My daughter’s school has been teaching pupils how to treat others. “Everyone has invisible buckets on their shoulders,” she told me. “When you’re nice to someone, you are filling their buckets. But if you’re not nice, then you’re emptying their buckets.”
The image has clearly fired her imagination. Her younger brother has been reprimanded for bucket-tipping, and when Mr Brighouse helped me get something down from a top shelf in the supermarket, she yelled, “Mummy, Daddy’s filling your bucket!”, for all of aisle 7 to hear.
Having spent the majority of my life (as pupil and teacher) in faith schools, I find non-religious moral instruction strange. In a faith school, if you need to give children a reason for good behaviour, there’s always a parable or general encouragement to “love thy neighbour as thyself” to fall back on. I don’t know what I expected non-faith schools to do, but half-baked bucket metaphors wasn’t it.
It’s not as if non-faith schools aren’t good at teaching children to be kind, moral human beings. They really are. What seems more difficult is teaching RE. The sheer breadth of the subject combined with an overloaded timetable forms a barrier, and it is not unusual to hear teachers plead lack of subject knowledge in a way they would never do with history or maths.
This is not a time to fob children off with empty platitudes
It is therefore unsurprising that RE often falls prey to the “oxbow lake” method of education: where children are left with random sound bites of knowledge unanchored to any deeper context. An education in which the whole history and culture of Sikhism is reduced to five things beginning with K and where thousands of years of Judaism can be condensed into an annotated Seder plate.
Last year, I sat in assembly watching the local vicar tell the Easter story by punching a hole in an Easter egg. He went on to explain that this represented the empty tomb at the resurrection, but by that point, I - like the children - was too fixated on the chocolate to pay any attention to its meaning.
I know not everyone is in favour of RE in schools but it’s on the curriculum and surely deserves to be taught properly. Not least because, in my experience, kids love it. The same goes for PSHE. Some primaries now teach philosophy. I’m not sure why all of them don’t. It seems counterintuitive to reject the wisdom of the greatest thinkers of all time in favour of “British values” and an activity on friendship thought up by a consultant in Milton Keynes.
And since society is haemorrhaging compassion and tolerance, instilling these values in the younger generation is clearly a pressing need. This is no time to fob children off with empty platitudes about teamwork and kindness. We need to give them foundations of rock, not sand - some fragments they can one day shore up against their ruins. If you think teaching maths and English well is important, PSHE is even more so. In the words of W H Auden, “We must love one another, or die.”
Jo Brighouse is a primary school teacher in the Midlands
