The Lincolnshire school authorities have decided to allow local schools the choice of including the study of paganism with the existing study of religions:
If you’re looking to improve your child’s chanting skills or enhance their moon dancing, Lincolnshire may soon be the place to go — as the county decided this week to let individual schools decide on the teaching of pagan doctrine.
At present, some six world religions are studied in that County’s schools.
According to the minutes of a meeting of the Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education (Sacre) the county’s RE advisor fed back the results of her investigation into Paganism.
I’m not a fan of teaching any religious beliefs in any public school, but if you’re going to cover any of them, you can’t exclude one arbitrarily. “Paganism”, in this instance is a superset of Druidry, which is now officially recognized as a faith (that is, all Druids are pagans, but not all pagans are Druids):
This makes 2010 a very good year for UK Paganism, following the recognition of druidry as a religion in Britain for the first time in October, when the Charity Commission accepted it as a faith and gave it the charitable status afforded to other religious groups.
Critics — who have been slow off the mark so far on this issue — may also be relieved to learn that modern pagans, unlike ancient druids, are more concerned with focussing personal energies through ritual than human sacrifice. Then again, that allegation was laid by the Romans, who also accused early Christians of eating babies.
