Singing from the same hymn sheet

Alastair Kirk stopped going to school when he was 11. He is now 20, and not exactly a dropout — he went on being educated at home, sitting down every day to work through booklets of maths, english, science, history, geography, all couched in a unique style. ‘Here are examples of interrogative sentences,” states one booklet in the curriculum he used, Accelerated Christian Education (ACE). ‘Do you know Jesus as your personal Saviour? Can you ever praise Him enough?”

The best thing about being educated in this way, says Kirk, is ‘I could study the word of God every day rather than defending it every day”. What did he miss out on by not being in school? ‘Temptation,” he says.

More than 500 families in Britain are educating their children with the ACE curriculum, which was developed in the 1970s by American fundamentalists, but its popularity is growing in the United Kingdom, and not only among home-schooling families — more than 50 schools in Britain are using it.

Arthur Roderick, a director of Christian Education Europe, says it is getting more and more inquiries every year. ‘More people understand why we do this now.Black is getting blacker and white is getting whiter,” he says.

But he isn’t satisified yet, feeling that too many people are choosing this kind of education just because they dislike the state system. ‘The flood will come,” he says, ‘when God touches more people to do it for positive reasons.”

Much concern has been expressed about independent faith schools in Britain, but the anxiety is always concentrated on independent Muslim schools. Independent Christian schools, on the other hand, are pretty much ignored. The chief inspector of schools, David Bell, for example, recently criticised independent Muslim schools for failing to teach tolerance of other cultures. But after he had made that speech, his office released information that showed evangelical Christian schools are even less successful at that task.

British legislation lays down that independent schools can go their own way in many things, but they must ‘assist pupils to acquire an appreciation of and respect for their own and other cultures, in a way that promotes tolerance and harmony”. Of the 40 evangelical Christian schools that are not yet fully registered with the authorities, 18 had failed on that count.

But even those schools that were deemed to have passed the requirement don’t see it as their brief to talk about other faiths. Where other faiths, or even branches of the same faith, are discussed in the ACE booklets, the tone is telling. One social studies booklet on Martin Luther and the Reformation, for example, is critical of the Catholic Church using such words as ‘idolatry” and ‘superstitious nonsense” to characterise supposedly Catholic teachings.

At the Maranatha Christian School near Swindon, west of London, 60 children are taught with ACE, which emphasises that evangelical Christianity is the only route to the truth. In this way it differs fundamentally from the education provided at state faith schools, which put religious education alongside the national curriculum — and can accept children and employ teachers from other faiths. At Maranatha, all the families and teachers are literally singing from the same hymn sheet.

The children in Maranatha’s classrooms, who are aged up to 18, sit at individual desks facing the wall, with high dividers between them so that each has to work alone. This is another characteristic of ACE — discussion with fellow students or a teacher is not encouraged and the pupil studies, in silence, the booklets that begin with Bible verses and thread homilies on good Christian morals through every subject.

Thirteen-year-old Leah moved from a state school to Maranatha three years ago. ‘I had mixed feelings but now I like it a lot,” she says. ‘Sometimes I miss my old friends but I don’t think I’d like it at their school — the peer pressure and everything.” Some British state schools have been criticised for putting creation and evolution as equivalent viewpoints in religious education lessons, but for children at ACE schools the literal interpretation of Genesis permeates everything they are taught. And for the parents who choose schools like this, such literal use of the Bible is the draw. Tom Price has five children at Maranatha and loves that they are being taught that the six-day creation story is a fact. ‘Evolution removes God from the world. But I see God’s hand in everything. I see purpose and design,” he says.

Price is a lay preacher in a Pentecostal church, Assemblies of God. ‘I don’t want to have to undo and unpick what they are taught at school.”

Another area of ACE that stands out is the traditional delivery of information with none of the role play and speculation of mainstream curricula. This is all about getting your head around the ‘facts” and then retelling those ‘facts” in multiple choice and fill-in-the-blanks tests. Although that means children learn the basics in a way that many state-educated pupils may not, it also means they do not learn to question anything they are taught.

Harry Brighouse, professor of philosophy and education policy studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has watched the expansion of ACE in the United States with distaste. ‘It is a crude curriculum. It doesn’t encourage questioning or individual thought — it is very much based on rote learning.”

What is undeniably attractive about ACE is the way that it moves at the same pace as the child. Children are assessed on entry and progress at their own speed, working through booklets and doing the tests at the end of each before they can move on to the next. They mainly work alone, but if they get stuck they put a little flag up in their cubicle and a supervisor will help out. This flexible pace with its built-in checks can clearly work for children who have fallen through gaps in the state system.

Sharon McGowan has four children at Maranatha. It was the experience of her nine-year-old son that made her turn to this school. During his first year he had a new teacher who had no idea how to teach; during the second his teacher was off sick and he had a succession of supply tutors. He began to fail. ‘He was a proud little boy and when he had to start special classes it had a real effect on his self-esteem. I was worried that he would compensate with difficult behaviour, and I could see that starting to happen,” says McGowan. Within a year of starting at Maranatha he had caught up.

Another such school is the East London Christian Choir School, in Hackney, east London, which was set up just a year ago by two pastors, Maxine and George Hargreaves. George recognises that one of the main reasons children are finding their way to this school is that the state system is failing them.

The children’s learning is shaped by a narrow interpretation of the Bible with all the preconceptions of this religious bias, including a very particular approach to sex education. Says George: ‘We tell them that the bloodshed when virginity is broken on the marriage bed is part of the blood covenant made between you and your husband under God, and if the blood is shed elsewhere it will weaken the covenant.”

ACE schools are much cheaper than other independent schools: the reliance on pen-and-paper learning cuts out the need for big investment in resources and the staff (who are often not qualified) are propelled by a belief in God to work for very little.

ACE-educated children also don’t have to sit for state exams as their own qualification, the International Certificate of Christian Education, is now recognised by more and more universities and colleges.

For parents who mistrust main-stream education, the ACE system provides the means to avoid it completely. The curriculum is easy to use at home because all the information is contained in the booklets, which also provide self-tests and which progress neatly from level to level. And by withdrawing children from school, of course, parents can exercise more control over what their children think and read and say.

A style of education that discourages debate poses a question for the rest of society. As David Berliner, a US educationalist at Arizona University says: ‘Their educational system is closer to ultra-fundamentalism than is healthy for a democracy.”

Ben Rogers, the associate director of the think tank Institute for Public Policy Research in the UK, produced a recent report, What is Religious Education for?

The report argues that discussion of atheism and agnosticism should be included in religious education. ‘There is this view that parents own their children,” he says. ‘Nobody owns kids. Children aren’t yours to control — you hold them in trust, and you should cultivate certain qualities in them, including the ability to understand the value of different points of view.”

In the US, evangelicals have effectively created a parallel system of education, which has schooled hundreds of thousands of pupils in its messianic world view, and the evangelical social and political agenda has moved into the mainstream. Evangelical Christianity is far from being such a force in Britain, but it is clearly the desire of a passionate group that it should become so.

Fundamentalist Christians point enviously to the fact that more children are currently educated in Muslim independent schools than independent evangelical Christian schools in the UK — about 14 000 compared with about 5 000 — and independent Muslim schools are growing more quickly.

Rather than confronting this sectarianism with a call to inclusiveness, they would like to react with further sectarianism of their own. The goal is a more, rather than less, divided society. ‘Christians have been leaving it to the government to decide on their values, while Muslims have said, ‘This is mine, this is my culture, this is who I am’,” says Maxine Hargreaves. ‘Now we Christians are saying that we want to defend our culture, too. We want to take back our children.” —