What’s going on at VCAT?

In other words, democratic values like choice and tolerance are seen as barriers not as good things; different religious beliefs just ‘confuse’; and the reasonable objections of non-Christian families whose children turn into Christian evangelists are critical challenges to be overcome.

ACCESS Ministries currently provides the vast majority of all SRI in Victorian schools.  From a position of such strength, they can afford to be magnanimous and say they support the efforts of other religions to offer SRI, knowing that their domination will not be challenged any time soon.

But even if other faiths grew their provision of SRI, is this a good thing?  As the parents at VCAT (both in the witness box and in the public gallery) graphically illustrate, the current SRI policy is socially divisive, educationally flawed and perhaps psychologically damaging.

ACCESS Ministries say that in their SRI program, ‘students learn about the teachings and values of the Christian faith, such as loving your neighbour, being a ‘Good Samaritan’ and caring for others, caring for our world and personal responsibility’. 

How could anyone object to these sorts of values?

Again, let’s pick this apart.  Firstly, the ACCESS Ministries SRI syllabus may teach these values but that’s not all it does.  For example, the student workbook for children in Years 1 and 2 includes sayings like ‘God made us with feelings’, ‘God knows how we feel’ and ‘Jesus is alive’.  These are written as statements of fact, not belief.  This is not education, it’s indoctrination.

Secondly, government schools already teach values anyway.  Through the Victorian Essential Learning Standards, schools teach values like care and compassion, doing your best, a fair go, freedom, honesty and trustworthiness, integrity, respect, responsibility and understanding, tolerance and inclusion.  And all this without indoctrinating children into believing in imaginary friends.

So what should the Victorian Education Department do?

Last year, the Department clearly acknowledged their existing policy was wrong by changing the SRI guidelines to make sure parents had to make a positive decision to opt in rather than opt out of SRI.  This is a good start but it’s doesn’t go nearly far enough.

As pointed out above, giving parents a ‘Sophie’s choice’ to opt in or opt out is unacceptable: the system has to change.  If the government is committed to giving parents a genuine choice, one that does not force them to choose between the lesser of two evils, then they should:

1.       Ensure SRI is offered in the same way as other extra-curricular offerings – after school hours – so that it doesn’t segregate children by their religion or lack thereof during school hours.

2.       Provide parents with clear and unambiguous information about what SRI actually is – that is, indoctrination into the tenets of one particular religious doctrine.

But the Government should not be having anything to do with SRI in any case.  What we are seeing here is the emergence of the very same phenomenon that in 1872 led to the original Education Act declaring that government education should be free, compulsory and secular – the phenomenon of the social divisiveness and rancour that attends religious indoctrination. 

By all means, let properly qualified teachers teach about religions, their beliefs and practices, rituals and cultural traditions.  But governments should have no business facilitating the access of evangelists to vulnerable children.