Religion In Schools

My religious convictions lie somewhere between agnostic and humanism, if these can be viewed as religious convictions.

So then why am I going to make a case for religion in public schools? Because it is the higher quality education for the pre-teen mind, over the conventional religiousless public school.

If we're looking for the biggest bang for the parenting buck, consider what the Catholic school board demands of kids as compared to the public school with the inclusion of a religion class:

First, there is a supreme all-seeing being. For the purposes of raising kids, this is extremely handy. While kids continually test the limits of what they can get away with, there is no getting around the all-seeing supreme being, God. If they don't behave, even when they aren't witnessed by others, the very least they will suffer is the bad karma from the Big Guy (OK, so karma isn't Catholic...)

Second, having God watch is terrific, but we must now introduce what we generically dub 'morality.' These are the rudimentary directives that set important limits on our behaviour. These are ancient laws, most of which are still true today.

Third, religion is an anchor for most cultures. As such, the parables, Bible stories, etc serve as common points, such that a person NOT knowing the story of Christmas, or Noah's Ark for example, in a christian based nation is viewed as backward and clueless. This is true of all religions within the nations they dominate.

Now then, to recap: given the addition of a religious class in public school or no such class, as a parent I can tell you I want my kids to be well-behaved, and if the fear of God helps, that's great. Also, I want them to know more, not less, and I'd prefer that they know the ancient stories in addition to the conventional school curriculum; there's no virtue in ignorance. For that matter, ignorance is very expensive as a rule.

If I can make my 'visionary' suggestion, I'd prefer to see ALL public schools keep religion within the curriculum, though it could evolve well past the Catholic agenda. Public schools could have an ecumenical class that teaches the fundamental points by visiting all religions, and extracting the most fundamental directives (like the Golden Rule) shared by them. As a Canadian who assumes multiculturalism, this would make our kids culturally richer, and I'm certainly for that.

Religion in this school context is a complex of common knowledge, unlike the single disciplines of mathematics, english, etc. I think that instead of trying to separate religion into rudimentary law, sociology, psychology, theatre, etc, the organic origins of religion serves the young mind better.

As the child grows, s/he will learn many more refinements over and above what they had learned in religion class, and it may eventually turn out that God isn't so fearsome. We need to consider far beyond 'an eye for an eye' if our societies are to evolve.

I'd even go further with this concept and introduce another such multidisciplinary course later in high school: since business and economics underpin any job a student may eventually pursue, I'd like to see a course in the later years of high school investigating general entrepreneurship. This would teach kids who may have peculiar interests that they'd like to pursue as a career, how to fit it into the economy, how to get paid for it, and also, what the market will in turn demand of them.

OK, so now let me consider all the multidisciplines that should probably exist in the public school system, in addition to the single disciplines of 'reading, writing, and arithmetic': kids would start with religion, eventually moving into what is now called social studies, then onto rudimentary entrepreneurship. The inclusion of this line of education would give the graduating student a good basis of 'common knowledge' whereby they could thrive on their own.

I'm not sure I could ask more of the school system.