Following a performance by a Christian American rap group at an inner-Melbourne public school last week questions were raised about the practice of letting religious groups into schools. Below is a piece written on the issue by he teacher who raised the concern.
By Brendan Bailey:
For all those who argue that there is no issue having religion in public schools, think again. Religion has a very real impact on students. With all the issues teenagers are going through are they really better served by the inflexible doctrine of whichever religious group happens to have infiltrated their school? Nowhere is this more pronounced than in school catering to at-risk teens.
As an employee of the Department of Education and Training, I'm not really allowed to speak in this forum. I've already been rapped over the knuckles for speaking to this newspaper on Monday (Teacher hits church's free shows, 14/08/07). Teachers were banned from speaking to the press during the reign of Kennett, but were allegedly re-granted the right to freedom of speech with the advent of the open, transparent Bracks government. Like most Bracks government promises, however, this was short lived, and teachers were directed to shut up or face disciplinary action.
There are times, however, when the threat of a note in one's permanent file becomes secondary to that of an education system stripped of its key values. When the Education Act of 1872 was revised in 2005 its central tenets - that state schools should be free, compulsory and secular - were trumpeted as continuing to play a defining role. Reality has shown this is to be far from the truth.
Due to dramatic government underfunding state schools have long been forced to charge fees facetiously labelled as "voluntary" that are nonetheless compulsory. There goes ‘free'. Students are still forced to attend school until the age of sixteen, despite very few public schools having the resources to chase up students who are chronic absentee students. For all intents and purposes, there goes ‘compulsory'. And, as we are now seeing, the creeping influence of religion in our schools is slowly but surely making a mockery of ‘secular'.
These are serious issues at our school, which caters for at-risk students. These aren't abstract questions that can be debated endlessly from all sides. These are real issues facing the teenagers in our care and they don't have the luxury of disengaged debate. How can they be confident in their school when the person supposedly there to help them has rigid and immovable answers to these complex situations? How can they trust us? And for these children there often isn't anyone else to turn to.
A lack of funding means that schools are forced into partnerships with wealthy religious organisations. The Assembly of God, at the heart of Monday's controversy, is simply one group that has stepped into the gap left open by a procession of tight-fisted governments, offering such basic solutions as routine maintenance and the occasional free barbecue. Schools have had no choice but to allow this, as they simply do not have the money in their budgets to cover it themselves. This is despite the Assembly of God being described in Wikipedia as "aggressively missionary", and explicitly placing God at the centre of their educational policies. This, for example, comes from their website:
"To meet graduation requirements, students (at the AoG's Cambodian schools) must participate in a church planting effort during their final year of school. These students graduate with the necessary skills to plant other churches."
And yet, if we don't let them come into our school, our walls remain covered in graffiti, our windows remain broken, and our toilets... well, it's better not to think about them. The government has failed to fund us appropriately and there are very few other organisations willing to step up.
Additional funding for schools occasionally comes from the federal government - an issue in itself, given the constitution gives jurisdiction on education to the states. But when it does, it is directed very carefully. And this is where religion in schools goes from being implicit to explicit government policy.
The federal government gives schools up to $20,000 a year to run a chaplaincy program. The chaplain, apparently, may be of any religious affiliation, but this begs the question: if the chaplain can be of any religious affiliation, why must they be religious at all? Why can't this $20,000 a year be allotted to a youth worker, a drug and alcohol worker or a housing worker? Students desperately need counseling, but they do not need it filtered through a particular religious lens. When confronted with a chaplain who represents a group whose stated views are pro-life, what happens to the girl who needs an abortion? When sent to a chaplain who represents a group whose website refers to homosexuality as a sin, what happens to the student questioning their sexuality? These at-risk teenagers are confused, they are angry, and when they don't have anyone who they feel comfortable talking to, that anger will be directed at society as a whole. This is the Howard government at its most divisive. It will be our students who continue to pay the price.
Those who state that when the Nubian Gents performed at my school on Monday they didn't mention God, or that a chaplain does not necessarily present a particular religious view, are missing the point. When a school allows a group through its doors, the school is giving tacit approval to all the stated opinions of that group. And when that group expresses opinions that directly contradict Education Department policy on secularity, this becomes problematic. In "Christians dance up a storm" (The Age, 15/08/07) the Nubian Gents themselves commented on their surprise at being allowed to perform in public schools, "There is a strict division of church and state back at home," a representative said. "They (state governments in the United States) don't really allow a lot of outside programs into the public schools."
The Department is quite good at enforcing the Act when it comes to teacher registration with the Victorian Institute of Teaching, or punishing principals who fail to run a school within the constraints of their budgets, but is dangerously quiet when it comes to one of the cornerstones of its key philosophy.
If the department is serious about keeping state education secular, they must not only issue directives to schools, they must also increase funding the levels of funding, so schools are not forced to become religious by default.
We have a responsibility to all of our students. Our responsibility is to uphold the provisions outlined in the education act. When we allow religious groups into our schools we fail to do so, and in turn fail our students.