An Outdated Collaboration?: Christian State Schools in a Secular Society

Something that has always perplexed me about the UK is the control that Christianity is awarded over the education of young people. Given that we now live in a society in which less than half of the population identifies with the Christian faith, as revealed in the latest census, surely the teaching of Christian beliefs as fact in roughly a third of schools is something of a blaring anachronism in twenty-first century Britain. According to the Department for Education, of 7,000 faith schools in England, 98% teach either Church of England or Roman Catholic beliefs, with only 42 Jewish, 12 Muslim, 3 Sikh, and 1 Hindu school in the country as of 2011. Clearly, the distribution of faith schools has little correlation to the actual religious beliefs of current UK society.

I myself went to a Roman Catholic Primary School, and much like anyone else from a similar upbringing, I have plenty of anecdotes to make people from secular schools widen their eyes in disbelief. There was the much-loved teacher fired for not being Catholic enough, the bottles of red wine handed out to seven years olds at summer fetes, the agonising struggle to deicide which sins I should confess to at the age of eight, and that one fabled citizenship lesson in which the headteacher made all of us promise never to use condoms or risk the fiery depths of hell. Whilst the vast majority of our schooling was entirely up-to-date and Ofstead approved, many moves by the school seemed designed to send us off into the word with completely archaic ideas about faith and morality in modern Britain.

I should say that I don’t think religious primary schools are a particularly dangerous force of indoctrination, mind-washing children into a rejection of science or spewing hatred at those with different beliefs. Of my entire class, after seven years of hymns, communions, prayers, and confessions - I struggle to think of a single acquaintance from those days who still actively practices the faith. You’d think that surely after all of those formative years spent nodding along with teachers and priests we might have taken to a life time of rigid belief, and yet by week two in our new secular secondary school we had all, without conferring, become secular ourselves. The Holy Trinity was out and Katy Perry, The Hunger Games, and Angry Birds were in.

Despite these memories of a school which was, in many ways, shockingly outdated, I struggle to resent the control religion had over my life at that age, and find this fondness to be something of a phenomenon amongst people I meet from similar backgrounds. Catholicism, like most religions, has a knack of making you friends from around the world, not always based on belief but from experiencing this shared faucet of culture, uniquely unconfined to a country or even continent. Those days gifted me with a foundation of knowledge in lesser studied yet culturally powerful history, which continues to serve me well in everything from pub quizzes to analysing poetry from the middle ages to the romantic movement. To quote Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, ‘[I]f you are born and brought up a Catholic, you have absorbed a good deal of world history and the history of ideas before you are twelve, and it is like learning a language early; the effect is indelible’ (Mary McCarthy, 1957). However, I do believe that this unique ability of religious teaching to impress knowledge upon children usually beyond their reach is merely the effect of daring to teach the young on matters that, in any other context, would be considered overly complex. As someone with a bit of experience in teaching children, I’m a firm believer that kids are a lot more intelligent than we as adults care to credit them, and so perhaps the teaching of any type of more advanced studies in primary schools would be bound to leave that generation with a hazy but useful understanding of say, quantum mechanics or Shakespeare’s Histories. Nevertheless, eleven years olds quoting Henry IV Part One is rather redundant if they never got around to learning their two times tables.

Of course, the troubling relationship between church and state goes much deeper than our education system. Writer and comedian Sandi Toksvig recently raised awareness of the power reserved for Christian Archbishops in the House of Lords, sparking debate when she tweeted that ‘[t]here are only two countries in the world where representatives of the state religion automatically get seats in Parliament. They are the UK and Iran.’ (Sandi Toksvig, via Twitter, February 2023). This allowance of governmental influence to religious leaders raises troubling concerns about how our democracy considers issues such as gay marriage and women’s reproductive rights, long debated by members of the Christian faith. Without looking too dated tradition and cultural norms formed in a Britain of the past, it is hard to justify why exactly this power is awarded solely to members of the Church of England in a multi-faith and predominantly non-religious modern society.

Overall, I think it’s best if as a culture we start to leave the churching to the church and the schooling to the schools. Parents should have the right to raise their children with whichever beliefs they decide, yet the prevalence of faith schools, especially in rural areas, disproportionately caters to a minority in an outdated tradition of Christian schooling in the UK.