The Ministry of Education has backed away from its new guidelines on religion in schools, after pressure from Anglican Bishops. naturally, the god-botherers in United Future are applauding, as are the conservatives in National. Both argue that this is a matter best left up to Boards of Trustees and local communities - but I suspect they'd feel rather differently about the matter if a local Board was forcing every student to participate in a Black Mass at assembly. They also claim that there is currently no problem. I think that Asher's experience alone suggests that there is. Students in our schools are being forced to participate in religious observances of the majority religion - and that is a flagrant breach of the freedom of religion, conscience and belief affirmed in the Bill of Rights Act.
As for what can be done about it, I have no doubt that a bill introducing secular secondary education by making secondary schools subject to the same regime as primary schools would win majority support in Parliament (if National allowed its MPs a conscience vote). All we need is for someone to put it in the ballot...
This is only a problem because of Government involvement in education.
ReplyDeleteIf education were privatised, parents could choose to send their children to secular or religious schools as they saw fit - children would be raised in accordance with their parents wishes, & atheists wouldn't find themselves subsidising God-botherers (or vice versa).
Mind you, the PPTA would have a fit. They're ideologically opposed to competition (as per their recent press release arguing against performance-related pay for teachers) - heaven knows how they'd react to parents actually being given the right to choose who educates their own children.
Duncan: if education were privatised, the rich would have free license to use their economic power to impose their religious beliefs on the poor. That's freedom for the pike, not for the masses, and no thus real freedom at all.
ReplyDeleteif education was privatised we would also start to see an increase in both adult illiteracy and crime - which i think we can all agree is very costly to society.
ReplyDeleteFollowing the privatised model, if the only school you can afford to go to is a badly funded one (due to the parents being from lower socio-economic groups)then the chances off you getting a good education and escaping poverty are diminished.
The societal cost of not moving the nation forward together is all too often overlooked by free market cheerleaders.
fraser
Fraser: not to mention the fact that education is a vital part of helping people to exercise their freedom (it opens more options, and allows people to make more, and possibly better, choices). Which again goes to show that the "freedom" Libertarians are interested in is a freedom only for the rich...
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