Scripture
Now that C is at school, he does scripture once a week. As an atheist household, we were pretty against the idea, but the alternative was spending the time colouring-in with the other children with weird parents, so the three weird parents in the class agreed to rotate the children one term at a time through the four options (Anglican, Catholic, Bahai and Jewish).The problem with this exercise in comparative religion is that everything is, of course, presented as fact. So we weren't really prepared for C telling us seriously on Friday that Jesus died on the Cross at Easter. It's the heart of the Christianity, so of course Easter got a fair bit of attention (even if it is a bit gory), but we didn't really know how to handle it - we ended up downplaying it. When I started correcting C's interpretation (no, Jesus died on the cross on Good Friday, not Easter Sunday), I think E was slightly concerned about reinforcement (disclosure: I went to Sunday School and Church weekly until I was 16 or 17, so I'm at least educated in the details).
Still, we've got it easy compared with one of the other sets of parents - their son insisted that they go to church on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, and has been telling his parents that he can feel God's love, which they're find a bit difficult to figure out how to react to.
posted by Jennifer @ 7:55 pm
4 Comments:
Just goes to show why Scripture shouldn't be taught to kindergartners in State schools - all they are ripe for is indoctrination at that age. And this is in the context of the recent request for ethics classes as an alternative to Scripture made by the P&C Federation (? I think) and rejected by the Minister for Education on the grounds that ethics are embedded in the rest of the curriculum. Welcome to free, secular and compulsory education in the 21st century - not so different from the 19th.
P.S. What's so bad about colouring-in, anyway? I seem to remember doing a fair bit of it as part of the formal curriculum when I was in Kinder in 1973.
Wait, this is a state school? Oh my. And I was getting irritated when my kid came home from preschool with a construction paper Easter bunny.
I think our part of Sydney is full of lapsed Christians - can't really be bothered, but don't care enough about religion to actually stop their kids learning about it. After reading about Bahai (I knew nothing about it other than the name), I'm hoping that it'll teach C to be sceptical about all the rest, although you're right JV, he could do with some more colouring in, he's not very good at it.
Yes Phantom, we don't have quite the separation of church and state here that you do in the US (even though we seem to be far less religious, on average)
Post a Comment
<< Home