Defend Truth

Opinionista

Freedom is a fragile thing

Rousseau is a voluntary exile from professional philosophy, where having to talk metaphysics eventually became unbearably irritating. He now spends his time trying to arrest the rapid decline in common sense exhibited by his species, both through teaching critical thinking and business ethics at the University of Cape Town, and through activities aimed at eliminating the influence of religious ideology in public policy. When not being absurdly serious, he’s one of those left-wing sorts who enjoys red wine, and he is alleged to be able to cook a mean Bistecca Fiorentine.

In the midst of our current – and righteous – campaign to safeguard our hard-won freedom to information and to a free media, we should equally guard against the clear and present erosion in too many schools of our children’s freedom of religious belief. Or, indeed, the freedom to have no religious belief at all.

While South Africa’s Constitution attracts justified praise for its commitment to preserving various freedoms, we should remain vigilant in our defence of the rights it affords us, and consistent in our engagement with the responsibilities that correlate with those rights. When proposed legislation threatens to chill free speech, it’s appropriate for us to use that freedom to challenge measures such as the Protection of Information Bill. In the absence of such vigilance, the Constitution could end up with little more than symbolic value.

But while recently our attention has been on troubling questions related to press freedom, a quiet, but worrying, and ongoing erosion of another freedom should not be allowed to pass unnoticed. And this is freedom of belief, or more specifically, the freedom to have no beliefs at all, particularly of a religious sort. The place where this freedom is threatened is in schools, where despite official policy which insists on religious neutrality, many schools continue to abuse their captive and impressionable audiences by proselytising for one specific religious viewpoint or another.

The National Policy on Religion and Education (2003) is a wonderful document. Kader Asmal’s foreword tells us that the policy “adopts a co-operative model that accepts our rich heritage and the possibility of creative inter-action between schools and faith whilst, [sic] protecting our young people from religious discrimination or coercion”, and that it “is neither negative nor hostile towards any religion or faith and does not discriminate against anyone”. Most important, perhaps, is that it calls for “a profound appreciation of spirituality and religion in its many manifestations, …  but does not impose these”.

The policy makes for interesting reading, as finding a compromise between the religious – and mostly Christian – beliefs of many of our citizens, and the need to embrace the possibility of a diversity of views is a tricky task. The policy meets this challenge by defining “religion education” as an activity that requires “a spirit of openness in which there shall be no overt or covert attempt to indoctrinate pupils into any particular belief or religion”, with “religious instruction” understood as “instruction in a particular faith or belief, with a view to the inculcation of adherence to that faith or belief”. The former is permitted in schools, the latter not. In fact, the state “must maintain parity of esteem with respect to religion, religious or secular beliefs in all of its public institutions, including its public schools”.

But these noble intentions often seem to bear little relation to what might actually be happening in many of our public schools. Consider a school like Stellenbosch Primary, whose website says: “Die skool sal ‘n Christelike karakter hê en dit sal in alle aktiwiteite uitgeleef word” (The school will have a Christian character, and this will be exemplified in all its activities). And this Christian character frequently seems to involve keeping children in the “dark ages”, judging by the regular emails I receive from both parents and pupils at various schools, expressing dismay at having to endure classes which dismiss evolution, and instead preach the explanatory value of creationism.

As many readers will know, the teaching of evolution has recently been in the spotlight due to a proposed policy change which will remove it as a compulsory topic in schools. The topic is alleged to be “cognitively too demanding”. The irony is that the concept of a triune God, or immortality of the soul, are orders of magnitude more cognitively demanding than the basic principles of evolution by natural selection. The travesty is that the lack of qualified teachers in this and other subjects is not being remedied by better incentives for those who might want to teach, but instead by dumbing down the curriculum.

As part of the same round of revisions to the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (Caps), the life skills curriculum uses plenty of neutral-sounding language while simultaneously allowing for much dogma to be transmitted into the minds of our children. While it speaks of the virtues of producing scholars who are able to “critically evaluate information”, it’s simultaneously littered with sentiments that express a necessary connection between religion and morality.

In Grade 6, pupils get to hear about “risks or dangers associated with non-participation; penalties for non-participation”. Of course there may be risks, especially if your family or community is hostile to any questioning of their chosen worldview. But there may also be benefits, and we see no mention of these in the curriculum. Furthermore, seeing as it is quite plausible that what risks there are often result from irrational adherence and defence of dogmatic faith, discussion of the risks should really be framed as a problem with religious belief – not a problem for the child who is thinking about opting out of religion.

In fact, the dogmatic retention of religious points of view is perhaps encouraged in the curriculum by requirements such as “The teaching of religion education must be sensitive to religious interests by ensuring that individuals and groups are protected from ignorance, stereotypes, caricatures and denigration”. What does “sensitive” mean in this context? Is it a stereotype or caricature to say that for some believers, the content of their beliefs contradict established knowledge in biology, physics or cosmology? It’s easy to claim offence, and the lessons children are taught here will further reinforce the idea that the victory will always go to the hypersensitive and those who complain the loudest.

Teaching about the wrongness of “discrimination against religions” and “accommodating religious diversity” is not necessarily problematic, so long as being critical does not automatically make one discriminatory. And so long as we also find counterbalancing mentions of the wrongness of discrimination against the non-religious, and how laws against “religious discrimination” may in fact exist in tension to laws around freedom of speech.

While children remain free to excuse themselves from religious ceremonies, prayers and the like, two significant problems are not addressed by the “freedom of association” embedded in existing school policy. First, if your school’s character is explicitly defined as Christian, you have no option to disassociate yourself on a formal level, except by leaving the school. If there are no other schools in your area, or that are suitable for whatever reason, then you are compelled to study at a school that is Christian in character, despite the fact that public schools are not permitted to take on or practice the character of any particular religion.

Second, and more disturbingly, children cannot be expected to have the independence of mind to disassociate themselves from such activities, or to recognise that what is being taught to them as consisting of critical enquiry and tolerance of diversity, is in fact significantly biased towards a religious point of view. Consider also peer pressure: if all of their friends happily say their prayers, I doubt that we would find many children willing to risk the potential social repercussions of excusing themselves. They would instead meekly play along, despite the fact that the mystic mumbo-jumbo they are exposed to might make no sense to them at all.

And in the manner of all propaganda and brainwashing, it may well end up being the case that some – or many – of these children end up taking the nonsense they hear seriously, and thereby consign one part of their rational brains to eternal sleep. We have an existing policy, the National Policy on Religion and Education, which reminds schools that religion education (a neutral account of various religious points of view) is permissible in schools, and religious instruction is not. The Caps are not in accord with this policy, and neither are many of our schools.

This is one of those areas which presents a real threat of the subtle erosion of the liberties enshrined in our Constitution. We have little reason to be alarmed at the teaching of religious traditions and points of view in schools, so long as they are presented critically rather than being yoked to concepts like “equipping learners, irrespective of their socio-economic background, race, gender, physical ability or intellectual ability, with the knowledge, skills and values necessary for self-fulfilment, and meaningful participation in society as citizens of a free country”.

Self-fulfilment and meaningful participation is possible for us all, not only for those who believe in one particular religious tradition. Meaningful participation is even possible for those who think any religious tradition is a handicap to self-fulfilment. We can have little control over what children are taught in their homes, but ideology taught as objectivity has no place in public education. After all, schooling is meant to make one smarter, rather than to transmit the crippling notion that there is only one route to human flourishing. DM

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