.

There is some hope in the Curriculum Education movement, which demands a return to a traditional, knowledge-based, systematic curriculum. The optimist might think this uncontroversial. Yet the hangover from the contrasting skills-based emphasis on teaching persists among the still dominant, self-styled “progressive” educational hierarchy. The progressives maintain that pupils need to learn how to process knowledge and argue about it convincingly, rather than learning the knowledge itself. The skills are what are important and enduring. After all, knowledge is so readily accessible, especially in the Internet age, that there is no point in learning anything by rote. All that is needed is the skills to sift information. And on the truth of the information itself, the educator must remain neutral. Knowledge in itself is pure data, completely value-free.

But how can pupils know which evidence to trust?

How can they make choices without knowledge?

How can they make reasoned arguments on the basis of the minimal and highly selective evidence presented to them in class?

And who, ultimately, defines the range of data from which they may legitimately “choose?”

The impeccably neutral teacher. Or the neutral State. Or the neutral textbook writer. In other words, whoever "neutrally" curates whatever particular snippets of data the children will be fed.

Need I say that this neutrality is a myth?

The Church of England Education Office certainly thinks so:

There is no such thing as a neutral education. As soon as we begin to teach something to someone else, we are inevitably making value judgements about what we are teaching, how we are teaching it and why we are teaching it. Any decision we make about what or how to teach contains within it, an implicit understanding of the human condition, of what is important in life, of the relationships we want to foster, and of what is worth learning, knowing or questioning. – The Fruit of the Spirit, A Church of England Discussion Paper on Character Education, 2015, p.3

So if the popular phenomenological, topic- and skills-based approach to Religious Studies is not really neutral, what is its hidden agenda? Absolute relativism: for as teachers mime agnostic neutrality and present this as the norm, they inculcate not only by word but by example the firm conviction that there is no truth.

Students are exhorted to write about what, say, Islam or Christianity teaches, but only that “some Muslims believe…” or “some Christians believe…” In other words, “some believe x, some believe y, but ultimately, the only truth is that you can believe whatever you want.”

Because none of it really matters.

And even if it did, the basis of these convictions and the question of whether they are even credible cannot be touched upon - for fear of breaching the commandment, “Thou shalt not offend.”

This is exactly what our pupils have been taught to think by the very people who are claiming not to be telling them what to think: by our “neutral,” secular educators, our brave renouncers of authority. Our departments of State, our university lecturers, our teachers.

With all the authority they can bring to bear.

Stenhouse did not see that teachers who claim neutrality in the supposed renunciation of authority are in fact exercising authority in disguise. They are making the authoritative claim that rival truth-claims do not matter, and through the process of authoritative obfuscation implicit in the “learning for skills” agenda, are restricting access to the knowledge which which will enable pupils to make reasoned decisions of their own.

One way to answer this problem would be simply to appeal to another, older authority: the authority of nation, Church or Party, perhaps. One could simply assert that there is some system of revealed or otherwise incontestable truth; that anything which does not match up to it should simply be lopped off, Procrustean style. Our Bible, our Qur’an, our Manifesto, or whatever, is the only truth, and anyone who makes a rival truth claim or suggests there is no truth at all is simply wrong.

But this will not convince. For one thing, it is exactly this kind of bald assertion of truth of which the young are sceptical. Now, they are sceptical and relativistic only because they have been taught to be, but let’s for a moment assume that this scepticism has been taught for a good reason. After all, we have seen and continue to see the result of religious movements, empires and people’s Soviet republics asserting their truth-claims by threats of incarceration, humiliation or eternal damnation, each attempting to enforce their uniform way of thought on all people. When truth becomes a matter of who has the biggest guns or spikiest torture racks, scepticism is understandable and even admirable.

But - what happens when scepticism towards absolute truth-claims becomes an absolute truth-claim itself? In other words, when scepticism is itself presented as the sole truth, also to be enforced? When, for example, positions in universities and the civil service, platforms for public speaking, even the possibility of adopting children, become inaccessible for failing to conform?

This is what happens when relativism itself becomes absolute. It is logically inconsistent to make the truth-claim that no truth-claims are of themselves demonstrable as true, because there is no reason why the idea that there is no ultimate truth should be taken any more seriously than any other claim. All relativism can do is assert itself, just like any other truth-claim, leaving us in an unresolved and unresolvable cacophony of bald, unjustified rival voices.

And assert itself it does: to the extent that relativism has become the only permissible way of thinking at all. Like a cuckoo, it has emptied the nest of rivals, and only too late does the mother bird realise what a monster she has hatched.

Relativism is revealed as an authoritarianism which does not reveal anything beyond itself, does not see any need to justify itself, but commands the gaze, asserts itself as the sole arbiter of truth and demands unquestioning assent. Or, as we say in the theological trade, an idol – hiding its brazen fists beneath modernity’s velvet gloves of neutrality and choice.