Pupils cannot make sense of history, art or law without knowing the religions behind them

The argument

Proponents of this position begin by separating two things that the question tends to run together: teaching religion and teaching pupils to be religious. The claim here concerns the first. Religion, on this account, is among the largest forces that have shaped the societies pupils are being educated into, and a curriculum that leaves it out does not produce neutral pupils but ignorant ones. Proponents argue that the gaps show up everywhere in the rest of the timetable. A great deal of the art, music and architecture a pupil is asked to admire was made for worship, and its subject matter is unintelligible without knowing the stories it depicts. Much of the literature set for study turns on sin, grace, pilgrimage or prophecy. The legal and political vocabulary pupils are taught, including oaths, charity, conscience and the very idea that a person may refuse a lawful order, carries a religious history. Wars, migrations, revolutions and constitutions were argued in religious terms by the people who made them, and a pupil who does not know those terms cannot follow the argument. The argument concludes that religion is not an optional extra alongside the subjects but part of their content, so excluding it does not leave the curriculum intact. On this account a school that declines to teach religion has not avoided the topic; it has handed the pupil a version of history, art and politics with the reasoning removed, and has left them to pick up whatever account of other people's beliefs happens to circulate outside the classroom. Proponents argue that teaching religion, taught as subject matter rather than as doctrine, is what a school owes a pupil who is expected to understand the world.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that this argument succeeds only for a narrow kind of teaching and is then used to justify much more. Whatever religious background a painting or a statute requires can be supplied inside the art or history lesson, they argue, which is an argument for better history teaching rather than for religion as a subject with its own slot, syllabus and specialist teachers. They add that the practical result in many systems has not been the comparative study the argument describes but instruction weighted heavily towards the locally dominant faith, so the case for context ends up licensing something the case itself does not support.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The distinction is clear in principle but rarely holds in practice, since syllabuses described as teaching about religion have in many systems weighted instruction heavily towards the locally dominant faith. [Rejecting P2] Whatever religious background a painting, text or statute requires can be supplied inside the art, literature or history lesson that needs it, which is an argument for better teaching of those subjects. [Rejecting P3] A curriculum that handles religion as context where context is needed is not one with the reasoning removed, so the alleged gap does not arise. [Rejecting C] At most it follows that pupils need religious context within existing subjects, not that religion should be taught as a subject of its own.