SRI Travesty

It was reported in The Age today that “Victorian schools will scrap special religious instruction from class time, with changes to the state's curriculum throwing the future of the controversial program in doubt.”  The report went on to say that “The Andrews government has ordered that the weekly 30 minute program move to lunchtime and before and after school in 2016”

There are a number of problematic issues with these changes:

• It appears that a replacement program consisting of “new content on world histories, cultures, faiths and ethics” will be taught in class time as part of the curriculum and that “qualified teachers would deliver the new faith and ethics content.”  Just how many teachers in state schools does the government think are actually qualified to teach the faith and ethics content? There would be a few, but very few.  The majority of trained teachers in these discipline areas are more likely to be employed in the faith-based schooling systems of which Australia can be justifiably proud.

• Education Minister Mr Merlino was reported to have said that "This new content helps all school students, regardless of their background or faith, to understand the world around them and the ideas and values that shape that world."  Unfortunately this misrepresents the notion of RI in state schools in the first place.  All education acts have or have had in the past an allowance for the religious instruction of children for those parents who want it for their children.  This was either in an opt-out or an opt-in arrangement.  In Victoria it was an opt-in program. In the 1800s when these options began to appear in colonial education acts, the programs were Christian in nature, as that overwhelmingly was the dominant religious paradigm of its day.  These days RI is conducted for a variety of faith traditions – In Victoria I am aware of protestant, Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, Judaism, Islam and some others.

Mr Merlino is absolutely correct in saying that it’s important for students irrespective of background to “understand the world around them and the ideas and values that shape that world."  But this new program is unlikely to do the job, of students don’t first understand their own family’s faith background…and it is this option that will be practically removed from Victorian state schools.

• Comments attributed to Lara Wood, a spokeswoman for Fairness in Religions in School, a group that has spent the past four years campaigning against SRI, reportedly claimed victory. "We won, we got what we wanted."  If this comment is correct, it gives more credence to the view that her organisation might better be named “Freedom from Religion in Schools”.  Ms Wood reportedly said that “religious instruction providers were proselytising in primary schools while students missed out on learning.”

“Australian Education Union (AEU) Victorian president Meredith Peace, another opponent of SRI, [reportedly] welcomed the announcement, saying state schools should be secular,” and that the AEU “didn't believe SRI was consistent with that."  Ms Peace reportedly “said students who did not opt in to the SRI lessons were sent to the library or sat in corridors.”

When the founders of this nation, decided that schooling should be Free, Compulsory and Secular, they ensured that: schooling was available for children whether parents were rich or poor; schooling was for every child rather than only for the class of children who had historically been lucky enough to be educated; and that schooling should be secular, that is, schooling which is an open marketplace of ideas, rather than just one stream of ideas (at the time Christian).

Those who bandy around the term ‘secular’ need to be careful.  When George Holyoake coined the term secular he regarded Secular Education thus: “Secular education is by some confounded with Secularism, whereas the distinction between them is very wide. Secular education simply means imparting Secular knowledge separately--by itself, without admixture of Theology with it. The advocate of Secular education may be, and generally is, also an advocate of religion; but he would teach religion at another time and treat it as a distinct subject, too sacred for coercive admixture into the hard and vexatious routine of a school.”[1]  Those words were penned in 1870…the very year when adjectives such as ‘Free, Compulsory and Secular’ began to be applied to the various Australian Education Acts.

• Offering a different perspective from that of the Government’s, “opposition education spokesman Nick Wakeling” is reported to have said that the “decision by Daniel Andrews will create chaos for thousands of parents.”  Even if the report that enrolments in the opt-in system of SRI that operates in Victorian state schools “fell from 92,808 Victorian students in 2013 to 53,361”, it does suggest that The Andrews government is comfortable with making a decision that will impact a large number of Victoria voters.

For the original story the reader can go to https://www.theage.com.au/victoria/religious-instruction-scrapped-from-curriculum-20150820-gj425e.html

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/36797/pg36797.txt Chapter IX.