At my secondary school, we had a mandatory R.E class from year 7 (although up to year 9, it didn't matter much). Then in the GCSE years, my school gave mandatory R.E classes in order for us to gain another qualification - offering both the full course (which I did) and the short course. However, those R.E classes were boring and I ended up skipping most of them for both years and managing to get a B because the exam was mostly common sense. Despite hating it at GCSE, I took the subject for A-level and I have to say it was so much more interesting. We didn't even touch Christianity which I was pleased about because I didn't want to learn about that one. In the first year, we had an exam on Buddhism and Judaism, and they were both really interesting. In the second year we only focused on Buddhism as we had one exam and then a synoptic essay under exam conditions. Synoptic was between three questions and we had to reference to either two or three religions, with Buddhism obviously being one of them.
For me, I have never been raised religious. I don't identify as anything, not even agnostic or atheist. But although I found GCSE really boring, I am glad we had it mandatory. We learnt about the Holocaust (which, before, we all thought only happened to the Jews), we learnt about Sikhism in year 7 and the five Ks (but I have no idea now) and we weren't just thrown Christianity. None of it was preachy, it was all taught like a normal subject. And I went to a public school, so it shows that R.E can be taught properly without religious views being pushed onto the pupils because we had Christians and Catholics and Muslims in one class and none of them felt like their beliefs were being insulted, nor that the teacher or the syllabus was being preachy on a different religion.
GCSE R.E was separated into six sections, although I can only remember "Religion and Medicine", "Religion and Conflict" and "Religion and Abortion". We had some discussions about Quakers, Scientology and even Jediism. I went to a school where it didn't force religious beliefs onto its students, and where my R.E teacher that I had at GCSE as well as A-Level was a really nice one who respected the religions and chose to teach Buddhism and Judaism (because it was a choice) at A-Level because it's a "bit boring" going for the typical choice of Christianity, which I agree with.
For me, I have never been raised religious. I don't identify as anything, not even agnostic or atheist. But although I found GCSE really boring, I am glad we had it mandatory. We learnt about the Holocaust (which, before, we all thought only happened to the Jews), we learnt about Sikhism in year 7 and the five Ks (but I have no idea now) and we weren't just thrown Christianity. None of it was preachy, it was all taught like a normal subject. And I went to a public school, so it shows that R.E can be taught properly without religious views being pushed onto the pupils because we had Christians and Catholics and Muslims in one class and none of them felt like their beliefs were being insulted, nor that the teacher or the syllabus was being preachy on a different religion.
GCSE R.E was separated into six sections, although I can only remember "Religion and Medicine", "Religion and Conflict" and "Religion and Abortion". We had some discussions about Quakers, Scientology and even Jediism. I went to a school where it didn't force religious beliefs onto its students, and where my R.E teacher that I had at GCSE as well as A-Level was a really nice one who respected the religions and chose to teach Buddhism and Judaism (because it was a choice) at A-Level because it's a "bit boring" going for the typical choice of Christianity, which I agree with.
September 5th, 2014 at 03:05am
