Collective Worship

My son turned three in February and so last week was his first week in school. He is ready to explode with joy.  Spending time with other children, playing & learning, are things he is beyond excited about. 

My first day taking him, he ran into the classroom almost forgetting I was there and headed straight for their play-castle.  He climbed into the turret to survey his classroom kingdom with a giant grin on his face.  This boy loves school.  It was a bit of a surprise then, when he was immediately joined by a little girl, puppy dog eyes welling up as she declared “I want my Mammy!”.

“This is my Daddy!” Affirms my son.  “He’s going now.”

All of which is great.  I can’t wait to hear about what he’s done all day, and the fact that he’s not only excited to play, but excited to learn, fills me with an immense sense of pride.  Education is the most important gift we give to our children.  Unfortunately there is another part of my brain which is panicking.  And it’s not because my little boy is growing up, or I’m worried he’ll pick up bad habits or any of the usual parent fears about sending their kids into education.  There are no two words right now which are causing me more doubt, confusion and dread than “collective worship”. 

My own experience with religion is pretty standard, my upbringing involved singing hymns in school, prayers in assembly, nativity plays...  I've read the bible (some parts more often than others), and while I never had religion of any sort thrust down my throat, there was just an assumption that there was a God.  I questioned it more and more as I grew older, at one point switching from theist to atheist on almost a weekly basis, before finally having my moment of realisation as a teenager, in a Waterstone's, whilst on holiday with my Mum.  I don’t remember why, but I know I was bored and I was waiting for my family to pay for the books they were buying.  As I waited I picked up a book on ethics to leaf through and there was a sentence in there that read “Christians believe morality to be passed down from a God in Heaven”….  And I realised, quite angrily at the time, that this was utter nonsense.  Just absolute rubbish.  Clearly the whole thing, for whatever reason, was a complete lie. 

I have, in the past, described myself as “a hardcore atheist”, thinking it was important for people to stop deluding themselves, and realise the simple truth that there is no God.  For me, it became like saying you believe in leprechauns.  And how can you ever put your trust in another person after you find out they believe in leprechauns? Or, even worse, that the decisions made by those leprechauns influence our daily lives?

Which is all very well in theory, but it doesn’t work in practice.  I know lovely, trustworthy, intelligent people who believe in God and while I cannot fathom why or how they can believe it, I accept they do and, aside from the occasional sarcastic comment, it doesn’t change my relationship them one way or the other.

My son’s school practices “collective worship” which should, in theory, be non-denominational.  My child’s teachers will be telling him, however passively, that there is a God, and that will almost certainly be a Judeo-Christian God. 

I am paying taxes to have people lie to my son. 

Before you start to question it, I am not against the idea of him having religion.  I will not, as much as is possible, impose my views on him.  He will not be an atheist child but, as Richard Dawkins would put it, a child of atheist parents.  If, when he’s older, having sat and thought about it and come to an informed decision, he decided he wants to become a Jehovah’s Witness?  Good for him.  I’ll disagree with him, but at least he’s thought about it and made the decision himself.  The same goes for anything.  If, when he’s old enough, he wants to vote UKIP I’ll argue with him until I’m blue in the face, but I’d still give him a lift to the polling station. But it would upset me (and every other parent worth anything) if I found out his school had enforced talking to Nigel Farrage on a weekly basis.  And I’m struggling to justify to myself allowing him to be put into that situation.

So what are the options? 
Option 1 is to just let them get on with it.  Even if he does end up singing hymns or having to say the lords prayer once in a while, he's only going to believe it as much as he believes Doctor Who is real, or Santa Claus, and like all the lies we tell our children he will grow to realise there is less truth in them than there may seem.  But that feels wrong.  When we tell our children the fun lies (the Easter bunny being the latest one) we do it almost as a game, and in full knowledge that we are doing it.  It is a shared secret amongst adults that these things are not true, a world-wide promise to maintain our kids' sense of wonder, and woe betide anyone who would dare reveal the truth.  We do this with full knowledge that, given time, our children will grow to question these things and eventually join in the game for the benefit of their younger counterparts.  But that's not the point of "collective worship".  It doesn't exist to promote that sense of wonder, it isn't a game, it exists because people honesty, passionately, believe these things to be true and want to indoctrinate these ideas to children at the earliest opportunity.  It is not a lie I can join in on and, if asked, would have to explain that I don't believe in it.  At which point I am either telling him his teachers are misinformed or are liars.  While I'd like him to grow up able to question the things his teachers (and friends, and parents) tell him, I don't think forcing a three year old into debating religion with his teachers in the best start for his school career.

Our only other option is to withdraw him from these events. But that's unfair.  He wouldn't want to be excluded, it would teach him (and the other kids) that he is different and would ultimately still lead to conversations he's not old enough to have:

"Daddy why do I have to leave assembly?"

"Because some people believe an incorporeal space giant made the world and everything in it and they want to talk to him and ask him favours by singing songs about his magical half human, half space giant zombie child.  But Daddy doesn't believe in the space giant, and thinks this is too big a concept for people so young, so doesn't want you taking part until you're old enough to understand what you're saying"

"But I like singing!"




It's not going to work.  So obviously we go with option one, but I'm not happy about it and am no closer to being happy about it than when I started writing this blog.  Schools should teach our children to question things.  They should teach our kids that some people believe things which may or may not be true, and educate them to make their own decisions on them.  If a teacher held a séance in school there would be outcry and that teacher would be fired.  If schools as a whole started telling children which way to vote there would be an all-party commission within the day. But somehow teaching them about a vengeful magic creator is fine.


I'm going to end on a quote from the great Sam Seaborne which, while used in a completely different context, sums up my feelings better than my own ramblings ever could:

"Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes. We need gigantic monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be getting six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defence. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.”