Tim & Jo’s Story

Our daughter started kindergarten this year at our local public primary school in Sydney.
We want her to grow up knowing about as many religions as possible, and respecting other people’s beliefs and values. To follow a particular religion (or not) is a choice for her to make at some point in the future.We are not religious ourselves, but like all of the people we associate with we live according to a value system based on honesty, respect, tolerance, and treating others the way we would like to be treated ourselves.

Our school has the usual scripture once a week, with offerings from a varierty of different religions.
One of the Christian churches is particularly active in the area, with many children of families from that church attending the school.
Many of our daughter’s classmates come from families who attend this church and attend its scripture classes.
However, we elected to send our daughter the Buddhist class first, figuring that she could attend others in the future.

Unfortunately, she refused to go and got very upset. She was scared by the get up of the Buddhists. The fact that the teacher was male didn’t help and she just wanted to be with her friends to do colouring in and singing, which is understandable in the first few weeks of kindy.

The teachers weren’t keen on forcing her to do something she clearly didn’t want to do. So we relented and rather than have her go to the library where they’re not allowed to do anything much we let her go with her friends to the protestant scripture. The crying stopped and she’s happy, but each week she brings home a sheet from scripture and it is clear that rather than ‘educating’ the kids about the story of jesus and Christian values, they are brainwashing these 5 year old kids about the existence of God as if it is a truth or fact.

For example, a colouring in sheet she brough home recently tells the story of how ‘God made the grass and God made cows, cows eat grass, cows make milk, therefore God made the milk you drink’. The result is that our daughter now proclaims to us that she believes in God, who is in the ground (presumably because that is where the grass came from), and tells us we will go into the ground (presumably hell) if we don’t believe in them too!

We have taken great care to explain things to our daughter and to give her the opportunity to question and think things through for herself.
We want her to learn about the stories, beliefs and in particular the morals of different religions, but not to be brainwashed into believing that one interpretation of human existence is fact.

For all of these reasons we were heartened to hear about the ethics for kids trial that is being run in 10 NSW schools with a view to being rolled out in other schools in the future.

Ideally, what we would like to see is a single scripture class in state schools where through a structured program the kids are taught about all of the religions in an unbiased way – a sort of comparative religion program for kids. But recognising that’s probably a bridge too far, the curriculum for the ethics course looks attractive to us. Who could really argue against teaching kids about ethical issues such as ‘fairness’, ‘not lying’, ‘keeping promises’, ‘good and bad character traits’, ‘respect for people, animals and nature’, ‘children’s rights’ and ‘how to lead a good life’?

I’m afraid the churches need to realise that the horse has bolted on attendance at scripture in schools and the question now is not how to get kids back into scripture, but how to maximise the education and development of the children whose parents elect to have them not attend organised scripture.

Tim & Jo