Should Religion Be Taught In Schools?

Religion has always been part of our educational curriculum, right from the onset of formal education in Nigeria. In the northern part, Islamic education has been there even before the introduction of western education. 

The Western education introduced to Nigeria was brought not just by the Europeans but by the church (missionaries), little surprise most educated Nigerians before the 70s were product of Western education provided by Christian missionary. And so if the missionary is your teacher the Bible automatically becomes a compulsory subject. 

Thus Western education became the most effective medium used to brainwash and turn most Nigerians away from their ancestral religion to the religion of the white man.

In Nigeria today, most private schools and most State run schools, run their school based on a moral dictates of a particular religion. If it is Christian school, don’t expect to see Islamic knowledge in the curriculum, and if it is Muslim school, it is a Haram to teach the Bible to students.

So the million dollar question is this if we must teach religion in schools; which religion should be taught?

The Christian parent is skeptical and uncomfortable with a Muslim teacher; teaching her child about Islam and the same goes for the Muslim parent; so what we end up having are teachers preaching about a particular God/religion and consciously or unconsciously condemning the other religion (which is virtually what all religions do), so at the end of the day students only end up with one side of the story and will grow up with a biased mindset and a negative outlook towards other religion.

Some will argue that religious education breeds good morals in students. But so does Civic Education and in Nigeria, students even carry out examination malpractice when it comes to Religious Education examination. 

If Religion Education does breed good morals, then Nigeria shouldn’t be experiencing this level of moral decadence we are seeing today, so it is either the teacher or the church and mosque has failed woefully.

Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, it is in fact a fundamental Human Right but religion should be something that a child needs to learn at the mature age. If indeed the person chooses to learn it. 

Teaching religion may provoke an exchange of hateful comments between children who have prejudice against people of a certain religion. Religion isn't like math or English, you don't need a WASSCE in it for nearly any job, unless you want to become a nun, an Imam or something.

While in secondary school, I saw Religious Education (CRK) as a waste of 45 minutes of my precious time each week when I was taught stuff that goes in one ear and out the other because I had gotten tired of hearing it in church or during family devotion. In that wasted time at school, and all the other subjects which are nonsensical, I could have learned lots of other things that are more applicable in real life.

Been a student of a Missionary School, I found teachers to be  incredibly biased, and I find most of my teachers teach Christian beliefs and see Christian belief as the only medium of teaching good morals, sometimes forgetting the fact that there are students of other religious background.  Not even religions associated with my roots or other countries of the world were taught to me, if they were ever mentioned it was either to condemn the belief or ridicule them.

Religion is something that children don't know how to analyze or really understand. You can't teach something like religion to children as they don't really know all the stories and can't know how to critically analyze and ask their own questions. Teaching a child about the story of Jesus or Mohamed is non-essential to their education and it gets in the way of their curriculum. Religion should be something they find on their own and should not be forced by parents or their teachers.

Many religions are corrupt and if we must teach children about religion in schools, we should not cherry pick them. You can't give someone a false perspective on something. Just read Leviticus and kids will never want to read the Bible again.
  

Every person in the society is free and has right to choose which religion he/she want to choose. And if this person believes in Christianity, he can be tolerance about the other religions, but somehow he/she will be biased about other religions. Brad S. Gregory mentions in his article of “The Other Confessional History: On Secular Bias in the Study of Religion” that during the history people always had bias toward the other religions and even they had wars because of the different beliefs (pg.132-149). Nowadays, this situation changed but it is still remaining as a cold war or a war of thought. For example, in the western world, people have bias toward Islam because of the terror acts. In these conditions, you can't expect a Christian teacher to give an unbiased education about Islam.

 It is time government should stop paying to upkeep subjects that are not essential to our students’ education. I won't condemn Sunday schools and Koranic schools and any other education used to help educate people in religion. But I feel that it shouldn’t be part of students’ grades. If anything, they should learn religion when they can truly understand it, instead of a sort of brainwashing technique.

I throw down the gauntlet to the government. Ban religion being taught to children under eleven in any manner, at home or school, then let them make an informed choice thereafter. Let's see how long it takes for the numbers of ' believers' to tumble rapidly because the children haven't been brainwashed.