Rewriting the World Religions Unit
The head of department at a co-ed state secondary school is rewriting Year 11 Religious Studies. The current unit is six weeks on six 'world religions' - Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism - one week each, with 'founder, sacred text, festival, symbol' for each. Student evaluations say 'it's just a list of facts' and 'none of it is about anyone I know'. The roll includes a large Tongan Methodist congregation, several students who attend a local Fo Guang Shan Buddhist temple, a family who describe themselves as secular humanists and who complained the course is 'religious instruction in disguise', and iwi representatives on the board who have asked why Māori spirituality is absent. A new student asks where her Rātana church fits. The school is required to be secular. The HOD has nine weeks and a $400 budget.
1. Identify and explain four problems with the current 'world religions' framing.
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1. The list is a construction, not a neutral map. The 'world religions' set - founder, book, belief system - was assembled in nineteenth-century Europe and selects traditions that fit that shape. Oral, Indigenous and non-religious worldviews fall outside it. That is why Māori spirituality and Rātana do not appear: not because they are absent from the world, but because the frame was built in a way that excludes them.
2. It treats each tradition as bounded, homogeneous and static. One week per tradition cannot show internal diversity (Sunni and Shia, Methodist and Pentecostal, Theravāda and Mahāyāna), change over time, or the difference between official teaching and what people actually do.
3. The checklist is not an inquiry. 'Founder, text, festival, symbol' produces labels, not understanding. Students can fill the table without ever explaining why a belief matters to an adherent or how a tradition responds to a problem.
4. It is disconnected from the room and from the community. Students learn about people elsewhere and nobody here. That is the complaint in the evaluations, and it is also a fairness issue: the traditions actually present in the school are treated as case studies while others are treated as the norm.
A fifth, quieter problem: a survey can slide into a 'they do this, we do that' comparison that implicitly ranks traditions, which is at odds with the school's obligation to be secular.
2. Propose a revised nine-week structure and justify what you keep, drop and add.
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Weeks 1–2 - What is a worldview? Meaning, belonging, ethics, ritual, authority, story. Include secular humanism here as one worldview among others, so the category is set before any tradition is studied.
Weeks 3–4 - Depth study: Tongan Methodism in our community. Interviews, a visit, primary sources (hymns, church notices). This is where students learn that a tradition is not one voice - the gap between what the church officially says and what a lay preacher says is the analysis.
Weeks 5–6 - Depth study: Māori spirituality and Rātana, planned with iwi guidance from the board. Taught as a worldview with its own categories - whakapapa, tapu and noa, kaitiakitanga - not as an add-on to a European list.
Week 7 - A third depth study, chosen by the class: the local Fo Guang Shan temple, or humanism in practice (ceremonies, ethics, organisations).
Week 8 - A contested issue across two traditions, for example climate change, so students practise the 'how does a tradition respond' skill with real sources.
Week 9 - Assessment.
Keep: the analytical skills, the comparison, the requirement to describe before evaluating. Drop: the one-week survey and the founder/text/festival checklist. The $400 covers transport to one local site and a koha for a guest speaker; the rest of the sources are free online.
3. A parent emails: 'Teaching humanism is teaching atheism as a religion - that's not Religious Studies.' How do you respond?
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I would thank them for writing and answer directly, on three points.
1. The unit is about worldviews, not about deciding which one is true. A worldview is a set of beliefs about what is real, what is good, and how we should live. Secular humanism has all three, plus organisations, ceremonies, ethical traditions and public advocates. Excluding it would not be neutral - it would make religion the only thing worth studying and implicitly treat non-religion as not a position.
2. Studying is not teaching. Students analyse humanism; they are not asked to adopt it, any more than studying Islam asks them to become Muslim. If the assessment asks them to explain and evaluate, they are doing exactly what they do with every other worldview in the course. I would offer to send the actual assessment task so the parent can see the wording.
3. The school is required to be secular, and that cuts both ways. No devotional instruction in any tradition, and no privileging of religion over non-religion. Including humanism is what secular Religious Studies looks like; a course that covered only religions and asked students to compare them favourably would be the actual problem.
I would also invite them in to look at the unit plan, because the strongest answer to a concern about indoctrination is transparency about what is actually being taught.