Religion in Schools

U.S. parents and churchmen alike had a right to rub their eyes in wonder last week at the news from Britain. In the U.S. almost every State makes it a crime to give sectarian instruction in the public schools, but within a few weeks Parliament will actually make religious instruction and daily worship a statutory requirement for every school in the United Kingdom.

Surprising as this British move seems today, the passage of such a law would have seemed even more surprising to men of earlier generations--for exactly opposite reasons. For centuries Christianity and education went hand in hand. Throughout the Middle Ages education was so exclusively the domain of the church that any prisoner who could read was recognized as a cleric (clerk) and could get his case transferred to the more lenient ecclesiastical courts. Every great university in Britain and the U.S. was founded with strong religious motives, largely to educate ministers. And until the last century the idea of education without religious instruction was as novel as the idea of travel without a horse.

Like many another thing British, the present drive for religion in British schools started with a leader in the London Times. Shortly after World War II began the Times lamented that "in a country professedly Christian, and a country which at the moment is staking its all in defense of Christian principles, there is a system of national education which allows the citizens of the future to have a purely heathen upbringing."

Evacuation of British city children proved an eye opener to the families who sheltered them. For example, one survey showed that three out of-every five evacuees had no idea who was born on Christmas or why Christmas was celebrated, "knew absolutely nothing of the Bible and had never been taught to pray."

Both the Church of England and Nonconformist sects joined in the drive to put religion into the schools. Even the Roman Catholics approved the move. Gone were the inter-church squabbles that helped secularize British and American schools in the first place.

Last summer 224 British peers and members of Parliament signed a manifesto "that the future citizen should be so molded in character by Christian education that his citizenship shall become the expression of these principles in action." Last month the House of Commons took time off from discussion of the war for a lengthy debate on religious education.

Result: the churches and Britain's Board of Education are now collaborating to draft an act making worship and religious instruction compulsory and providing a Government inspector of religious education (i.e., bringing religious teaching up to scratch).

U.S. schools are much more secular than Britain's. In Britain more than 1,500,000 of the 5,000,000 children aged five to 14 go to church schools (most of the 1,500,000 are Anglican, with 377,000 Roman Catholics). Of America's 20,707,000 schoolchildren, only about 2,200,000 are in church schools, nearly all of them Catholic (though half America's Catholic children go to public instead of parochial schools). To compensate for the almost complete absence of religious teaching in the U.S. public schools, churchmen have plugged for "released time" to let children out of school for an hour a week of instruction in their own churches, but the movement has attained only a small success. For example, in New York City only 70,000 of the 998,679 children in public schools take this time out.

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