Background: As part of the Education and Global Social Justice Project, in May 2011, undergraduate student Conor Finegan interviewed Rene Ferguson, a professor of life orientation and religious studies at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. In this interview, Ferguson discusses the apartheid-era Christian nationalist education, the educational reforms that have been implemented since, and the legacy of apartheid in religion.
The first two questions are a little more personal. It’s just to give me more background. Can you tell me about your journey to your present position and what inspired you to do the work that you do.
Thirty years ago I started as a high school teacher and at that point in time, I was a committed Christian. I taught at a state religious instruction, which was Christian national education based and I taught the vicar studies. I taught those for about 10 years. And then I left the school system and I came to this campus which used to be called Johannesburg College of Education (JCE), and subsequently has become the School of Education. I’ve taught as a JCE staff member for about 10 or 11 years and started off teaching what became to be called Bible education because the education department was very intent on distinguishing between Christian religious education and anything that smacked of diversity. This was in the 1980s, when I taught at school, diversity was not something they could appreciate in the way that it is now. So I continued to teach, but then I also started to teach different religions in between. And then, with some colleagues, I started to push for a change in curriculum because the first democratic election was being held about 1991, 1992, 1993, and we made our first moves to include more world religions and religions of South Africa. So, we started to do that. I think that in the beginning it was quite a political thing from our side, challenging the Christian national education system which had been part of a liberal university and was something that was not vetoed from the diversity side. It was vetoed from the education department which we discovered, when we tried to push our views into schools, we were told not to come back. That’s because the biblical literalist slant was maintained for a long time after the first democratic election in South Africa. So at that time, myself and my colleagues kept pushing our curriculum so that we could incorporate more and more students from different religious and cultural backgrounds. I suppose that is just the diversity indifference, that it doesn’t have to be something that is conflicting or oppositional or whatever. But that is what our nation is actually made of: diversity and difference. And we need to embrace it and we need to work hard at understanding it so we continue and are passionate. I mean that as our constitution, our new constitution, became embedded in the minds and the discourses of South Africans. I started to shape my teachings of religious diversity from a human rights perspective and, more recently, I began to look at it from a social justice point of view. From a point of view that everybody’s’ voice needs to be heard, and that the idea of being able to articulate one’s religious beliefs and our liberties must happen at school. And, then again, it doesn’t have to be something that causes conflict. We need to learn how to understand one another, and there’s no better way than to do it in the classroom. So for me, the challenge has been how to get teachers prepared to do that. [Teachers should prepare] to gather, to facilitate, and to mediate the learning around religious teachings in the classroom. And to learn to put their own beliefs aside temporarily while they allow children in their classes to explore. What they need experience is to learn about the world views, the religion, whatever you like to call them, of the other children in the class and in the broader school community.
Before we continue, I have a side question. What was that Christian nationalist education like? What would that do?
The nationalist government that came to power in 1948 in South Africa based its entire political philosophy on what was called Christian Nationalism. And it was basically a brand of Calvinistic Christianity that supported apartheid’s dogmatism. And, so, especially through the diatribe church, the upper carny, the African churches, that was propagated through the diaotroform churches and it was actually devised by theologians from the dioatroform churches. It was particularly obvious in Afrikaans schools; less of the thought was in white, English-speaking schools, because our schools were completely separated before 1992. In about 1992, schools started to become mixed. The desegregation process started, but Christian National education would be in every subject in school. Every subject was seen from a white, Christian—it was a brand of Christianity. I can give you some resources to have a look at it, if you want to. It was way of looking at Christianity that supported racism. It was introduced by Nazism, Nazism of some sort, the idea of white supremacy and that anybody of color would be less able to do anything. So a look into the religious education that I taught in school, was called religious instruction, and it was very biblically based, the geography of the Bible, the history of the Bible, books of the Bible. There was absolutely no reference to anybody who wasn’t white. And I think having grown up in an English home, gone to English schools, having taught in an English system, I was less exposed to that Christian Nationalism than similar Afrikaans compatriots were because it was a whole part of the Afrikaans philosophy that was promoted in South Africa, and continues to be promoted in some circles today. You would need to do some reading. But even in the way in which the politics were derived was dependent upon a particular way of understanding Christianity, in a nutshell.
The last personal question: could you talk a little bit about how your personal position has influenced or motivated or detracted from or just otherwise effected your work, if at all.
Originally, I said I was a committed Christian. I am no longer a committed Christian. I’m no longer a Christian. I would be lying if I said I was a Christian. Because I don’t subscribe to the beliefs of the New Testament and I think that was probably influenced by the injustices associated with Christian Nationalism. I know that shouldn’t be, but because there were—and still are—many Christians in South Africa who fought against the system. People who were placed under house arrest long ago, in the 1960s and 1970s, because of their Christian faith. Because they couldn’t see how they could align the atrocities of apartheid to Christianity. And so, many very good Christians left South Africa. People who were political leaders, or were religious leaders, left South Africa, went into exile. Some stayed here and managed to oppose the government within the system.
When I watched—I don’t know if you knew about truth about reconciliation—when I watched, I found it extremely disturbing and it started to make me question my own beliefs. And I think also because I was thrown into interactions with people of different faiths, and I started to read in other directions. At one stage I was thinking about converting to Judaism, but decided it would take too long, because I enjoyed the ethics of Judaism. I then have been reading quite a bit into Buddhism and faith, and finding its way of charity. I’m not interested in Buddhism. I have not embraced the whole thing, but if I were to embrace any religion at any time, it would be Buddhism. They’re rather good—and I think it’s about the ethics—and it’s not that institutionalized, that you have to be this way in it. That’s what I find. It’s shifted for me, but according to religious development theorists, I’m in a very normal stage of development—for my age. And I think that what’s happened, to answer your question about influencing me, I think as I open my soul to more conversation with people from different religions in South Africa, I also have opened up both sides—myself and the other side—to conversation: to talking to each other, to listening to each other, to understanding each other. And that, to me, would be the best part. And lead leading my students in that direction, teaching them that they can be rooted in a religion. I’ve got a complete rapport with some students who are absolutely and totally blown over by learning religions, that they are so rooted in them. Islam—but they are so interested in religion and teaching religion in school, dealing with the issues. So that’s what drives me right now.
Then, to get to the issue of evolution and creation. Like I said before, 64 percent of Christians, according to two interviewers I have talked to, believe in biblical literalism. From your perspective, what do you think drives that idea? What are the reasons that so many people have that belief?
Before I answer that, I have to ask you where they got that 64 percent from…
They didn’t cite anything in particular, but I can just say that from my own point of view, the number seems pretty high. I don’t know if that’s the exact percent, or where that comes from.
I would say it’s probably quite high. The work that I do with my own students, and judging the communities where they come from, I think it’s because of the past history, South African history, even though black people were discriminated against, the idea was to Christian-ize everybody. So many people were originally Christian-ized, if I can put it that way, in mission schools. And the way in which they learned Christianity, and the way in which most whites in South Africa, or most people, except if you belong to any of the other religions. Anybody who followed the Christian litany in any way was taught that way in colleges of education, in schools, in churches, the schooling system was based on biblical literalism. If I think of the curriculum that I had to teach, when I taught at school in the 1980s, the Old Testament was taught from a Christian-based perspective. And any attempt to change that was vetoed quite vehemently by the so-called inspectors of education at the time. So I would put down, very much at the time… there are lots of liberal Christians—those kind of Christians, which is the place I ended up. Now you find it very difficult to find a church where you can go and have very open and challenging conversations that are not literalist. But, I would say in a nutshell, basically, the schooling system, as it was in the past, and the churches mostly are still propagating a Christian perspective on the Bible.
What is the perspective now that is being taught in schools post-apartheid?
Post-apartheid, what happened was, the committee who became the constitution committee started their work. Alongside those who would draft the constitution, there were other committees that were put into place to look at the curricula as they stood after 1994. And their task was to remove all kinds of racial discrimination. Any kind of racist talk had to be removed from the curriculum. And, of course, the one thing that connected everybody in the faith was Christian National education and the kind of religious education that was taught in school. The people who were responsible for this task of streamlining the curriculum—it would be an interim curriculum until new curriculum could be put into place. The dilemma for them was, what to do with religious education? The religious education was based on the idea that you could only go to heaven if you were Christian—and basically, you could only go to heaven if you were white. It was notorious. And so they refused to remove it from the school curriculum. Many black students refused to have any form of religion in school. And so, it was removed for a while. But the idea was they put the new constitution as though it would be a secular state. There would be no alignment. From a social justice human rights point of view, because one of the key freedoms is the freedom of religion and belief. And knowing the United Nations declaration—and I think you have something in the first amendment.
Yes, freedom of speech, religion…
So, in order to honor that, religion was going to be removed completely from the curriculum. In fact, the very first education document that started to emerge in the 1994 election had no religious education at all. And, then, some people from this university, actually, started to propagate for the idea there needs to be some kind of religious education, and it should be a religious education that includes everybody, because religion is such an integral part of the lives of many different South Africans. Then there were moves in the late 1990s to put a committee together to write a national policy on religion. There was a lot of politics around that because the person who headed it up was a fundamentalist Christian of Baptist origin. He was a committed Baptist—and so, he allowed this coming together of this particular policy to be shaped by his biblical literalism. And then it was critiqued and then we had a new minister of education who was a Muslim, but an atheist, and a human rights activist. And he looked at this and said there’s no way we can actually have this kind of national quality, so he got hold of more people at different universities who started to write a new one. I actually worked on that committee and we finalized it and streamlined it but just to get it through. It took them over three years and I can actually email a copy to you and you can have a look at it. I’ll send it to you and you’ll see it is a far more just way of looking at religion. But because people still have this fundamental understanding of religion and the significance of the “other”—that you shouldn’t have to learn about the other, it’s slow to take root. So that’s where we are at the moment. So some teachers are very good at teaching religion. Some schools will argue that they question, because the majority of the children who come to the school as Christian, so they are quite dogged about it and they will teach Christianity. Some private schools have popped up because they want to propagate the old South African schooling system with Bible education. So we have this dilemma at the moment.
So is that document then applied to all schools? Or is it for government schools?
It’s mostly for government schools—for public education. But it does have a clause in it that hones in on private education. Private schools have the right to propagate their own particular religion and to educate children in the religion of the parents that the school identifies with. So we’ve got private Jewish schools, we’ve got private Muslim schools, we’ve got various Catholic schools. Catholic schools have a long history in South Africa—and other Protestant church movements. We’ve got one Hebrew school that I know of not far from here. But anybody who is a citizen in South Africa is subject to the spirit of the constitution, so within the confines of the school, even if you’re Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, whatever, you cannot undermine the religions of others because of the freedom of religion clause and because of the values that are part and parcel of the curriculum and what it means now to be a citizen, you cannot discriminate on anyone. So they should actually be running something that is parallel to the religious education clauses that they have to—I keep using the word propagate—but to sort of teach their particular religious belief. But they should do something parallel and this document mentions that—that there should be something that educates young children about the religious diversity of the land. And some do it very well. There is one Jewish school that I know, King David, that does it very well, I believe. And there are other schools that don’t do it at all.
So with this idea then of teaching religious diversity, do you think that the belief in biblical literalism would hopefully then just die out over the next generation? Or is there something else that is fueling that belief that would need to be addressed as well?
Actually as I’ve just thought of now, as you’re talking, that our history is of Christianity and biblical literalism, but you mustn’t forget that we have a very, very conservative Jewish community in South Africa. Those children go to small, tiny, little private schools, probably learning to be rabbis. The girls and boys, once they reach puberty, are separated—there are also Muslim schools like that—and they would be opposed to reach religious diversity. And then, again, the right-wing political thinking in South Africa—there are African Christians, there are Afrikaans Christians, and there are white, English-speaking Christians who are bent on the approaching the Bible from a fundamentalist, literalist kind of view. And I don’t believe it will die out. The whole thing of creation and evolution has been a bone of contention for many schools, for educators, and for biologists, who have felt that it’s a topic that needs to be put into the school curriculum. So I don’t think it’s going to die out and it poses a problem for science in the curriculum.
I want to talk a little bit about that 64 percent again. I know you mentioned the legacy of apartheid—so many people believe in it. Are there are things contributing to it from your prospective? Are some groups more likely to be biblical literalists like Afrikaans versus coloreds or Indians?
I think it’s the nature of the churches. So I think, in terms of Christianity, you’re going to find there definitely cases in the churches. And then I would also like to think—I don’t want to generalize—because I know of people who go to the Baptist churches, students of mine, who have been my top students in world religion, and let me tell you, if you know what I teach, you would probably cringe. And most biblical literalists would probably die knowing what I teach. Because when I say that I’m inclusive, I am very inclusive, because that is social justice. Social justice doesn’t leave anybody out. And so I go to the n’th degree when it comes to inclusion and I make my own little groups of students incredibly aware of the topics I choose.
I would say that, by and large, the Pentecostal have churches, there are some charismatic churches that are Pentecostal, but they put the Pentecostal movement aside of some churches, and many people are going to those churches. There are other instances—individuals who are self-styled prophets, and I wonder if it isn’t because of the whole—I think we are quite a traumatized nation actually. I wonder if it isn’t because of high crime, the influence of modernism, people have been unnerved by the demise of apartheid and the equalizing of society. People are unnerved by it. But I think there are people who are—if you take, for example, there’s a political party in South Africa called the African Christian Democratic party. They claim to be democrats, but in actual fact they are extreme—they’re not pro-choice. Our constitution is pro-choice, they are openly homophobic, they’re openly anti-abortion, and we have a huge problem in South Africa with the corrected way people have been, which has just emerged over the last few years. And, various Christian groups remain silent, or they are almost supportive of homophobia and several other controversial issues like that. So I don’t think we’re going to see the demise of that. You have the same thing in America, the southern states of America. Biblical literalism is not going by us, or some of the churches and people in the southern states America, in the near future. And the same thing is not going to happen here in South Africa.
But I think there are other things that fuel it. I don’t know what other people have said, but I think it’s the uncertainty in South Africa, that is influenced about crime. The idea of equality, where before people were protected by the government if you were white and Afrikaan-speaking, you got jobs—all protected government top jobs, state jobs, working as cashiers in the Lights and Water Department. Now you’ll very seldom find a white person in those jobs. So the poor, white population is increasing but nobody sees them because everybody is concerned about the poor, black population. It’s a mixture of things. And so what do people have? They cling to their faith and they go back to the Bible. That’s where the charismatic churches are coming in and filling the gap. An interest of mine is South African Pentecostalism movement. Since the 1960s, there’s been a rise in African Pentecostalism, or we call them independent churches. They are literalists as well—that the Bible says a man must not lie with another man, then that’s what it is. And if you’ve got a “stoning-to-death,” well we might not stone him to death, but we might just exclude him from society and ostracize gay men and gay women from society, and make their lives a living hell because the Bible says so.
I know that because I’ve experienced those voices coming through my students. They go home with the conflicting and the difficult issues and they raise those issues that we talk about here. When they go home they talk about those issues in the taxis and on the train back to Soweto, or Alexandra, or wherever. People pick up these—and then there are backlashes—“don’t listen to what you hear at the university, you don’t have to pass the exam." And I kid you not, because it came up in one of my classes, “you don’t have to pass your exam because you’ll come back to the churches and you must believe what the churches tell you.” So I don’t think it’s going to die out anytime soon.
I want to get back to that point—just doing enough to pass your exam—in a second because that comes up with creation and evolution as well. But just one last point about this belief. We’re talking about violence and race, and to a certain extent, poverty and job equality. Can we call this a social justice issue—the fact that people cling to biblical literalism?
I think it’s a problem for social justice. I think that when you talk about social justice you have to rise above your own belief system, whatever that might be. And if your religious/cultural beliefs exclude people on any ground, then that is a problem for social justice, because social justice will not be realized. But if those very same religious beliefs allow you, or encourage you, or inspire you, to hear the voices of the downtrodden, to see the plight of the poor, then that contributes to a realization of justice. But I think it can be both ways.
On the flip side of that, are people’s beliefs in biblical literalism fueled by social injustices?
It could be. It could be. We have a problem, again, with the idea that white people are targeted by crime, and their perception is that it always black people who do crime against white people. And so, therefore, we continue to remain exclusive in our religions, in our politics, in the way we interact socially, etc. So I think it could be. And I would go as far as saying that it most probably is in many cases.
When students have this biblical literalism, as well—I know we’ve talked about how it’s the poor who have social injustice moving forward—but do you think it’s a disadvantage for them as well as they attend university, and look to get a job afterwards? Are they disadvantaged?
I would say yes. But they would say no. And their parents would certain say no, because you believe what’s going to get you to heaven. So they wouldn’t think they’re disadvantaged. They are made uncomfortable. What always surprises me is why they choose to go to a liberal university like this, where freedom of speech, as long as you don’t harm anybody else, is appreciated and it’s encouraged. So what we do find is that the students will come and sit in their classes and when any of those difficult issues are raised, they will just keep quiet. They won’t participate. [They will] just pass the exam to leave it behind.
When it comes to employment, nobody can be discriminated against on the grounds of their religious beliefs, but it would depend entirely on what it is that they’re applying for. So they would find their way back to places where they know they can get a job. That’s generally what happens.
To get to that point about just memorizing things to pass the test, how do you, as a teacher, deal with students who do that? And, at the same time, what advice do you give to your students who will become teachers to deal with the same thing? Specially, if you can talk about creation and evolution, but in general as well.
I don’t give them tests because I don’t believe in my subjects that you can learn something by rote [memorization]. It doesn’t make sense. So I teach them to write argumentatively. I teach them to be critical thinkers. And I teach them—it doesn’t always work—once after years of teaching a student, after she left here, she said “I wanted to tell you before I leave here that I don’t believe a single word you’ve taught me. I’m now going back to my world.” I don’t know why she took my course to be honest. It’s a high-powered second-year liberal, religious studies course where you learn about Eastern religions and others. I have no idea why she got to that point—I don’t know. Teaching is one like one of my favorite authors from literature—creating communities, that to teach for social justice, you actually have to allow students to become a critical thinkers and you have to expose them to many different voices, so I don’t think that exams allow them to learn by rote. They just can’t.
For example, in one course they have to do a research essay, they have to take home a research essay, and they will be looking at how Judaism, for example, propagates human rights. Does Judaism propagate human rights? So it’s something along that line. It’s a research essay, it’s investigative, and they have to write it and bring it to me. And I teach them in my pedagogy courses, we are also teaching them to look at diversity in a way that allows as many voices to be heard in a classroom. I also teach them what it means to be a mediator, rather than an authoritative, overpowering—they are given monologues in the courses that are driven by the teacher. But to work together in a conversation, you have to teach them about dialogue and that’s how I go with my classes.
When you are teaching high school students, they are very impressionable; they ask a lot of questions, a lot of doubts and everything. And with ideas like creation and evolution, they’re pretty complex. How do you prepare your teachers to get on student’s levels and really get across these ideas? What tools do you teach them to use?
The first thing, they have to be confronted with the idea. We can’t send someone into school confronting very skeptical—and these days they’re incredibly alert in high school. Everybody’s got access to cell phones. The blacks are calling their Blackberries. My students email me from the hall to see if I’m in my office—if they want to ask a question they’ll say, “I’ll email you from my Blackberry.” So this is a technology—you’re a young person—everybody has this technology—they techno-freak. They know the Internet backwards. They’re into YouTube. So you cannot afford to be a teacher if you have not been exposed to all sorts of different ideas. And a lot of the time I’ve been observing students in schools, and as much as we expose them to, they still are not prepared for the questions that the students ask. So I think, by and large, we attempt to address the issues that are going to be topical in the school curriculum and we actually have to teach them to be better and more informed than the students at school are going to be.
So most of the time we try to prepare them here, and in my courses I expose them to many different kinds of reading. And in some of the other courses here, they are also exposed to all sorts of issues and questions to broaden their minds. But sometimes it’s quite difficult because many of our students have just come out of high school themselves, and have barely any experience of life, really, to be able to accomplish that. But we hope that will be—we try to get them to search; we try to get them to engage in those issues themselves. We dialogue [about] them, or we debate them, in the classes themselves, so that they can begin to formulate their thoughts. So that when they have to raise those issues and teach those topics in school, they’ve had some exposure. I can’t say that we’re always successful. I don’t want to paint the picture that it’s always successful. But usually they’ll come back and say, “Gee, you know that discussion, that debate, we had in our classes today, we had in a classroom, and I’m so happy we did them.”
But I think it’s just about being open and listening to what people say. I’ve realized that just by listening to some of my students, that learning to just listen to the opinions and the beliefs that students have in classrooms in schools is a good tool, is a good technique, rather than shutting them down. So even the one who is a biblical fundamentalist or literalist—whatever you want to call them—give that person a chance to speak so that you hear the voice and then you can do something to actually present another point of view. And I think that a lot of the time, that’s the best you can do. You have your point of view, and you’re allowed to air it. And these students have their points of view that are about evolution or some type of cosmology or some other sort of other, but let’s see what we can do with it. That’s the idea. And if you can get them halfway there, then you’ve achieved a lot.
So just in general terms, education, but also this program of believing creation and evolution, can sometimes change someone’s religious beliefs or their belief in science, which is pretty much a radical thing, because religion is so important to someone’s identity. Is that the goal, that sort of radical change? What’s the goal here? What’s the hope for students?
I think from my point of view, this transformation is all over the place. The students will come to university and they will always voice the opinions of their parents. And the younger they are, the more likely they are to do that. Perhaps by the time they start getting into secondary school, into high school, they are starting to be a bit more independent in their thinking. And they are raised as Christians and maybe they share the same religious world view as their parents. So, I guess, at the very least, what I would want with my students is to accept that they cannot push their own particular beliefs onto others. It’s a fact of life that there are different viewpoints. If I could just open my students, just a little bit, to respecting that, and allowing some elements of that to be evident in their classrooms, then I will think that I will have achieved a lot. But I don’t know what happens once they leave the portal. I don’t know what happens. Whether they revert back to their very conservative ways of thinking or, in their conservatism, are able to open up the discussions in their classrooms to include topics deliberately.
Just before you came I was putting a PowerPoint together for one of my classes, and I was citing Amy Goodman, a feminist and theorist, and she talks about how in education you can be repressive about what you choose not to teach. And I’m not just talking for myself. I would imaging most of my colleagues on campus would be doing similar things—we would steer our students in a direction that allows them to open up the conversations. And you can’t do that if you choose not to—so, for example, with religion and creation. If you choose not to put that on the table as some topic to be discussed and debated and researched, then you’re not ever going to get any change or transformed point of view about the two living. But at least open up the debate even if you don’t believe it yourself.
It’s an interesting question with science, though, because religion isn’t taught in the science classroom. Do you think maybe it should be addressed? What’s the proper form to talk about religion and science?
I think it can happen in a very nice, integrated way. I regard geography [as] a science, too. So I think teachers of the social sciences and teachers of pure science could work hand in hand. My area is a subject called “Life Orientation” which is a new construct in our curriculum. And I focus on—some of my colleagues think that I should be in the social sciences because of my approach—because I’m not teaching religion for faith; I’m teaching religion for education.
I think that in our schools, with life orientation, science, geography, and history—they could be wonderful, integrated studies where religion is taught in a science class. And actually, some years ago, and it was the only time I ever came across it, I was conducting an interview and I discovered there was a head of science at a primary school in Johannesburg where the science teacher had already introduced evolution and creation. And so what he did was he started with the religion. He allowed all the children to talk about their religious views on creation. And then he introduced evolution. He said, now these associated with how the world came to be. And now, we’re going to look at another point of view—science has a different onset. And apparently it was extremely successful. And I’m quite sure that many people do that. I’m not saying he’s the only one, perhaps there are others who do that. But I think that religion could be taught in science. One of my colleagues who teaches science, as far as I know, she does that. She brings religion into the classroom in order that students can see the different viewpoints with regard to that. So definitely it can be done.
I think what’s happening now, though, is that that doesn’t happen.
Not too often.
And so, we have a program like the Jesuit Institute on the Origins. I guess what needs to be done then to make the change? Because talking with people at the Origin Center at the Jesuit Institute, they know that their program isn’t sustainable. They’re not going to be able to reach out to every school. There’s also the fact that there’s not time—they’re only there for two hours. What is a better way then, besides this two-hour lecture, once a year, at a school, to get this idea across? To get this idea across—that religion and science don’t need to be antagonizing one another.
Trained teachers—I don’t like the word “train.”—educating teachers. My own Ph.D. focused on looking at religion as an aspect of citizen education—that the two don’t need to be at war with each other. So what I wrote about in that is that there needs to be some kind of approach to educating teachers where these kinds of issues can be opened up. And it must be sustainable. It can’t just happen overnight. In some cases, you may have to work closely with teachers over long periods of time, especially people who aren’t trained in the idea—that evolution is wrong.
Let me give you a quick example. I went away with some friends. We went into Free State. And one of my good friends, whose sister is a biblical literalist—of note—also came. So South Africans love the four by four trips into the hills and we went to this very remote place, it was really exquisite. We went driving up over the rocks and on to a hill. The scenery was just too beautiful. And my comment was, I wonder what kind of geological forces created millions and millions of years ago gave rise to these rock formations.
So my friend’s sister said, “You know, I believe it was Noah’s Ark.” I almost fell over the cliff—I couldn’t believe it. And the next day the owner of the place took us to this amazing place—was actually part of this farm and the soil is eroding away. The soil looks really hard, but when you touch it, it just melts away. But yet, strangely enough, it’s taking a very long time to erode. The formations are beautiful. They almost look like deformed statues or something. I was commenting on how amazing these are. And then she said something about, “So, you evolutionists…” Now I’m an “evolutionist.” I didn’t know that I had that label. “So you evolutionists, you still don’t think that this could be Noah’s Ark?” Well, I’m not getting into this discussion. I’ll disappear and leave someone else to deal with it. And that point of view is all over the place. But if teachers hold that point of view, the need is to work with them over a long period of time, because it’s actually illogical and it’s ridiculous to have a point of view like that. And so, if you hold that point of view, and you hang onto it, you’re never going to open up the conversation in the classroom if you’re a teacher. And if you hold that kind of view at home and the teacher opens it up. Imagine she has a mother—if the school that her children go to raise the issue and the child goes home and says, “Guess what I learned in school today?” then you’re going to have a counter-acting influence that says to the child, “You mustn’t believe in evolution.” The world was created 6,000 years ago. And there are rabbis teaching that. The rabbi told me that when I took students a couple of years ago to the eastern shore, that I’m crazy to think that the world could be any other than 6,000 years old. I said, “But look at the fossils.” So the idea of secularity doesn’t sit well with many people. They’ve been indoctrinated to think negatively of secularity.
But secularity can work very well in a diverse society in that nobody’s religion will hold sway, that the voices of all get heard. And the same is true for science. One of my colleagues made have this amazing fossil-find. It was at the Origins Center and it was displayed. How can you ignore that? But people will ignore it because it doesn’t sit well with their beliefs.
So the way in which teachers get trained is very important. They can be re-educated, and the way things are at the moment, I don’t see much of a chance. And if the Jesuits are being allowed into schools, I bet they’re not allowed into all schools. I’m sure the doors must be closed for them at some schools. I’m taking a guess on that. I promise you that very conservative Jewish Yeshiva-type schools down the road will not welcome the Jesuit priests. And some public schools probably will not. But others will.
You said you don’t think that sort of training is going to happen anytime soon. Why? What is the source of opposition to something that seems like a good idea?
I could be wrong in what I’ve just said to you. I’m busy doing a research project myself with a network of researchers around South Africa. And one of the things we are propagating is that human rights education ought to get a much greater focus in schools to counter-act some of the gross human rights violations, especially against girls. It continues because of patriarchy in some of our communities. Because of tradition-ism, they are not gender sensitive. So that’s what we’re looking at. And one of the things we’re looking at, is in order to get the message out, you have to educate the teachers. But it’s also something that you can’t just do in a quick two hour talk. It’s got to be fairly long-term until it’s engrained until there’s some sort of practice that is related to that. So we went into a school last week and I found a bit of resistance from the teachers who we speak to. We posed the idea that what we wanted to do is work with teachers as a community to practice, and to be sustained over a period of time, we deal with the issues of human rights and to have a look at human rights in relation to the community. What then was popped up was—all teachers in South Africa belong to these clusters—that would really be interesting to actually have a look at whether in the clusters - these are groups of teachers based on the region that their school is in—who come together over a period of time. And I’m not really sure what happens in those clusters. From the research I did for my Ph.D., nothing much. It was more just to disseminate information, and that was it. Some say they really did work together on issues and they discussed many issues.
So it would be interesting to find and to see if whether there is a physical science cluster and what actually happens and where this kind of issue—science and technology and religion and creation and all of those kinds of issues which are in the curriculum—and whether anybody has taken the time to work with the teachers to determine the attitude and the willingness and the desire to, because I’m sure there must some teachers out there who do it, but maybe get swallowed up and kind of disappear. There’s a strong tendency for people to avoid confrontation.
My last question is just what do you think educators around the world should learn about teaching science and religion or creation and evolution?
I was just thinking before you asked me the question, is I think that another reason people might avoid it is the knowledge of it. Have teachers been taken through the paces? Do they have the knowledge? What is their professional content knowledge like in order to teach, because you need the knowledge of creation. And not just read Genesis, Chapter 1—and you need to have an understanding of what evolution actually is. To be quite honest if you say to me now, you need to go and teach it, I would have to say, no, give me two weeks to research it because I would need to do a decent job. I would think that because of our past history and depending on what your teachers covered in their own universities, qualifications in the course that they are introducing that would determine whether or not it’s done in the classroom.
I would say that you can’t just say that people have to do it. You have to teach people about religion, not just Christianity, but different religious world views and cosmology, which is an entire course on its own. And you would have to do a lot of sound, solid scientific teaching about evolution, and that relationship if there is one, or if there isn’t one, or the complexities of that relationship. Those would need to be taught to teachers in an undergraduate education degree, in post-graduate studies, whether it’s done informally or in additional professional courses, but you can’t just assume that people have the knowledge. You have to make sure that they do have knowledge—so activism in terms of insuring that people have the knowledge.
Just a quick question then—are there certain government requirements that the education department put on the undergraduate degree for education, for teaching teachers? Could something like this be a part of that?
I don’t think they would make teaching evolution and creation [required]. It’s in the curriculum, so therefore an alert science lecturer—because I haven’t done this. I don’t know enough about evolution. But I would say to my students that there’s a space for both. But it’s something I have not raised. It’s probably something that I should include in my courses. But, as far as I know, from the Department of Education, that it’s not something they impose—that you have to do. There are certain things—sometimes they do impose them, but as far as I know, that is not one of them. Having a knowledge of languages is, and having a knowledge of HIV and AIDS—we are supposed to teach a 12-week composite course to every single one of our students and adjuncts. Science and creation, as far as I know, you would have to ask the people who deal with the science curriculum. As far as I know, that is not an imposition. That’s nothing they’re compelled to teach. But a clever science teacher, and a good science teacher will include this, as my colleague does. Both my biology colleague and Father, and Del Kagan, I think they do.
Anything else then, that you want to discuss or anything you want to say?
No, I just found it interesting—looking at my work from a slightly different experience, but it was nice to share it with you. So I don’t know if you have anything else you’d like to ask.
No, that’s all of my questions. Thank you so much. It was a great help.
My pleasure.