Telegraph UK: Parents should be prohibited from withdrawing their children from religious education classes, so the headteachers union has just resolved. Sounds reasonable? Not to me it doesn’t, because every child has a right to be peculiar.
I do not mean that children should be ignorant of the Bible. Yet they are, and so are my contemporaries, who know no more of the contents of Scripture than King Nebuchadnezzar, who “did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws”.
That sort of memorable imagery, which doesn’t just come from King James’s translation committee, but derives from the original, is part of a child’s cultural inheritance, like Shakespeare. But those two books, the Bible and Shakespeare, which are to be found, we’re told, on every desert island, are terra incognita to millions who have passed through schools ruined by these pesky headteachers.
I admit that what children learn is not the same as what schools teach. At my first school we had a short assembly every blessed morning and the teaching staff could never talk the children out of their overwhelming preference for the rousing hymn Onward Christian Soldiers. It was the tune that appealed, though the softer kind of teacher harboured deep suspicions of incipient militarism among the scrubbed-kneed fry.
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Categories: Religions, Religious Values, The Muslim Times, UK