Opinion Articles

SOUL MATTERS: Religion plus ethics gives schools balance
By Terry Lovat

The current debate about the role of religion and/or ethics in public schools is not as new as it might seem. In our earliest days, there was a vigorous difference of opinion about how these matters might best be handled in the emerging schools of the colonies. Most of the Education Acts of the 1870s and 1880s reflect this debate or at least the compromise reached. The NSW 1880 Public Instruction Act is replete with the notion that they are both important parts of a sound education, outlining the ideal balance between denominational religious instruction and a broader study that might well have been termed ‘ethics’. The term that was actually given to this latter component was ‘religious teaching’ but, when unpicked, it was clearly referring to the need for students to be inculcated into their society’s values, including understanding the role that religious values had played in forming legal codes and social ethics. It was in part what modern educators refer to as ‘ethics’.

The idea, therefore, that public education is part of an ancient heritage around values neutrality and non-religiousness is mistaken. Evidence suggests that public education was conceived as the complete educator, not only of young people’s minds but of their inner character, including their religious and moral selves. The association of public schools with values neutrality and non-religiousness was largely a 20th century invention, born of an exaggerated secularism that ‘threw the baby out with the bathwater’. It confused institutional religion with non-institutional spirituality and objectivity with values neutrality.

The exaggerated rejection of values and religion was often translated into education. Hence, religious and values education came to be seen as the preserve of private and religious schools while the ‘ethics’ of public schools were defined largely in terms of their absence. This not only drove ‘religious teaching’, as conceived by the 1880 Act, out of the curriculum but it clearly made it very difficult for moral education or denominational instruction to occur. The balance conceived by the 1880 Act between learning about the wider world of beliefs and values while exploring one’s own religious and cultural heritage was lost. It is largely because of sufficient recognition of this loss, and its denuding effects on learning, that so many efforts have been made more recently to re-construct within the public curriculum opportunities to explore issues of beliefs and values.

The ‘Adelaide Declaration’ (1999), an agreed statement between States, Territories and the Federal Government about the essential goals of Australian schooling for the 21st century, reinforced the 1880 perspective that all schools are in the business of providing a “… foundation for young Australians’ intellectual, physical, social, moral, spiritual and aesthetic development”. In this spirit, all States and Territories now have forms of religious education that provide opportunities for students to study the wider cultural beliefs of their world as well as reflect on their own religious culture.

Similarly, all States and Territories are now pursuing values education to provide the opportunity for students to reflect on the values that underpin their own heritage and culture, to understand better integrity, character and citizenship, and to make appropriate personal decisions. Government has been active in promoting values education for all schools, especially through its ‘National Framework for Values Education in Australian Schools’ (2005) and the various projects that it has funded. Evidence suggests that such an approach has potential to strengthen students’ optimism, self-esteem, sense of personal fulfilment, ethical judgment and social responsibility, as well as their academic diligence.

Any contest between religious teaching and ethics is spurious. As the architects of our education systems in the 19th century knew, and as fresh evidence has reinforced, a sound and balanced education aimed at forming the whole person will have room for both religion and ethics, and any education that forces either from the curriculum will be impoverished. They are not in contest, but are bedfellows in providing the rich form of education conceived by both 19th and 21st century educators.

Professor Terry Lovat is Pro Vice-Chancellor (Education and Arts) at The University of Newcastle. This article is submitted by the Churches Media Association www.cmahunter.com.au


*This article was published in The Herald, 19th October 2009