Moral panics, moral education, and religion

Moral panics, moral education, and religion 

This article by Marilyn Mason , Education officer of the British Humanist Association, reflecting on how much attitudes to moral education have changed over the last 50 years, was first published in Think , the magazine of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, in Spring 2004. 

You can read the two 1955 broadcasts that this is based on here 


"The Unholy Mrs Knight"   

In 1955 psychologist, broadcaster and humanist Margaret Knight stunned post-war Britain by suggesting in two talks on the BBC’s Home Service (now Radio 4) , that moral education should be uncoupled from religious education. 

“It is a mistake to try to impose [Christian beliefs] on children and to make them the basis of moral training,” she said.   “The moral education of children is much too important a matter to be built on such foundations …” 

Although she knew that these views would be provocative (it took three attempts to get the BBC to air them), no one anticipated the thousands of letters both she and the BBC received, the press outrage and abuse (“untrue and vicious propaganda”, “Mrs Margaret Knight is a menace” are mild examples), and the headlines (“The Unholy Mrs Knight “, “Godless Radio Repeat Shocks Nation”).   Perhaps more predictable were the relief and appreciation expressed by some of her “godless” correspondents, including many teachers and parents (“At last someone is saying these things we have felt for so long”, “It was like opening a dungeon door…”). 

How much has changed? 

Would Margaret Knight’s talks be so controversial or so relevant half a century on?   Some elements of her talks and the public reaction now seem like signs from another world: her confident endorsement of smacking; the background fear of communism; her almost exclusive concentration on Christianity as the rival to “Scientific Humanism”.   Other things have changed less.   Leading the attacks on Margaret Knight in the 50s was The Daily Telegraph , and even today secular humanist speakers can provoke similar hostility and incomprehension from similar sources.   They can also still provoke recognition and relief.    Much of what she said still seems like common sense to the average humanist, and much has happened to confirm her claim that religion and morality are two different things.   

But a perception persists that without religion there can be no sound basis for values.   In the moral panics that periodically seize the media, the impression is often given that all the young need in the way of moral education is a good dose of religion, particularly the Ten Commandments.    In the United States, where, admittedly, both sides in this debate are more extreme and more embattled than they are here, the religious right’s response to rising crime and tragedies such as the Columbine High School massacre and the events of September 11 ^th , is to challenge the 1980 Supreme Court ruling that posting the Ten Commandments in schools is an unconstitutional promotion of religion.   June Griffin, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Tennessee and campaigner for public displays of the Ten Commandments, was reported in December 2002 by   theAssociated Press as saying: "Our nation is in the sewer and the way you get out of the sewer is to begin with the definition of sin so that the people know what it is. They don ' t know what sin is now. The Bible gives you the definition of sin.” 

Similar arguments can be heard here: in media outrage after the murder of toddler James Bulgerby two small boys; in the fears voiced in Parliamentary debates (particularly in the House of Lords) that to take religious worship out of schools would cause widespread moral degeneration; and in the common belief that to get a sound moral education, you must send your child to a “faith-based” school.   A few years ago, Conservative Education Minister John Patten proclaimed “No religion, no morality” and even this May vicar’s wife Anne Atkins clearly expected only negative answers to her rhetorical questions on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day : “ Without God, where do we find absolutes of right and wrong? What is to stop a secular society sinking to depths of depravity that as yet we only dream of?”   

These kinds of argument seem to be based on several false premises: a belief that the Ten Commandments, or any other code derived from religion, will have binding and beneficial authority over the non-religious (when they don’t even always work with the religious); the idea that there is no viable educational alternative to simply laying down the law (or posting it up on the wall); a nostalgic view of the past that attributes an imagined catastrophic moral decline in young people to a decline in religious belief; and the naïve notion that children (and terrorists) do dreadful things because they don’t know that there are rules against them. 

All the evidence suggests otherwise. The September 11 ^th terrorists found not condemnation but support in their religion for their dreadful actions. Blake Morrison in The Guardian of February 6, 2003 , brought some calming reality to media hysteria and pessimism about children who kill:   “UK statistics don ' t suggest that violent crimes by juveniles, especially schedule one offences such as rape or murder, were any worse in the 1990s than they had been previously. Recorded killings by children in Britain go back as far as 1748.”   A study published in 2001 by the Division of School Psychology, Alfred University, New York, suggested sixteen reasons for school shootings, including access to guns, bullying, alienation and dysfunctional family background.   Not knowing the Ten Commandments or that shooting other students was wrong did not appear.   The study concluded: “We need ‘kinder, gentler’ schools. We cannot continue to allow bullying and abuse as normal milestones of child development. We need to communicate the value of caring, and demonstrate that care. We need to provide alternatives to violence for problem-solving, to encourage more frequent, open, and genuine communication between students and the adults who care for them, at home, at school, in the community…”    

And in our schools… 

Our school curriculum, where discussion of morality and moral issues still takes place largely in Religious Education lessons, tends to reinforce conventional links between religion and ethics.  Attempts to separate the two, for example by teaching Citizenship or introducing ethical issues into other subjects, can provoke worryingly defensive reactions from RE professionals.   Yet as long as the two are taught together Margaret Knight’s concern that when children cast off their religious beliefs, as many do, they might also cast off moral values, remains well-founded. 

However, the picture today has improved since the 1950s, and RE has undergone a transformation at least as radical as any other school subject since then.    No longer is it simply Christian scripture taught in a way that assumes assent; the introduction of other world religions and the multi-cultural nature of many classrooms put an end to that.   Many RE teachers acknowledge that many pupils have no religious belief or culture, and that reliance on those as a source of moral values would be mistaken.   Much of the discussion of morality and moral issues in RE is genuinely impartial and detached from any particular worldview, except, perhaps, a rather vague and implicit humanism.  In other subjects where ethical issues come up, this is even more so.   The downside of all this open-mindedness and vagueness can be a pervasive but unstated and unrecognised (and so unchallenged) moral relativism, sometimes, paradoxically, accompanied by the view that whatever is natural must be good (a view often, wrongly, blamed on the rise of evolutionary psychology) and absolutism about, for example, animal rights .   A good dose of philosophy would do more to cure these ethical muddles than the good dose of religion that is often prescribed, though I doubt that philosophy alone can make people better human beings.   

What else is there? 

Margaret Knight offered guidance and reassurance to perplexed parents, the ones with little or no religious faith who wavered between thinking that religion must be good for children at least and worrying about passing on what they believed to be untrue. She pointed out that education, not religion, went hand-in-hand with decreasing crime and that our values owed at least as much toancient Greece and Rome as to Christianity (a fact recognised recently in the draft European Union constitution).   She pointed out that just as "it is natural for us to be to a large extent self- centredand to be hostile towards people who obstruct us in getting what we want… it is also natural for us to co-operate with other people, and to feel affection and sympathy for them."   She suggested ways of nurturing these benevolent feelings and helping children to grow up kind and generous, prepared sometimes to put their own interests after those of others.   Her methods will not surprise thoughtful parents and teachers: love and encouragement, security and firmness and consistency, training in the rules of small societies such as the family; teaching and demonstrating that things go better “if members are friendly and co-operative than if they are hostile and resentful.” She also recommended stories exemplifying courage and unselfishness that would make a child think “that this is the sort of person he would like to be”.   Her advice remains sound.   

What else can be done to educate children morally in a world where people, including teachers, are often afraid of imposing their values on other people or “ moralising ” (another change, perhaps, from the 1950s)?    What can those of us in education with philosophical inclinations do to help?   

To Margaret Knight’s heroic tales of unselfishness and courage, I would add stories that develop empathy with and understanding of others, and that raise moral issues. I would also stress the values shared by the religious and the non-religious alike. Entire classes will agree absolutely that mugging old ladies for their pensions is wrong, and will come up with rational supporting arguments, usually based on human nature and experience, our need to live safely and sociably amongst others.   Similarly, teachers can demonstrate that we generally use a combination of reason and empathy to work our way through moral mazes.   It is a rare student who relies completely on religious authority or codes, or, indeed, on one meta-ethical theory for all situations, when presented with moral dilemmas – from thought-experiments about shooting people trapped in burning lorries to more mundane questions about cheating in exams.   And even atheists who do not believe that religion is the source of morality can acknowledge that it may support and motivate a moral life.   We do not need to attack religious beliefs, though we do need to promote a sounder foundation than religion for moral values. Margaret Knight’s work is not yet finished.