Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Religion and Government Schools
(I wrote this rant yesterday, 31 October, but didn't post it till today.)
Over the last couple of days there’s been talk on the news of the government’s latest initiative: that they will be allocating an amount of $20,000 per school ($90m over three years) for chaplains. Apparently our schools have “extensive counseling arrangements”, so this money is “providing and supporting students' spiritual wellbeing and their pastoral care”.
The quotes are by Julie Bishop, the Minister for Education, from the AM transcript yesterday.
This made me cranky; talk about wasting taxpayer money on pushing a religious agenda. Bishop was full of “it's up to the school community to determine if they want the chaplaincy services and also, if they do, what sort of services do they want” style talk. Can you honestly imagine any school that wasn’t founded on the basis of religion coming to a consensus?
What’s more, while I can appreciate that kids aren’t necessarily going to want to talk to their parents about some issues in their lives, if I were a parent I’d want to know that the advice my kid had access to at school was even handed and didn’t have its own religious issues to push.
“Extensive counseling arrangements”? Not when I was at school. Maybe things are different these days – but the few calls I heard on the radio yesterday morning before I had to get out of the car made me think otherwise. I’d rather see the $20k spent on additional, more secular counseling services. Or at least give the schools the choice!
On the drive to work today I got even more cranky, because they were interviewing Tony “I was taught by magnificent, heroic nuns, and they wore the habit, but they certainly had their faces visible” Abbott.
Yes, he really said that.
On the subject of the chaplaincy program, he also said, “We think that religious faith is important. We also think that the faith of our fathers is important. It shouldn't be devalued or downgraded and we are just providing some modest assistance to schools that also think that religious faith is important and want to give their kids access to it.”
Maybe I am being less than charitable in my assumptions, but the “faith of our fathers” comment in line with the nuns comment and the rest of the interview (which was Islam bad, Christianity good) says to me that the government is expecting that, for the most part, this new “initiative” will push a Christian agenda.
After all, schools with more of a mix of faiths are unlikely to agree on what they want and therefore are unlikely to participate. So the government is unlikely to have to pay for something that isn’t the “faith of our fathers” – all the while being able to say it was the choice of the school community in question so it isn’t their fault!
Grr!
Here’s the rest of what Abbott said that boiled my blood this morning:
“I think religion has a very important role in society, but when people enter politics they do so motivated by civic values as much as by religious values. The beauty of Christian social teaching is that it's based on reason, not revelation, and that's why I think that Christians certainly have much to contribute to our political process. There never seems to have been the Islamic equivalent of the Enlightenment. Islam doesn't seem to have a well-developed concept of pluralism, and the separation of church and state. And pluralism and the separation of church and state are central to modern western society. I certainly think it's good to have people of faith in politics, but they've got to understand that in polity such as Australia, positions can only be advanced if they are based [on] reason, if they are based on arguments that are accessible to everyone, not simply arguments that are accessible only to people of a particular religious persuasion.”
GRR! (Did I say that already?)
I hate this government. I hate their religious bias; I hate their support of Guantanamo Bay and their refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol. I hate their industrial relations reforms and their crinkle-eyed leader. And I hate their control of the Senate.
Please god (any god, whoever’s listening), let them lose – or at least lose numbers – at the next election. Let the climate change issues or the interest rates or the industrial relations reforms or something show people that this government isn’t working in their best interests unless they are a rich Christian big business owner!
Over the last couple of days there’s been talk on the news of the government’s latest initiative: that they will be allocating an amount of $20,000 per school ($90m over three years) for chaplains. Apparently our schools have “extensive counseling arrangements”, so this money is “providing and supporting students' spiritual wellbeing and their pastoral care”.
The quotes are by Julie Bishop, the Minister for Education, from the AM transcript yesterday.
This made me cranky; talk about wasting taxpayer money on pushing a religious agenda. Bishop was full of “it's up to the school community to determine if they want the chaplaincy services and also, if they do, what sort of services do they want” style talk. Can you honestly imagine any school that wasn’t founded on the basis of religion coming to a consensus?
What’s more, while I can appreciate that kids aren’t necessarily going to want to talk to their parents about some issues in their lives, if I were a parent I’d want to know that the advice my kid had access to at school was even handed and didn’t have its own religious issues to push.
“Extensive counseling arrangements”? Not when I was at school. Maybe things are different these days – but the few calls I heard on the radio yesterday morning before I had to get out of the car made me think otherwise. I’d rather see the $20k spent on additional, more secular counseling services. Or at least give the schools the choice!
On the drive to work today I got even more cranky, because they were interviewing Tony “I was taught by magnificent, heroic nuns, and they wore the habit, but they certainly had their faces visible” Abbott.
Yes, he really said that.
On the subject of the chaplaincy program, he also said, “We think that religious faith is important. We also think that the faith of our fathers is important. It shouldn't be devalued or downgraded and we are just providing some modest assistance to schools that also think that religious faith is important and want to give their kids access to it.”
Maybe I am being less than charitable in my assumptions, but the “faith of our fathers” comment in line with the nuns comment and the rest of the interview (which was Islam bad, Christianity good) says to me that the government is expecting that, for the most part, this new “initiative” will push a Christian agenda.
After all, schools with more of a mix of faiths are unlikely to agree on what they want and therefore are unlikely to participate. So the government is unlikely to have to pay for something that isn’t the “faith of our fathers” – all the while being able to say it was the choice of the school community in question so it isn’t their fault!
Grr!
Here’s the rest of what Abbott said that boiled my blood this morning:
“I think religion has a very important role in society, but when people enter politics they do so motivated by civic values as much as by religious values. The beauty of Christian social teaching is that it's based on reason, not revelation, and that's why I think that Christians certainly have much to contribute to our political process. There never seems to have been the Islamic equivalent of the Enlightenment. Islam doesn't seem to have a well-developed concept of pluralism, and the separation of church and state. And pluralism and the separation of church and state are central to modern western society. I certainly think it's good to have people of faith in politics, but they've got to understand that in polity such as Australia, positions can only be advanced if they are based [on] reason, if they are based on arguments that are accessible to everyone, not simply arguments that are accessible only to people of a particular religious persuasion.”
GRR! (Did I say that already?)
I hate this government. I hate their religious bias; I hate their support of Guantanamo Bay and their refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol. I hate their industrial relations reforms and their crinkle-eyed leader. And I hate their control of the Senate.
Please god (any god, whoever’s listening), let them lose – or at least lose numbers – at the next election. Let the climate change issues or the interest rates or the industrial relations reforms or something show people that this government isn’t working in their best interests unless they are a rich Christian big business owner!
// posted by Cass @ 6:47 PM 
