• "Religious education is a priority and MUST be saved"
    111 replies, posted
RE wasn't mandatory at my school.
[QUOTE=matt.ant;34759015]That is how it works in Britain, from age 14 you can choose which subjects to study, however Maths, English, Science and RE is mandatory. Art, music, media, languages etc is optional however you must pick 3 (or it might be 4) of the optional ones[/QUOTE] RE needs to be optional.
[QUOTE=AceOfDivine;34759047]RE needs to be optional.[/QUOTE] Maybe, but it was only worth half a GCSE and so it was a one hour lesson per week, whereas Maths and Science were 5 hours a week, and English 4 hours
Trying to say that RE shouldn't be taught in schools is as damaging to children as religion schools who lie to their students about the real world! Some of the people on this thread should been ashamed
[QUOTE=AceOfDivine;34759047]RE needs to be optional.[/QUOTE] I don't entirely see why. I mean, I like people to have a choice in what they learn, but it's not like you're going to instantly take up whatever religion you're being taught about and get whipped otherwise. I enjoyed RE the most out of most of my lessons, yet I have yet to adopt any of the things I've been taught. Though choice is always good.
In my school we studied religion as part of world history, the class was never encouraging people to take part in any one faith (although one day our Islamic principal gave a little speech about religious tolerance) Religion and culture are greatly intertwined, for anyone to know anything about history, or for that matter society at all, they do have to study religion. Regardless of what your religion is, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Atheist, you have to understand other peoples' religion and culture.
[QUOTE=dannyof47;34758657]The state of RE taught at any level in my experience is very poor, repeating the same content year on year - most of which is [B]boaring[/B] and insignficant in the current world. It could do with being replaced with at GCSE and lower levels with some sort of broader 'cultral studies' subject, teaching about how different people live, including information on religion where approperiate.[/QUOTE] 'Boaring' But yeah, I agree with the fact that it should be replaced by something like cultural studies with religion stated only where necessary, like you said.
Religious education is extremely important. If it wasn't for the catholic RE I underwent, I might not be the staunch atheist I am today :v: [editline]19th February 2012[/editline] [QUOTE=The golden;34759578]Physics and chemistry are MASSIVELY important classes and MANY careers require you to have them, but they are still optional. (At least, they are here)[/QUOTE] What jobs require you to have knowledge of chemistry without a college degree?
When I did RE in secondary school it was more like ethics and philosophy than anything else [editline]19th February 2012[/editline] Plus I got an A in gcse RE so I was pretty chuffed with that
I think some level of religious education is important - whether you like it or not, religion is a [i]huge[/i] part of our world and many people's lives and being ignorant of it doesn't help anyone. Understanding religions is a big part of understanding how the world works. [editline]cocks[/editline] though I agree that it could possibly be better just to include it as part of a 'social studies' course or something.
I preferred Philosophy and Ethics anyway - Much more informative and useful, in my opinion. Not that I didn't drop it when I did my GCSEs.
[QUOTE=Rents;34757127]They don't, when I took RE as a GCSE the full range of religions covered was baptist, catholic, protestant and Judaism. If they had the class cover several major religions instead of just the Abrahamic ones I'd support it.[/QUOTE] Mine only covered Catholicism and Catholic issues, the course I did should be banned.
We covered Buddhism and Sikhism. Was interesting, actually.
I think RE should be taught in schools, religions played a very important role in history, and RE does not focus on a single religion, but on all of them. I don't see a problem with that.
[QUOTE=Contag;34763528]Religious education is extremely important. If it wasn't for the catholic RE I underwent, I might not be the staunch atheist I am today :v: ...[/QUOTE] I'm in the same situation, the RE we had during school was done by volunteers, the the only people willing to volunteer were from the local church, so every single lesson I had was just about how awesome Jesus was. And that's what made me realise I was an atheist (I remember arguing with the girl about a Jonah and the whale, her response of "God did it" didn't satisfy me) Proper RE lessons that taught us about multiple religions would have been awesome, instead of the one sided crap we got.
The problem is when schools make religious education compulsory and it's heavily biased towards christian/catholic studies. RE is largely a waste of time in my eyes, it should only be a voluntary subject, as it just increases the workload (pointlessly) for students, and wastes time that could've been better spent on shit that actually matters, like English/writing and maths. I remember when I was in high school, I always thought it was amusing that we got an assembly lecture because of the massive amounts of students who were not "performing" in religious education, the contention was basically implied that we were just rebelling against the system just because. No idiots, it's because every student realized what a goddamn waste of time it was having to write some stupid prayer card shit when there was more pressing matters at hand like work experience and maths tests to study for.
I think it is kinda necessary, for junior cycle (~13 to ~15 years old) our religion teacher put a lot of emphasis on Islam, for obvious reasons, and I'd say if she didn't, a lot of people in my year would still think that Islam encourages terrorism, and that Muslim women are forced to wear burqas. But I do think that the courses need to be rethought, because they're quite biased towards religious thought. I'm currently studying religion for senior cycle (~17 to ~18) and my teacher marked me down for writing an essay on some part of Christianity and saying "... this is shown in the story where Jesus..." because I used the word story rather than event. It also covers different non-religious thought, but it subtly hints that they're wrong, using phrases like "reductionism allows no room for spiritual fulfilment" and "It is bleak and unrelenting in its view that..."
idk, at least in my school, RE was about different religions, and about the cultures that they came from i think it's pretty important if it was taught like that everywhere; on the other hand i know people whose schools basically just taught them about how they should be christians and that was it. [editline]19th February 2012[/editline] though also from what i remember we didn't really do all that much work in RE at all
[quote]Supporters of RE want to see it included in the humanities category.[/quote] I thought that most schools did this anyway.
[QUOTE=hexpunK;34757787]students are more likely to believe a teacher than their family for education[/QUOTE] actually no this isn't true.
our RE teacher's room was pretty cool as well, she had so many prints of paintings related to hinduism and islam on the walls, along with other stuff like flags, that the whole room was basically covered with stuff floor to ceiling, so much so that as soon as you walked in you could feel how all the sounds were suddenly damped
[QUOTE=The golden;34757706]Let's be honest here, when these students are done school and enter the working world, is the religious education really going to benefit them? Probably not. It should be a optional class for the students wish to take it or need to take it for later education/careers. It's a very touchy area, and not a lot of students are going to care for it, so why force-feed it to them? The final year of highschool here, where I live, consists of 1 language course (you pick from a selection) and 1 history course (you pick from a selection). That's it. Everything else you pick and choose depending on what you want to do or what you need to do. Why can't this religious course be any different?[/QUOTE] We had RE here in my school when I was a kid, it was actually pretty good. It was a little more about christianity but mostly it was quite diverse, ranging from philosophical stuff to hinduism and whatever. It's really good to keep you openminded and I thought some of it was pretty interesting even. Studying purely religion would be kinda pointless since that's basically fairytales, but I think teaching kids to not hate every different person on the earth is pretty high priority
[QUOTE=Croix;34769724]We had RE here in my school when I was a kid, it was actually pretty good. It was a little more about christianity but mostly it was quite diverse, ranging from philosophical stuff to hinduism and whatever. It's really good to keep you openminded and I thought some of it was pretty interesting even. Studying purely religion would be kinda pointless since that's basically fairytales, but I think teaching kids to not hate every different person on the earth is pretty high priority[/QUOTE] agreed i mean, if you're gonna spend your life working in an office, then all the fiction books you read probably aren't going to benefit you there but that doesn't mean you shouldn't read them at all because of that
[QUOTE=Rents;34757127]They don't, when I took RE as a GCSE the full range of religions covered was baptist, catholic, protestant and Judaism. If they had the class cover several major religions instead of just the Abrahamic ones I'd support it.[/QUOTE] There are many different modules schools can elect to do. We did Christianity, Islam and Sikhism.
Maybe they should teach the religions. That way everyone will realize how much bullshit they all are. Honestly the only people that I've ever met that have read the bible fall either into 1. Super religious, and 2. Completely Atheist. The ones that were super religious come from a family background of the same level of religiousness.
I thought RE primarily focused on deconstructing each of the various religious doctrines.
It should be an optional subject to choose from, not mandatory.
[QUOTE=Ylsid;34770434]It should be an optional subject to choose from, not mandatory.[/QUOTE] From GCSE onwards it is. It should be mandatory up until then (Like all subjects), which it is.
[QUOTE=Darth_GW7;34770615]From GCSE onwards it is. It should be mandatory up until then (Like all subjects), which it is.[/QUOTE] No it should not be mandatory at any point.
when we had Re a good 80% of the students (me included) could not stay awake in class as it was so goddamn boring in fact the only time anyone really paid attention was when they put on the green mile why it had anything to do with RE i have no idea
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