Michael Reiss and John White: Atheism needs to be studied in schools

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/schools/michael-reiss-and-john-white-atheism-needs-to-be-studied-in-schools-1747489.html via source: http://forum.richarddawkins.net/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=87350

My Highlights:-

• It is a laudable aim of the current National Curriculum that pupils "know about big ideas and events that shape the world". But one of the biggest of these is too infrequently studied in schools. We are thinking of the growing loss of faith, over the past two centuries, in a religious picture of the world. David Hume's 18th-century onslaught on arguments for the existence of God was an early catalyst, Darwin's 19th-century attack on what today is known as creationism a later and more devastating one. Nowadays, according to an ICM poll in 2006, the majority of adults in Britain describe themselves as non-religious.
• Those who determine the curricula that are taught in state schools insist on knowledge of all sorts of particular facts and approaches to understanding in different subjects. But they do not require any awareness of this revolution in belief, arguably the most dramatic since the origin of Islam. True, the non-statutory RE curriculum now allows for teaching about humanism, but – unlike Christianity and other major world faiths – leaves it optional, and on a par with Zoroastrianism.
• RE has, thankfully, abandoned its position of proselytisation. What goes for Christianity and other world faiths on the curriculum should hold for humanism too.

• What kinds of learning might be required? Young people should think about whether they live in a divine world or a godless one. This points to discussing the standard arguments for and against the existence of God and such questions as the likelihood of life after death. But they also need to discuss whether human lives can have any meaning or point outside a religious framework. And whether people can live a morally good life that is not dependent on religious belief. Historical perspectives are also important, especially the impact of non-religious ideas on intellectual and artistic life over the last 250 years.

• One does not want children to be given the impression that they are going to hell because they espouse atheism or that they are intellectually second rate because they accept the divine inspiration of scripture.

• They should raise their eyes if not to heaven, at least to a more global picture of what education should be about. An understanding of non-religion, like an understanding of religion, is a vital part of this.