Presidential Address, given by Most Rev Dr Rowan Williams to the Governing Body of the Church in Wales, University of Wales, Lampeter, 10th April, 2002
British society is still strikingly unable to make up its mind about religion. High levels of popular religiosity remain and surface at times of national mourning - as we have seen in the last two weeks; the press still seems to find a fascination with what they think to be the inner politics of Anglican life; and there is a notable and measurable sympathy for some sort of religious element in the education of our children. It was this last feature that helped to guarantee an initially warm reception for last year's report on Church schools from the commission chaired by Lord Dearing. The government, which had already indicated some enthusiasm for Church schools, at first welcomed the report; it looked as though the expansion urged by Dearing would be plain sailing.
Then the cold feet developed. It was rightly understood that commitment to Church schools could and should entail commitment to schools with a non-Christian religious basis, and the discussion became one about 'faith schools' (not in fact the correct legal term, but the one that prevailed in the press). Alarm bells began to ring. Last summer's race riots in the North of England persuaded some that religious education must be divisive; the horrifying events around denominational schools in Northern Ireland received full coverage; and then there was September 11th, and a quite new level of panic about religious fanaticism. In and out of Parliament, doubts were expressed about the wisdom of expanding 'sectarian' education at a time like this. Right on cue came reports that a Christian school in the North-East of England was teaching creationism. Here in Wales, although the Dearing report did not address our situation directly, we face the same questions, made more acute as we work at improving communications between the faith communities; if we want an expansion of Church schools like that recommended by Dearing, how should we respond to the challenges posed in terms of the needs of a divided and suspicious society?
One thing that needs saying straight away - alas - is that many who have taken prominent part in this public discussion have shown an astonishing disregard for the actual practice of religious schools, and have talked as though they were relentless tools of indoctrination into violence and bigotry. Holy Cross school in Belfast has been taken as the norm or the natural result of 'faith schools'; spectres have been conjured up of Muslim schools reinforcing a state within a state, promoting irrational loyalties and communal paranoia. We badly need some common sense and accurate vision here; but we also need to clarify for ourselves exactly what we do expect from schools with religious affiliation.
And there is another preliminary remark that needs to be made. The discussion of faith schools should be a part of our general reflection on how we should be involved in the whole pattern of state education, which can take a vast range of forms. We need to think about how we best train clergy and others for constructive work in the state system, how we foster vocations to teach not just in Church schools but in the average local authority school (perhaps particularly in secondaries, where religious education - not to mention worship - is so often neglected or performed with sopmething less than full professional commitment). We need to ask how we can press for syllabuses in religious education that are not just vague travelogues. Good practice needs identifying here, and the Church has plenty of expertise to offer.
But let's return to the faith schools issue. At the heart of the worries of those hostile to the idea is a conviction that education is essentially a neutral matter; it gives a child a set of mental skills that will enable him or her to function in society (which is, of course, supposed to be secular). If you want to equip a child to function in this open public space, you cannot at the same time encourage a withdrawal to another world in which religious ideas and values dominate. Of course, you are still free to practice your religion as a matter of private option; but to give it a foothold in the educational system is to invite the eventual breakdown of the agreed public consensus into a set of mutually hostile groups.
I want to suggest that there are at least three things wrong with this analysis.
First: education is not so simply reduced to a neutral acquiring of skills. Some things can be learned about only by at the very least taking seriously what it means to do them - music being the obvious example. You can't teach music on the assumption that playing instruments or singing is something always done by other people, who are not really like you. The student may or may not be musically gifted or even interested; but they will grasp nothing about music if they are taught by tone-deaf teachers who will always look at music as outsiders. To learn in this area is to grasp a little of a certain kind of experience. And this experience isn't always just a matter of learning to function within a society successfully enough to survive; it opens doors to the sort of experience that changes what is possible in a society for the individual and for the whole group. The first question, then, is about how education in general deals with what isn't directly functional or useful - and it's a question about far more than religious education or faith schools, a question of some urgency in our obsessional, test-minded educational world.
Second: there is indeed a public space in our society, a silent agreement that we shall look for common ground that doesn't depend upon highly specific beliefs or revelations. But that space is always being argued over by the flesh and blood people who live in it because they often belong already to more local and particular communities. It was the great Anglican theologian, social theorist and spiritual writer, John Neville Figgis, who put into circulation at the beginning of the last century the idea that the state was a 'community of communities'. We don't stand before the power of government as individuals but as members of interest groups, conviction groups and so on - and it is as members of such groups that we work within the state and try to persuade others of our convictions. So if education is going to equip us for society as it is, it shouldn't just be treating us as abstract people who have no loyalties and beliefs to start with, but as people who already have affinities with living communities of concern. This is probably most strongly the case when we think about our Muslim neighbours; it would be a nonsense to pretend that children from such backgrounds could ever be 'clean slates' on which an enlightened society could write its impersonal values. Good education always works with the particular not the abstract.
So, third: we have to ask whether it's such a good idea to separate off religious learning from other learning if we want a healthy and argumentative democracy (very different from a divided and bigoted society). Anglican schools force Anglicans to defend and explain their ideas in the context of a wider critical world; they subject their teaching style and content, their religious education and moral ethos, to (literally) inspection. They make the Church accountable in some significant ways. And by bringing the Church into this wider world, they make for a more not a less intelligent religious mentality. Instead of a religious identity shaped behind locked doors by teachers with no responsibility to anything except the religious community, we have the religious community venturing out to explore whether it can really engage with the work of education in a convincing and professional way while letting religious belief shape the whole of what's done. All research suggests that the best of Anglican schools do indeed perform this task in a convincing way. If our Muslim neighbours become more involved in the same fashion, we can look for a more intellectually and socially involved Islamic community, well able to play a part in our society - not a ghetto, dominated by deep suspicion of the wider world, so that younger members lose faith because they cannot connect their faith with their experience, or else (as we have seen) adopt distorted and destructive models of faith because they have no encouragement to reflect on it and argue it in the public sphere.
Some schools give the message that religious commitment will never be seen as serious by the wider world; and that can reinforce religious reaction, fundamentalistic resentment. Responsible religious education is about helping students see why religion is a serious, a deep matter. Faith schools, rather than representing a retreat to religious ghettoes, are about our society letting go of its nervousness over speaking of religion in public. Those who simply don't want religion spoken of in public because they are convinced it is intellectually empty or morally vicious have every right to their view - but they cannot expect religious people to take it as a neutral picture of what's good for society. They too have to argue and persuade; and the presence of faith schools is a proper stimulus to that.
Now of course we want to be there in the public sphere because we believe that we have been given a saving truth which is capable of totally transforming human lives; and we want schools at least to convey with fairness and sympathy what such a commitment looks like and feels like. But more specifically with our own schools we want our children to grow and learn in such a way that their intellectual and emotional development doesn't appear to be going on in a quite different world from that of their faith community. We want them to feel that the belief of this community is a natural part of a full human life. In this sense, Dearing was right to say bluntly that Church schools are a tool of mission - for those who want their children to grow in such an integrated way, but also for those who want their children to keep hold of some sense of an integrated moral and spiritual life even if they don't subscribe fully to the belief system the school represents. The Dearing report comes out of a renewed confidence in some quarters about the importance of good and committed religious education and about the moral and pastoral qualities that can be offered by a school based on religious commitment - not exclusively, obviously, but in ways that are visible to many. Our record in Wales is good in this respect - and we have largely been spared the problem that does unfortunately shadow a minority of Church schools in England, the shadow of a popularity based on social elitism. I hope that Dearing will spur us on to new ventures. And I have in mind also a conversation recently with a prominent Welsh Muslim involved in statutory education, who suggested that perhaps we needed a forum in Wales where Christians and Muslims could discuss together the nature and potential of faith schools, working together to combat the sort of misunderstandings I have been trying here to challenge. Christians have nothing to gain from a Muslim population who feel that their beliefs are seen by others with fear and ignorance. Everyone is the loser in such a situation. If we are properly confident in our faith, we shall be glad to venture it in the realm of statutory education, and glad to encourage other faiths in the same task. We can work together to challenge a mistaken secularism and to promote a lively interchange about faith in our society. So far from compromising our conviction, this is, I believe, a mark of confident willingness to meet other faiths at their best. Secularism is not a self-evident truth, in education or in any other sphere. We need not feel embarrassed to argue this, and we need not accept the caricature produced by some critics -as if we wanted to impose a belief system on society. We have good news, an invitation to fullness of life in the risen Christ. I hope we shall happily take the opportunities we are given to publish this invitation -and to help it appear in the eyes of our children and young people the most natural and fulfilling thing in the world.