Professor Bob Bowie argues that education must rethink the role of religious studies in helping young people navigate an increasingly diverse world, engage with questions of truth and reality, and nurture their desire for connection and meaning.

I recently contributed to a BBC Radio 4 series looking at the health of the school subject of religious education and the university subject of religious studies and theology. But, there are bigger, more urgent questions we need to address with what our education provision should be providing for young people.

First, there is a profound atmosphere of polarisation and clash of worldviews which sits beneath what some describe as culture wars. Politics has always been divisive in the country, but the incendiary nature and visibility of social media disputation has created a sense of ‘tribal’ crisis in our diverse and plural society which has overflowed into public spaces and workplaces.

At one level we do not seem to know how to manage well belief diversity and conscientious dissent. Religious Education classrooms have historically specialised in managing moral and belief difference (religious or otherwise) within the context of the classroom community, but too few secondary schools have robust, well provisioned religious education to do this.

Second, we seem also to have come across a truth crisis, were widely competing accounts of reality are presented in contest with one another. This post truth convulsion has led scholars to conclude there is an attack on science, an attack on history, or even an attack on knowledge itself. This is not simply a matter for the corners of academia, as it manifests in the words of heads of state, and leads to employment disputes in British workplaces. A subject that equips students for navigating questions of reality and truth claims is vitally urgent if our future workplaces and organisations are not going to continue to struggle to balance viewpoint diversity.

Finally, we seem to be in a meaning crisis, where the personal lives of young people are afflicted with mental health difficulty, and the transforming technology increasingly seems to disconnect them from the physical and emotional world around them. Research in children’s spirituality reveals the profound value they hold for experiencing connection with nature, each other, themselves and something of the beyond, and there is a need to reestablish a literacy and a capacity for a spiritual life, in an age of disconnection.  This is also a priority for education to address.

Education urgently needs to review how well it prepares people to navigate the flurry of worldview diversity, the question of truth and reality, and the hunger for meaning for people is today, both personally for our spiritual wellbeing, and socially for a cohesive society to face to address enormous questions of our world.

Professor Bob Bowie leads NICER, one of the University Research Centres at Canterbury Christ Church University (see the substack https://nicernews.substack.com). He is a Trustee of Culham St Gabriel’s Trust which has a vision for a broad-based, critical and reflective religion and worldviews education contributing to a well-informed, respectful and open society https://www.cstg.org.uk . Recent projects he has collaborated on led to an article authored Professor Lynn Revell on the impossibility of the unthinkable, and pieces he lead authored on the idea of an integrative philosophy of knowledge and hermeneutical principles for classroom pedagogy.