PoliticalChic
Diamond Member
How much control should the government have in determining a child's education?
The Inquisition makes a good match for the Quebec Ministry of Education.
1. "Who gets to decide what kind of religious and moral instruction children receive in school? Parents or the state? Quebec says its the state. But late last week, a Quebec Superior Court judge delivered a powerful blow for the opposite side of the argument.
2. Catholic high school located in Montreal. Loyola had requested an exemption from a provincially mandated ethics and morality course Éthique et Culture Religieuse (ECR) on the grounds that it provides its students with an equivalent program, albeit one imbued with the schools Jesuit pedagogical principles. On June 18, Justice Gérard Dugré found that the governments decision to refuse Loyolas request was invalid because the refusal was based on the assumption that a confessional program could not accomplish the goals of ECR.
3. The decision will be greeted with jubilation by a number of grass-roots groups, ranging in motivation from religious conservatism to home-schooling libertarianism to atheistic nationalism. And rightly so.
4. The course is supposedly benign, a means of exposing children to a panoply of belief systems by inculcating in them absolute respect for every religious position. But according to ECR materials, every religious position includes pagan animism, witchcraft (Wiccans are women like any other in daily life) and even the nutbar Raelian movement. In one of the high school workbooks, Catholicism is allotted 12 pages, feminism 27 pages.
5. Religious activists opposed to the program see it as a blatant case of social engineering, a statist indoctrination of children into the ideology of moral relativism. Their quite reasonable fear is that the course will convince impressionable children that no religion is unique or has any superior moral insight to offer or is worthy of special reverence.
6. The program is predicated on the worst possible educational model for young children: the philosopher Hegels pedagogy of conflict.
7. In his 63-page decision, Judge Dugré issued a surprisingly aggressive and even humiliating rebuke to the Ministry of Education: The obligation imposed on Loyola to teach the ethics and religious culture course in a lay fashion assumes a totalitarian character essentially equivalent to Galileos being ordered by the Inquisition to deny the Copernican universe.
The Inquisition makes a good match for the Quebec Ministry of Education.
1. "Who gets to decide what kind of religious and moral instruction children receive in school? Parents or the state? Quebec says its the state. But late last week, a Quebec Superior Court judge delivered a powerful blow for the opposite side of the argument.
2. Catholic high school located in Montreal. Loyola had requested an exemption from a provincially mandated ethics and morality course Éthique et Culture Religieuse (ECR) on the grounds that it provides its students with an equivalent program, albeit one imbued with the schools Jesuit pedagogical principles. On June 18, Justice Gérard Dugré found that the governments decision to refuse Loyolas request was invalid because the refusal was based on the assumption that a confessional program could not accomplish the goals of ECR.
3. The decision will be greeted with jubilation by a number of grass-roots groups, ranging in motivation from religious conservatism to home-schooling libertarianism to atheistic nationalism. And rightly so.
4. The course is supposedly benign, a means of exposing children to a panoply of belief systems by inculcating in them absolute respect for every religious position. But according to ECR materials, every religious position includes pagan animism, witchcraft (Wiccans are women like any other in daily life) and even the nutbar Raelian movement. In one of the high school workbooks, Catholicism is allotted 12 pages, feminism 27 pages.
5. Religious activists opposed to the program see it as a blatant case of social engineering, a statist indoctrination of children into the ideology of moral relativism. Their quite reasonable fear is that the course will convince impressionable children that no religion is unique or has any superior moral insight to offer or is worthy of special reverence.
6. The program is predicated on the worst possible educational model for young children: the philosopher Hegels pedagogy of conflict.
7. In his 63-page decision, Judge Dugré issued a surprisingly aggressive and even humiliating rebuke to the Ministry of Education: The obligation imposed on Loyola to teach the ethics and religious culture course in a lay fashion assumes a totalitarian character essentially equivalent to Galileos being ordered by the Inquisition to deny the Copernican universe.