Not in these parts, anyhow.
Our daughter started primary school this year, at the zoned state school here in New South Wales. Upon enrolment you fill out a small pink form and tick whether you want your child to do religious education once per week or to be pulled out.
Almost every parent of the children in my daughter’s kindergarten class elected for their kid to be enrolled in religious education. Only four of kids stay in the classroom. The rest leave. I’m glad that this much is true; when I was at primary school, the few who didn’t do religious education were the ones who had to leave, making RE the classroom default. Mine were also secular schools.
What does my kid do while the others are learning about Jesus? Plays independently with the three other little atheists. This allows her teacher some extra planning time — to a point — and teacher workload is an issue in its own right, and independent play is also good, but what COULD the class be learning with that ‘lost’ hour? Oh, just the fundaments of evolution or something like that, I guess. Or physical education, which has been pushed right down to the bottom of the educational priorities with all that testing and an increasingly demanding curriculum. I didn’t understand evolution myself until I was well out of school and read up on it of my own accord. I had plenty of RE, though, and memorised enough verses in my time.
Earlier this year a girl on the bus gave our atheist kid a creepy thing to colour-in. Because segregating the religion only works yay amount when the R.E. kids are issued with proselytising materials, then take them outside the R.E. classroom into the wider school.
‘This Boy Belongs To God’ – grooming, much?
Fine, whatever. On the upside, our kid can’t really read. By the time she’s old enough to read fluently she’ll be old enough to understand our own family views on all this religious stuff.
But now she’s been assigned a part in the Christmas play which, fine, is Christian, and Christmas draws upon many different traditions so whatever. Except the lines I’m to practice with her go like this:
We are the Christmas Garlands
Berries and evergreens
Christmas always comes again
Where Jesus love has been
And for once, it’s not the lack of apostrophe which pisses me off the most. It’s the fact we can’t send our kid to school and expect that she gets a decent scientific, atheist education.
