This week we look at religious schools. Is it ok to limit students' exposure to diverse viewpoints and encourage a form of conformity that undermines their ability to form their own independent beliefs? What rights do parents have to decide?
Today, we’re diving into the complex and often contentious world of religious schools. Are they a threat to social cohesion and tolerance, or are they simply an expression of parental rights and freedom of religion? Some argue that religious schools may indoctrinate children or isolate communities, while others insist parents should be free to raise their children in accordance with their deepest values — including their faith.
So who's right? And what should this mean for public policy — especially in terms of how states regulate and fund religious education?
To help us think about these questions, we're joined by Professor Adam Swift, a leading philosopher of education and parenting, and co-author of a new book exploring these very issues.
Mentioned in this episode:
[00:00:00] Emily McTernan: Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics, and this week we're talking about religious schools and children's freedom.
Hello, my name is Emily McTernan. Welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
Today, our topic is religious schools. To some, they're controversial. Perhaps they undermine social cohesion or people's tolerance of other religions. Maybe they're indoctrinating children, but others think parents have the right to choose how their kids get educated and raise children within their faith. So, who's right, and what follows for how a state ought to regulate and fund religious schools helps us think through these issues? Our guest today is a world-leading philosopher of education and parenting who has co-authored a book on this topic. I'm delighted to be joined by Professor Adam Swift, Professor of Political Theory and Political Philosophy in the Department of Political Science to talk about what to think about religious schooling. Welcome back, Adam. It's great to have you on the show.
Adam Swift: Thank you.
Emily McTernan: Let's start with religious schools. What prompted you and your co-authors to write this book we'll be talking about today?
Adam Swift: It was a topic that completed the set for me because I had worked a lot on education and families, from a normative, moral political philosophy point of view. I'd focused on the social justice angle, the unfairness of private schools, should parents be allowed to have them, should we have fee-paying schools?
I'd written a book about that. I'd also done work on the families more generally on parents' rights with respect to their children. That got me into the question of not only what parents can do for their children, but also what they should be allowed to do to their children. [00:02:00] I came to view that we gave them much too much discretion. We grant them powers over their children that they shouldn't have. These include excessive influence on their emerging views about how to live their own lives.
One of the ways in which parents exert excessive influence is by sending them to schools that reinforce the message they get from home. I won't use the word indoctrinate, but it makes it hard for some children to choose their way of living. Indeed, sometimes to know about different ways of living and the kinds of ways that other children in their society are living.
Emily McTernan: In the book, you resist the idea that religion is special. Is your worry any parental attempt to inculcate some overall philosophy or worldview? Or sending a child to a school that matches your philosophy and worldview? Or is there something different about religious education?
I guess here I'm thinking about a parent who says I'm roughly liberal, vague sentiments towards Christianity, and so I [00:03:00] send my child to the local Church of England school. Are those the cases that are traveling you here? Would it trouble you if it was just, oh, I'm going to send my kid to the local state school because I approve of the things that they teach there about climate change and microaggressions, is there something special about religion?
Adam Swift: The answer is yes and no. What's special about religion is what we call in political philosophy the “comprehensive doctrine”. In political philosophy, we call a comprehensive doctrine. It tends to have implications for how people live their lives in general.
That's partly why there's worry about children developing autonomy, and parents acting on their own judgments in ways that subject their children to their own views and don't respect what my colleague Matthew Clayton calls the independence of children.
But in other ways, religion isn't special. We're just as hostile to an atheist school as to a religious school. Atheist parents, in our view, shouldn't send their children to schools that teach their children to be atheists, teach that religion is rubbish, and so [00:04:00] on.
So, in that sense, religion is just an example.
Emily McTernan: When it comes to homeschooling, are we on similar turf? It seems like most people homeschooling are exercising too much control over their child's worldview, if it's not religious homeschooling.
Adam Swift: I think as liberal political philosophers, we do end up treating some kind of liberal framework of values as different from the kinds of comprehensive doctrines that people may be free to choose when they're thinking about how to live their own lives. For homeschooling, yes, of course, parents will be teaching their children to do some things and not others.
We hope they'll teaching them to respect others and the standard liberal agenda. But when it comes to homeschooling, as we'll talk about later, just partly for practical reasons, you must allow parents more discretion.
If you're going to [00:05:00] allow homeschooling, you can't have inspectors going into people's homes and checking exactly what's being delivered. We do end up arguing that this should be much more regulation of homeschooling. The amount to which homeschooling is regulated now is ludicrously negligible. There just isn't much at all. There are limits on what parents, even as home schoolers, should be allowed to do for their children. For example, all children should be taught a syllabus that teaches them about other people's religions, gives them some civic competencies, and helps them understand their civic duties.
If you're going to homeschool your child, you still have to make sure your kid knows that stuff. You can't just raise them in your view about how they should live their lives, whether that's religious or atheistic, or very spiritual.
Emily McTernan: Let's dive deeper into the philosophical underpinnings. We've talked a bit about children's autonomy. This is the worry that religious schooling might be over indoctrinating your child.
What's interesting about your contribution to the book, and one of the things I found interesting, is that you are someone who's [00:06:00] associated with talking a bunch about parental rights that you think parents do have lots of rights, although not too many rights. So, could you tell us about your account of parental rights?
Adam Swift: My view about parents' rights, the rights we have as parents to do things to, for, and with our children, is that the way to understand the rights people have is by thinking about how they can discharge the role of being a parent. What do you need to allow parents to be free to do to, with, and for their children that will enable them to do the job?
Our understanding of that job is to act as a fiduciary. Their job is to protect their children's interests, sometimes to advance their interests in developing into healthy autonomous adults. In the society we live in, we grant parents’ rights that go way beyond that, we grant parents’ rights to do things too, with and for the children to suit the parents and that they may think [00:07:00] as serving their children's interests.
I am sure many religious parents believe that sending their child to a religious school, for example, promotes their children's interests. But in our view, that's exceeding their proper authority, as they don't need to act on those to act as the child's fiduciary on what we think is the right understanding of what the relevant children's interests are.
In the more philosophical bit of the book, I argue that parents shouldn't intentionally raise their child in a particular religion at all. Never mind sending them to a religious school. But just in principle, they're exceeding the proper scope of their authority if they intentionally raise their child in a particular religion. That is much more controversial than what we end up arguing for in the book. And we can talk about why those views differ.
Emily McTernan: It's a very radical view, I think. At one point you're talking about prayer, and you say it might be all right to have a go at [00:08:00] praying with your child briefly, but it won't be all right to make that a kind of daily practice or a regular practice in your home. Is that right?
Adam Swift: The view is that it’s good for parents to reveal their religious beliefs to their children and share their understanding of the world with their children. We don't want to completely alienate parents from their children. But it's very challenging to raise a child to be autonomous, given the emotional influence parents have. We know children develop autonomy who have had religious upbringings. We know some children have had religious upbringings and been through a religious school. Those who develop their autonomy may endorse the same religion [00:09:00] autonomously, or they may come to reject it and live a different way of life.
Nobody's saying it's impossible to develop autonomy if you have a religious upbringing. But especially if the family and the school are lined up, or what gets called continuous. If the environment is very continuous and if that environment doesn't even give access or adequate access to other ways of living, to knowledge about other ways of living, then I do think parents are exceeding or exceeding their proper scope.
Emily McTernan: This makes me wonder that it sounds like you think it's problematic to inculcate your religion, even just as a parent. But is your position that I could take my child to church every week if I sent them to a school where they were taught about different religions?
Adam Swift: I think is the view of one of my colleagues in Andrew Mason. So one of the interesting things about this book, I think, is that the three [00:10:00] there are four authors altogether, but three of us offer our individual takes on the philosophical. We disagree about that question. Andrew Mason thinks there's a particular risk to children if the home environment is too consistent with the school environment, and that risk is sufficient. Although he thinks parents should be free to raise their children in their religion, and he also thinks that they should be free to send their children to a religious school in principle, in practice, there's too much risk that children will be denied autonomy.
One of the state's jobs is to guarantee children have an autonomy facilitating, let’s call it upbringing. My view and Matthew Clayton's is more extreme one that you just, you're just exceeding your kind of its ultra virus to raise your child in the religion at home.
You can take them to church to show what you believe in, showing “this is what we do”, and [00:11:00] “this is what we think”. To some degree, in my view, sharing a certain kind of religious practice is going to be helpful to the family relationship. But parents, I think, should find a way of preventing that, turning into raising their child in that religion, and making it hard for the child to come to reject the influences that come from those practices.
Something similar happens when we talk about school. You shouldn't even be able to have religious assemblies and sing and have prayers at school. There are lots of schools that say we're not teaching religion, we're not teaching our children to be Christians, but we'll do a little bit of praying in assembly at the beginning of the day and talk about God. We think that's not okay because these practices affect people's emotions. They affect people's identities in ways that are often premised on the truth of the entities that are being sung about or talked about.
It is not just that you can't [00:12:00] teach your child, this is true, there is this God or is there isn't that God. It's that you can't even do things from our view that makes it harder for the child to develop autonomy. Even if the child does develop autonomy, you are still wronging them because you are wronging them by treating them based on reasons that are not appropriate for you to act on, if you are in a position of parental authority over a child. Just like the state shouldn't be a Christian state or a Muslim state or a Jewish state, so the family should not be a Christian family.
Individuals as adults can choose to be Christians or Jews or Muslims, but something is going wrong when an authority is exercised over people in the name of religion.
Emily McTernan: So say there are two hardcore liberals and one liberal who's slightly less hardcore. Let me try and push the alternative view that has fallen out of favour in political philosophy, but I had a secret fondness for communitarians. If I were going to take their side on this debate, I would say something like, there's something oddly [00:13:00] formless, unattached, and rootless about the kind of citizen you're trying to raise here, right?
It's a child that doesn't have a tradition and a community and a mythology, right? I don't have to think the religion is real, I might just think it's important to have a rich tradition with some deep myths that often are similar amongst different religions and tell us some important moral principles about how we should treat each other. In a world where we encourage parents not to inculcate in their children an attachment to the particularities of the tradition in which they're being raised. The myths, the morals, the traditions, one where we won't end up with autonomous people at the end, we'll end up with very confused people. That it's better to start from a rooted attachment and then later question it, which is a normal part of adolescence and early adulthood is to think that the way to get autonomy is to encourage a rootless child, that when they [00:14:00] come to their moment of challenge has nothing they're kicking against.
Adam Swift: That is a respectable view. Why don't I agree with it? I don't think it's true that you need to teach people. I don't think it's true that you need to raise children in a particular religious view.
Telling them about mythologies, telling them about different narratives, different ways people live their lives, explaining the different ways in which religious outlooks can support moral values. That's all fine by us. But your stronger claim, the more relevant claim, is that you need to be raised to believe in a doctrine.
You need to have been told that doctrine is true, and in some sense or other have been committed to autonomy, is about rejecting that view.
There's a wonderful book by Ian McMullen who argues specifically that a primary school, what we call directive religious education, should be permitted. But at secondary school or adolescence, [00:15:00] that's when it starts to matter that horizons are broadened and people can start to think for themselves.
That disagrees with my view that parents shouldn't be allowed to do this at all. It turns out: are people who have not been raised in a comprehensive doctrine rootless? I don't think so.
Emily McTernan: I guess we might have ended up in a kind of empirical moment, right? We've got to know that if we looked at people raised within religion and people who have a better set of skills.
Adam Swift: We're not thinking about those who are raised in this religion and never think to do anything else. You can walk the streets of Oxford, Northeast London, and see such people, right? We want a solution that protects those children from, let’s call that indoctrination, where they are made a voting alternative. Maybe there's a kind of institutional solution that would get the balance right.
It is part of my claim that's not part of the parents' job because you don't need that to get [00:16:00] autonomy. It's part of your claim that maybe it is part of the parents' job to raise their children with some pretty strong, even comprehensive views, so that they can have this sense of attachment, which they can reckon with in due course.
Emily McTernan: It is interesting the way that you're framing your parental rights here, so it almost sounds like you're framing it as if you should do the minimum possible. You are only allowed to do this much and no more. That's not the way we normally approach parenting.
It's an interesting moment of challenge then to how most of us think we're doing this job, right? We've got to raise our kids, inculcate shared values and so on. And you are saying be careful.
Adam Swift: Yes, the shared values, that is part of the job to raise them to be good citizens.
Emily McTernan: Socially shared values, but I meant shared within the family unit, right? People often say we are the kind of family that likes to go camping or that goes to church, and these are the kinds of things you're questioning.
Adam Swift: Yes, things like going camping may be fine.
Emily McTernan: Because it's not comprehensive, right?
Adam Swift: They're very partial. It's not clear they involve any strong conception of the good as opposed to just this is something we like to do.
Emily McTernan: Before we turn to policy, there's one [00:17:00] more question I want to ask about religions that pops up a couple of times in the book in different ways, which is whether you are more worried about some religious traditions than others. I was thinking about whether I was very worried about autonomy, and I was thinking about religious traditions, there look like there are some that are fine. Here I was thinking of a certain kind of Catholicism that says the way to God is through reason. You are meant to challenge and question, and the root of God is not through blind faith, but through rationality. That might be autonomy-building in the long run, right?
It's a real training in how to think about big questions reasonably. Another tradition that occurred to me was liberal Judaism. It's much more about the culture and much less about committing to these overwhelming claims about the nature of God. Instead, focusing on inhabiting a community way of thinking about a religion, rather than it being all about the God figure and one's religious traditions around it. I did wonder whether some religions worry you more than [00:18:00] others and whether those two that I've offered you, one that's like a sea of e or a certain kind of Judaism that looks like it becomes quite loose in its, its philosophical commitments, or on the other hand, they're quite harsh on philosophical commitments or quite strong on philosophical commitments, kind of Catholicism, but that encourages questioning.
Adam Swift: Yes, my view has different implications depending on how liberal the content of the religion is. It's much less problematic to raise your children to say this is what we believe. Lots of people believe these things, other than having a view, perpetual damnation unless you live your life this way.
Emily McTernan: I was counting as a kind of liberal, a bit like the Church of England tradition in certain respects. Perhaps with a stronger sense of community, but not this comprehensiveness, you sometimes see in certain religions. The other religion I wanted to present was the Catholic right, who were a [00:19:00] not light, are not particularly liberal necessarily, but who very much think that the way to God is through reason. That's one defining feature that some people think is the difference between Catholicism and Evangelicalism.
The one is going to lean on the faith, just blind faith, just believe anyway, and the other says no. Here are my arguments. Let’s talk about them.
Adam Swift: You're exposing my lack of familiarity with the variance of Catholicism here. The way I've heard it is they're teaching their children: there is a God, and here are the arguments for why there is a good. We can think it through, and then we'll see, and we'll do that argument had to learn as an undergraduate, proofs of existence of what? I don’t know. That's not so, maybe that's not okay because you are, as it were, the whole exercise is premised on this controversial and reasonably rejectable judgment that you don't need to be doing in imposing on your kid or to properly parent them.
Emily McTernan: I think here we've nicely circled back to that communitarian and liberal divide, right? One story says rooted in [00:20:00] a tradition, but it's a tradition that encourages reason. And there's your skillset you can take out and become autonomous.
You all have got a slightly different view of what it is to be an autonomous adulthood, which is there's nothing you're so strongly committed to or been raised to be so strongly committed to that it will be a struggle and costly give it up. Is that fair?
Adam Swift: Yeah, that's fair in achieving autonomy. What you said was a fair characterization of the issue. If what we're thinking about is: will my children achieve autonomy and supposing it's my job to make sure they do does the other side of it, which Matthew Clayton would be particularly keen on, and my kind of strict reading of parents' rights insists, which just says even if they do develop autonomy, you still fail in Matthew's language. You still failed to respect their moral independence. What is this community that has the right to get its children to become autonomous through this particular set of religious views? Why does it have the claim to do [00:21:00] that to this individual child?
Emily McTernan: One of the fascinating things about this book is that it's written by four of you. Three major positions are laid out in the middle, but you'll come up in the end with a shared set of regulatory principles. How was it for the co-authors? Were you surprised to end up in the same place?
Adam Swift: The distinctive feature of the book is that it is co-authored with things we agree and disagree about. It's called “How to Think About Religious Schools” and there's a kind of reason for that, which is we are mainly concerned to help people think about religious schools at least as much as to persuade them of our conclusions about what they should think about schools.
Quite a lot of the book is about setting out a kind of analytical framework for thinking about the issues analogous to a chemist's periodic table. Some elements make up people's positions on these issues. We're trying to, and I won't go into it all now, but there's a kind of analytical [00:22:00] aspect of the book just says, look, these are the kinds of things you're going to need to think about these, and you're going to have to weigh these different kinds of normative considerations. So, we agree about that. We also agree in our method, which is how to get from philosophy to policy.
You need to think about all these normative considerations and how to balance them: children's interests, parents’ interests, our interests as citizens, their interests as future citizens, and so on. Then we must look at what's realistic, what's feasible in the circumstances. That's why our book, the policy regulation bit, is just about England.
If we were in the Netherlands, if we were in the States, if we were in France, if we were in Ireland, we'd be making very different proposals. We'd have different views about what is realistic in those contexts. Then, we apply this method and have slightly different philosophical views. When we get to policy about how these schools should be regulated, [00:23:00] what should the rules be, both for state schools and private religious schools? Albeit coming from different places, we all agreed this is the most coherent overall package for a realistic way forward.
It's not realistic that many people would vote for it tomorrow because it's quite radical in its implications.
It's very different from current practice, and it would be very controversial. But it's realistic where we think that proper airing and serious debate over time. Today's common sense was yesterday's wacky idea.
Getting people to see the extent children are dominated and not respected by their parents and not treated as independent moral agents properly by their parents, will be quite a big transformation in our thinking about the family. We'll come to see how terrible it was that we gave parents such extreme authority over their kids.
Emily McTernan: So, children's liberation movement. It's the next step after this book. We'll start with religious schools and then
Adam Swift: Yeah. It's a children's liberation movement. But parents are important for [00:24:00] children. There is a version of children's liberation that says, oh, we should just let kids run free and, all this authority to adults. That's a terrible idea. Children need authority, they need parental authority.
Emily McTernan: You're very clear on the need for attachment, and that's one of the wonderful things about your work, the sensitivity to the importance the parent has to the child.
Adam Swift: To some readers, my work on the family is a reactionary defence it insists that these parent-child relationships are important.
Emily McTernan: There are two facets of importance. One, the attachment thing, which I buy, and then there's also this authoritative thing, and I wonder if some of the reactionary stuff comes to the authoritative aspect of what you think is going on with that attachment relation, which I guess not everyone would necessarily sign up for two separate claims.
Adam Swift: I agree.
Emily McTernan: We've got into the parenting weeds, but to close, it would be fantastic if you'd give us one or two headlines of these policies. What do you think people might be struck by? If you had to pick one for this parliament, what would it be?
Adam Swift: The headlines are: [00:25:00] state schools should not engage in directive teaching. They should be allowed to have a faith ethos, which is a phrase in the current legislation. We don't want to get into details, but currently, there are a lot of schools in England that have officially registered as having a religious character, and this affects what they can do. I think about a third of schools have a religious character. Mainly Christian. When we wrote the grant for this book, one of the referees said: oh, it is obvious that this is about Muslim schools because that was in the news at the time. Muslim schools were tiny relative to Christian schools in the UK, the numbers are completely different. I can't remember how I got onto that; we shouldn't be allowed to have directive schooling.
Emily McTernan: But this faith ethos schooling you're not worried about. So, if there's a Church of England or a Muslim school that doesn't have directive teaching.
Adam Swift: A school can have a religious character if it has a faith ethos the argument for at least two of [00:26:00] us is that's the most realistic way to stop parents from going private or homeschooling.
Quite a lot of government policy is influenced by this to allow enough religion in schools to make them attractive to religiously minded parents so that they don't have private into a less regulated sector or homeschooling.
The boundary between homeschooling and private schooling is blurred. Families get together, and when it becomes a school, the main thought is that it's not so problematic from the point of view of autonomy.
Emily McTernan: What about the permissions to opt out of, say, sex education or other bits of the syllabus that conflict with one's religious tradition?
Adam Swift: We've talked about children's autonomy, and that's one reason why you want them to know about same sex relationships. You want them to know about whatever gets taught in current sex education or relationship education. It's [00:27:00] a hazard as to what the curriculum for those must look like.
But it's important for children's autonomy that they get to know these things. Even if they're the most conventional, heterosexual, bio normative, whatever you want to say, people themselves, they're going to be living alongside fellow citizens who will have very different views.
If parents can take kids out of classes where they learn about how other people are living their lives or the choices available to them, then that's problematic. It shouldn't be allowed. We advocate a curriculum in civic, religious, ethical, and moral education. We think that should be in the way of how children get taught about religion, but not giving religion a special status, as there are lots of non-religious answers to questions about how we should live, how we should treat each other. The Humanist Society is the main lobby group that kind of is always going on about this.
But [00:28:00] the humanism or non-religious in the conventional sense views should be discussed. All children, even those who are homeschooled, should get all that stuff so that even if you're going to homeschool your kid, you still have to deliver the syllabus in some way or another.
Emily McTernan: Thank you, Adam, for that deep dive into children's liberation. The nature of religion, what it is to parent well, and of course, religious schools. We've been discussing a book by Adam Swift, written by him and his co-authors Matthew Clayton, Andrew Mason, and along with Ruth Wareham. Published by Oxford University Press, called How to Think About Religious Schools: Principles and Policies. Full details, as ever, are going to be in the show notes for this episode. Next week we'll be talking about whether there's a human right against discrimination with Saladin Meckler Garcia. To make sure you don't miss out on those future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics, subscribe and you can do so on Apple, Google Podcasts, or whatever podcast provided you [00:29:00] use. We'd love it if you could take a moment to rate or review us, too. I am Emily McTernan. This episode was produced by Eleanor Kingwell Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann. This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.