Psychologies Magazine, February 2002 —
Will we introduce specific teaching of the history of religions in public schools? Jack Lang, Minister of National Education, has just entrusted Régis Debray with a mission to reflect on this delicate question. The former revolutionary, a staunch secularist and republican, has already stated that he is in favor of it. On this point, I completely agree with him. Religions are a major cultural fact in the history of humanity. A considerable part of our artistic, linguistic, intellectual, and historical heritage is incomprehensible without this knowledge. A few years ago, “Télérama” published a survey revealing a profound amnesia among young people on this subject. To the question: “What is the Trinity?”, most
answered: “A metro station”! I will go further: religious doctrines played an essential role in the intellectual debates of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. The history of ideas throughout the world is impenetrable to those who know nothing about major religious themes.
Should we also remember, and recent events have sadly illustrated this, that religion continues to play a central role in many regions of the globe? Knowledge of religions is an essential element for a good understanding of the world, history, and cultures. What exactly is this about? Not teaching a sort of catechism as in private religious schools. No one would dream of asking priests, rabbis, or imams to come and indoctrinate the students of the Republic! It would be a matter of either adjusting history programs so that they give a more important place than they already do to the study of comparative religions, or of teaching the history of religions as a subject in its own right, on the same level as philosophy.
The first solution is obviously simpler to implement. However, it risks being unsatisfactory, as history teachers have not received any appropriate training, and it is difficult to see how such complex information can be integrated without adequate training. The second scenario addresses this problem, but also has a major drawback: this would require the creation of a CAPES (Certificate of Professional Qualification) and an aggregation of the history of religions, something for which the mentalities within the teaching profession and the Ministry of National Education do not seem ready.
Yet, those who, in the name of secularism, reject specific teaching of religions in secular schools are in the wrong century. The battles between clerics and anticlerics no longer have any reason to exist. I would even say that an objective and detached knowledge of religions will awaken in children a critical spirit that will allow them to fight with discernment against all obscurantisms or fundamentalisms. Religious institutions have more to fear from such teaching than the republic!
February 2002