Comment 6 by hairybreeks :

My son no longer wasted time in his years 10 & 11 on learning something he had no use of

...The implication is that we should only be taught things we will later 'have use of'. Well, I have no use of ancient history, Latin, geography, chemistry and several other subjects, including, yes, religion, but I value these subjects as part of my general education and upbringing.Have we forgotten the recent announcement about Michael Gove's 'Bible in every school', and Richard's excellent retort? I believe that if we don't teach religion to our children then they will grow up ignorant of 'faith' and vulnerable to exploitation by religious groups. Provided, of course, that we don't actually teach them that these things are 'true'.

I think a compulsary GCSE in RE is pretty repugnant. And I went to a school where RE (previously RI, Religious Instruction) was compulsary.

Pretty patchy it was too. The ones that were most useful were by my history teacher. I'm guessing she was a believer but never made it explicit. "Remember the Bible is not a history book!". And put four columns on the board for Mathew, Mark, Luke and John and pointed out the contradictions and inconsistencies (in other words treated like an historical document).

Actual specialists in RE. Who on earth in the mid-20s wants to teach RE to uninterested teenagers? We were set an essay where we imaging how we could help other people (I can't remember if the "other people" was made explicit) if we won a large sum of money (say 10,000 UKP). Some subversive (maybe me) got the amount upped and we proceeeded to compete on the most profligate (and unhelpful) way to spend the money.

The headmaster "I can teach anything". RE was just like any other lesson he taught. Anecdotes from his past "when I was the director of a football team" or, his favourite, the 4 (or 5 or 12 or whatever it was) routes into an engineering career. I suspect he single handedly destroyed britain as an engineering nation.

So RE can be quite a broad subject. None of that wishy-washy comparitive religion though. "it just confuses them".