How I… realised the importance of Religious Education whilst living in France

My 10-year-old daughter was asked to teach a song to her French classmates recently so she belted out her current favourite “Take me to Ch-”. She was stopped at this point of the chorus, due to the act of saying the word “Church” in the classroom breaking the principle of Laicite or Secularism which runs through the State of France.  I asked her if she told the teacher that its not a religious song but was written to highlight the problems of the Catholic church and its stance on homosexuality and was even influenced by the writings of the atheist Christopher Hitchens, but seeing as her French was still fairly minimal at this point, she said she just stopped singing and returned to her seat.

I’m a Religious Studies teacher currently on sabbatical in France and the principle of Laicite fascinates me. I’m not teaching RE whilst I’m here, I couldn’t if I wanted to due to the Laicite- and so I’m intrigued as to how and when the teenagers of France get to have those heated debates in the classroom around the existence of God and all the various belief systems humanity has developed around it. A typical day for me as a London RE teacher involved debates around homosexuality and religious views, discussions of predestination and free will and singing the Lord’s Prayer Anglican style to unsuspecting and slightly alarmed kids, when we got to that bit of a handout on Christian practices- how could they not get a weekly lesson of this here?

I wonder if not discussing religion in French state classrooms leaves anything missing from those student’s lives? Bumping into ex-students of mine years later on the highstreets of East London and hearing them say that they remembered our lessons- “Oh! The debates we had Miss!”- shows me the importance of the space given in RE for evaluating views that are different to our own, and how much teenagers love to argue. As RE teachers we relish the chance to play ‘Devil’s advocate’- role-playing the questions and challenges in the classroom that our students may be asked, or may even ask of themselves later in life.

If the discussion of religion is contained in the private sphere- then how can a teacher role-model intelligent and respectful discussions around the tricky material that religions can give us? Students would often say to me that they could talk about things in my classroom they never would at home, or at least could try out their views and hear people’s reactions before discussing it with family and friends.

And whilst I have on occasion, had to inform my students that I do not have a hotline to The Almighty, when they are alarmed by world events– “Miss is that hurricane a sign of the end of the world?”  I know that my classroom was a space for them to discuss world events, including the role that religions and religious followers may have had in them.

When I worked as a volunteer teacher in Nablus, the West Bank , I lived in a house full of other volunteers from around the world, at one point a few from France and the USA me to give them RE lessons in the evening so they could understand Islam better, and so understand the children we worked with more  (Both are countries that have this separation of Church and State).  When I told my adult English class of Palestinian peace-workers there what I taught in the UK, they asked me for lessons on the key similarities between Islam and Judaism so that they could understand the Israeli’s over the border a few miles away, better.

And here in France? I find myself in the same position, English conversation sessions have turned into me explaining what the Baha’i religion is, and dinner table small talk has ended up as a debate around interpretations of Hijab or the Veil within Islam. I’ve met so many people here fascinated by religion and spirituality that I take any opportunity to discuss it. I might have stopped teaching RE to come and live here, but I will always be an RE teacher.

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