Nick Comfort asks why young children are not being taught that Christianity is Britain's main religion
THE other day, my three-year-old son emerged from his nursery class clutching a sheet of words he had been given to copy. No dogs, cats, Mummy, Daddy or any of that nonsense; the sheet read - Religions of the World. People worship at their church, synagogue, mosque or gurdwara. I cannot be alone in wondering how any infant could be expected to copy those words, let alone grasp the concepts behind them.
Remarkably, the private nursery was not in some ethnically diverse city where such tuition - at a later stage - might be desirable, but a market town in the south Midlands, where the non-Christian ethnic community comprises one extended family of Kashmiri taxi drivers. Political correctness was clearly at work, though not - I am sure - at the instigation of the staff. Nor, indeed, of Ofsted, whose recent inspection gave the nursery a glowing report but concentrated on practicalities.
The first alarm rang when our son serenaded us with "Baa, Baa, white sheep". Then I noticed a set of books in the classroom about Christmas, Ramadan and Diwali - each given equal prominence - and no sign of Bible stories. And when he came trotting out with a painting of "Alexander's mosque", my hackles rose. Can one imagine three-year-olds in a nursery in Pakistan being asked to draw pictures of churches? Of course not.
No other culture in the world promotes others before instilling the real thing, so why should ours? My instincts told me that the drive to promote all religions equally followed an approach from the local council. This, in turn, had coincided with an upsurge in the number of single mothers sending their children to the nursery. The episode raised the alarming question: is the social work/ educational establishment trying to erode the basics of Christianity by teaching very young children that other religions are just as much a part of their culture?
Not so long ago, it was a given fact that children in this country came from Christian homes or, failing that, homes where no religion was practised. The Nativity story, the parables and even the tale of Mary Jones and her Bible were handed down from one generation to the next. For the relatively few children in nursery classes, teachers and helpers gave religion a low profile. It was accepted that their charges would grow up as Christians, but that they were not yet ready to understand.
Nowadays, both assumptions are under threat, partly because of a shift in the nation's ethnic make-up, but also because the ground rules have been surreptitiously changed - just as state funding has triggered a surge in pre-school provision.
Battle has been joined over what toddlers should be told about religion and, in consequence, the underpinnings of our culture are coming under strain. Even to older children, multi-faith instruction is confusing. A friend's nine-year-old daughter came home from school with a red dot on her forehead, asking if she now had to pray to Hindu gods as well as to Jesus.
There is a world of difference between understanding the great religions of the world when one is ready and forcing them down tiny children's throats in a way that pre-empts any attempt to inculcate their parents' own faith when the time is right.
The Roman Catholic hierarchy in Scotland recently provoked protests by suggesting that pre-school children from Catholic homes should attend separate nurseries. By the time the next day's papers hit the streets, the sectarian trenches were being dug.
In one sense, such segregation is clearly undesirable; separate Catholic education has played a major part in perpetuating social friction in both Scotland and Ulster.
Yet the hierarchy has surely done a service by reminding us that nursery education is an extension of the home and its values, not a test-bed for social engineering. It is regrettable that, if the Scottish Church had its way, Catholic toddlers would not mix in nursery classes with those from Protestant homes. They may get little chance to do so in the years that follow.
Yet there is no doubt they will emerge with a far greater grasp of their cultural and religious heritage - and a surer knowledge of who they are - than those who are told to sit down and draw a gurdwara. To argue this point is not bigotry but common sense; what is more, practitioners of other faiths feel the same.
Not long ago, I heard an imam say on the BBC that he deplored the trend toward teaching comparative religion to the exclusion of the principles of one faith. Encouraging children to believe that all religions were the same and that there was nothing to choose between them would, he said, create a danger that they would grow up holding no religious belief at all.
Maybe that is precisely what the powers behind this socio-educational mishmash are trying to do. It is doubly alarming that they should be experimenting with the souls of our three-year-olds.
