ABSTRACT
Alain de Botton has noted that: ‘The difference between secular and religious approaches to education boil down to the question of what learning should be for’ (de Botton, 2012: 111). An answer to de Botton might be that secularists see the final goal of education as concerned principally with happiness in this world whereas Christianity and Islam view education as a means of achieving happiness in the hereafter. Both religions would also see religious and secular education as inseparable from each other. The risk that some religious people see in modern schools, which are often viewed by them as being entirely secular in orientation, is that the values that their children have learnt in the family are adjusted in such schools and may even gradually disappear in a school system which emphasises that children ought to choose and design their own set of values even if this means detachment from the beliefs, practices and values that have been carefully nurtured in the family. In other words, the claim is that transmitting secular values can undermine a child's sense of religious identity. Secularists would claim in response to this perceived threat, to varying degrees, that education should be objective, rational and even neutral and that all children ought to be free to choose what they believe and value. It is why many secularists are opposed to religious schools (see Singer, 2001). It does not of course follow that a commitment to secular values implies that one adopts an atheistic position; however, atheists have an obvious interest in supporting secularism. Some secularists would also claim that secularism itself does not seek to challenge the tenets of any particular religion or belief and that it does not seek to impose atheism on anyone. In contrast, Roger Trigg (2012) has observed that there is a clear trend of legal prioritisation of secular values in the United States and United Kingdom, which means that when the secular values are in conflict with religious values the latter always loses. The debate is of course more complicated than simply a series of statements and assertions about supposed purpose, neutrality and objectivity. The whole idea of how we conceptualise the ‘secular’ is part of this debate.
