Canada Takes The Lead

[PoliticalChic]

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 it’s 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 school’s Jesuit pedagogical principles. On June 18, Justice Gérard Dugré found that the government’s decision to refuse Loyola’s 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 Hegel’s ‘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 Galileo’s being ordered by the Inquisition to deny the Copernican universe.”

 

[IanC]

Canada is in love with the concept of multiculturalism. Of course the price we pay for it is not as high as the US. Most of our immigrants are high IQ and we don't have a poreous border with hordes of people trying to break in.

 

[Toro]

Religion is a nonfactor in Canada. Maybe 10%-20% of the people go to church. Nobody really cares.

 

[IanC]

Religion is a nonfactor in Canada. Maybe 10%-20% of the people go to church. Nobody really cares.

Actually the Catholic HSs care. You don't have to be catholic to go to them but you do have to repect their beliefs. That's why those schools have students more prepared for the real world.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Religion is a nonfactor in Canada. Maybe 10%-20% of the people go to church. Nobody really cares.

Actually the Catholic HSs care. You don't have to be catholic to go to them but you do have to repect their beliefs. That's why those schools have students more prepared for the real world.

There must be other factors as well, as these schools do far better than public schools in NYC as well....I don't believe it is the religious nature of the institutions.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Religion is a nonfactor in Canada. Maybe 10%-20% of the people go to church. Nobody really cares.

The import of the OP is that the political structure of Canada is designed to impost exactly that thinking.

Chicken or the egg?

 

[IanC]

Religion is a nonfactor in Canada. Maybe 10%-20% of the people go to church. Nobody really cares.

Actually the Catholic HSs care. You don't have to be catholic to go to them but you do have to repect their beliefs. That's why those schools have students more prepared for the real world.

There must be other factors as well, as these schools do far better than public schools in NYC as well....I don't believe it is the religious nature of the institutions.

Cath schools try to impart thatthere really are morals standards, that there are consequences for transgressions, that being helpful and productive and involved is an important part of being a person. Thatthere really is good and evil in the world and it is a personal responsibility to choose. Non negotiable standards.

Not just a hodge podge of everybody, everything is equal in all ways.

 

[Toro]

Religion is a nonfactor in Canada. Maybe 10%-20% of the people go to church. Nobody really cares.

Actually the Catholic HSs care. You don't have to be catholic to go to them but you do have to repect their beliefs. That's why those schools have students more prepared for the real world.

When I grew up in Saskatchewan, there was no difference in performance between kids in the Catholic school system and the kids in the public school system. The only difference was that once a week, you had to take a religious class, which often times wasn't even religious.

Talking to friends and in-laws who are now teachers in Saskatchewan, I hear of no noticeable difference.

 

[Toro]

Religion is a nonfactor in Canada. Maybe 10%-20% of the people go to church. Nobody really cares.

The import of the OP is that the political structure of Canada is designed to impost exactly that thinking.

Chicken or the egg?

No, I don't think so. People just aren't religious in Canada for the same reason why people aren't religious in Europe - they just don't care and don't see a reason for religion. It doesn't have anything to do with the state. I'd say that the state was a reflection of the people's will.

The most Catholic province is Quebec and they are probably the least religious, and that is an outgrowth of the Duplessis regime in the province which was highly corrupt and tied to the Catholic Church.

I sat on a province-wide committee in university that recommended to the education minister on future curriculum in the public schools. We never discussed religion. It never occurred to us. It wasn't part of the school.

I will say this, despite going to a public school, we did say the Lord's prayer at least once a week, and we did read bible stories up to grade four. There is no separation of church and state in the Canadian constitution.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Actually the Catholic HSs care. You don't have to be catholic to go to them but you do have to repect their beliefs. That's why those schools have students more prepared for the real world.

There must be other factors as well, as these schools do far better than public schools in NYC as well....I don't believe it is the religious nature of the institutions.

Cath schools try to impart thatthere really are morals standards, that there are consequences for transgressions, that being helpful and productive and involved is an important part of being a person. Thatthere really is good and evil in the world and it is a personal responsibility to choose. Non negotiable standards.

Not just a hodge podge of everybody, everything is equal in all ways.

Very well put...and astute.

Far more succinctly than I, you have named elements that are the very antithesis of the progressive vision.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Religion is a nonfactor in Canada. Maybe 10%-20% of the people go to church. Nobody really cares.

Actually the Catholic HSs care. You don't have to be catholic to go to them but you do have to repect their beliefs. That's why those schools have students more prepared for the real world.

When I grew up in Saskatchewan, there was no difference in performance between kids in the Catholic school system and the kids in the public school system. The only difference was that once a week, you had to take a religious class, which often times wasn't even religious.

Talking to friends and in-laws who are now teachers in Saskatchewan, I hear of no noticeable difference.

You are implying that there are no differences...

Unless you have some data to provide, I will claim that this is bogus.

I have no expertise re: Saskatchewan, but here is same for my town:

c. Urban parochial schools were serving a growing share of disadvantaged and frequently non-Catholic youngsters. In a study published in 1990, for example, the Rand Corporation found that, of the Catholic school students in these Catholic high schools in New York City, 75 to 90 percent were black or Hispanic.

i. Over 66 percent of the Catholic school graduates received the New York State Regents diploma to signify completion of an academically demanding college preparatory curriculum, while only about 5 percent of the public school students received this distinction;

ii. The Catholic high schools graduated 95 percent of their students each year, while the public schools graduated slightly more 50 percent of their senior class;

iii. The Catholic school students achieved an average combined SAT score of 803, while the public school students' average combined SAT score was 642;

iv. 60 percent of the Catholic school black students scored above the national average for black students on the SAT, and over 70 percent of public school black students scored below the same national average.

 More recent studies confirm these observations. Why Catholic Schools Spell Success For America's Inner-City Children | The Heritage Foundation

 

[PoliticalChic]

Religion is a nonfactor in Canada. Maybe 10%-20% of the people go to church. Nobody really cares.

The import of the OP is that the political structure of Canada is designed to impost exactly that thinking.

Chicken or the egg?

No, I don't think so. People just aren't religious in Canada for the same reason why people aren't religious in Europe - they just don't care and don't see a reason for religion. It doesn't have anything to do with the state. I'd say that the state was a reflection of the people's will.

The most Catholic province is Quebec and they are probably the least religious, and that is an outgrowth of the Duplessis regime in the province which was highly corrupt and tied to the Catholic Church.

I sat on a province-wide committee in university that recommended to the education minister on future curriculum in the public schools. We never discussed religion. It never occurred to us. It wasn't part of the school.

I will say this, despite going to a public school, we did say the Lord's prayer at least once a week, and we did read bible stories up to grade four. There is no separation of church and state in the Canadian constitution.

I bow to your expertise re: all things Canadian, eh.

But as for:
"People just aren't religious in Canada for the same reason why people aren't religious in Europe - they just don't care and don't see a reason for religion. It doesn't have anything to do with the state. I'd say that the state was a reflection of the people's will."

It would be difficult for me to place you on the correct path in less than a book-length essay.
But, just a touch....
1.The Age of Enlightenment was in large part a reaction to the excesses of the Church, and Monarchies.

2. Consistent with the saying 'throw the baby out with the bathwater,' the French Revolution replaced not just the Church, but Christianity itself.

3. The irony is that the 'reason' with which it replace same was the mirror image of Christianity: thus the secular religion that you see as "People just aren't religious." Of course they are, secularists are fervently religious, and see any who believe other than the popular culture as heretics.
The French Revolution turned politics into a religion, replacing Christianity with a secular faith in the Jacobin agenda. “The Jacobean atheism was integrated with rationalism, …and with the dismissal of Judeo-Christian scriptures.” Differences between Left & Right in their Psycho-Philosophic background


4. Don't you see the humor in your phrase "they just don't care and don't see a reason for religion."

[Robespierre] “is the prototype of a particularly odious kind of evildoer: the ideologue who believes that reason and morality are on the side of his butcheries. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot are of the same mold. They are the characteristic scourges of humanity in modern times, but Robespierre has a good claim to being the first.” Why Robespierre Chose Terror by John Kekes, City Journal Spring 2006

5. And if I wrote the script, this would be the next line: "I'd say that the state was a reflection of the people's will."
The French Revolution was based on the premise that the nation had to be ruled by an enlightened avant-garde who represented the ‘general will.’


I better stop here, because this is one of my favorite subjects.

 

[IanC]

Is it fair to expect children and teenagers to develope a philosophy of life? We tell them everything is equal and then are disappointed when they decide to be lazy and selfish. Not unlike the new math where students are expected to rediscover math principles on their own. Some get it (probably because their parents teach them) and many fail miserably. That remedial colege course thread stated that many high school graduates don't realize that 50% means the same thng as one half.

 

[Toro]

I bow to your expertise re: all things Canadian, eh.

But as for:
"People just aren't religious in Canada for the same reason why people aren't religious in Europe - they just don't care and don't see a reason for religion. It doesn't have anything to do with the state. I'd say that the state was a reflection of the people's will."

It would be difficult for me to place you on the correct path in less than a book-length essay.
But, just a touch....
1.The Age of Enlightenment was in large part a reaction to the excesses of the Church, and Monarchies.

2. Consistent with the saying 'throw the baby out with the bathwater,' the French Revolution replaced not just the Church, but Christianity itself.

3. The irony is that the 'reason' with which it replace same was the mirror image of Christianity: thus the secular religion that you see as "People just aren't religious." Of course they are, secularists are fervently religious, and see any who believe other than the popular culture as heretics.
The French Revolution turned politics into a religion, replacing Christianity with a secular faith in the Jacobin agenda. “The Jacobean atheism was integrated with rationalism, …and with the dismissal of Judeo-Christian scriptures.” Differences between Left & Right in their Psycho-Philosophic background


4. Don't you see the humor in your phrase "they just don't care and don't see a reason for religion."

[Robespierre] “is the prototype of a particularly odious kind of evildoer: the ideologue who believes that reason and morality are on the side of his butcheries. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot are of the same mold. They are the characteristic scourges of humanity in modern times, but Robespierre has a good claim to being the first.” Why Robespierre Chose Terror by John Kekes, City Journal Spring 2006

5. And if I wrote the script, this would be the next line: "I'd say that the state was a reflection of the people's will."
The French Revolution was based on the premise that the nation had to be ruled by an enlightened avant-garde who represented the ‘general will.’


I better stop here, because this is one of my favorite subjects.

I think it has more to do with the evolution of society.

The last poll I saw on religion in Canada was something like two-thirds of Canadians believed in God - more than 90% Christian - a quarter were agnostic, and everyone else - about 10% - were atheists. Yet, only 10%-20% attend church regularly. Those are not dissimilar numbers from what I have seen in Europe.

I lived in Canada and England before moving to America, and I was struck at how different people's views on religion were. Whereas maybe 20% of the population went to church in Canada and England, it is a mirror opposite in the Southern city to which I moved. And its a liberal city at that.

Generally, the demos break down along the lines of geography, education and income. Generally, the more income one makes and the more education one has, the less likely one is to be religious. Generally, one is less likely to be religious is one lives in an urban area. Generally, since society has grown richer, more educated and more urbanized, society has become less religious, at least in the developed world outside of the United States.

One reason why people turn to religion is for answers to questions that are hard to fathom. Religion offers those answers.

Education offers answers that people once turned to religion for. They may not always be the right answers, but it expands the set of answers one can choose from.

Of course, religion often offers bad answers. The last service I went to was on Easter at the neighborhood Catholic church - my mother-in-law is devoutly Catholic, and my wife doesn't like the church, so I often take her when she is visiting. The sermon was on Genesis. I just listened to it and thought that this was ridiculous. Here we are, in the 21st century, and the Church is preaching about God creating the world in six days.

I'm a Protestant Christian and I believe in God, but I am not particularly religious. And being an educated professional who tries to apply rationality to an often irrational profession, it strikes me as ludicrous that this is a plausible answer to the creation of the universe. Maybe evolution is incorrect, I don't know, but I certainly know that God did not create the earth and the universe in six days when science can show that light has traveled across the universe over billions of years.

At least that's my opinion. But I think it typifies what many people believe, at least in Canada and Europe.

So I think that much of society has looked at the world and religion's answers for the world, then looked at what science offers and have determined that more and more, science often offers better answers. This isn't state ideologues superimposing some agenda on the populace. It is the populace coming to general conclusions. It is a natural evolution of a more educated society.

 

[PoliticalChic]

I bow to your expertise re: all things Canadian, eh.

But as for:
"People just aren't religious in Canada for the same reason why people aren't religious in Europe - they just don't care and don't see a reason for religion. It doesn't have anything to do with the state. I'd say that the state was a reflection of the people's will."

It would be difficult for me to place you on the correct path in less than a book-length essay.
But, just a touch....
1.The Age of Enlightenment was in large part a reaction to the excesses of the Church, and Monarchies.

2. Consistent with the saying 'throw the baby out with the bathwater,' the French Revolution replaced not just the Church, but Christianity itself.

3. The irony is that the 'reason' with which it replace same was the mirror image of Christianity: thus the secular religion that you see as "People just aren't religious." Of course they are, secularists are fervently religious, and see any who believe other than the popular culture as heretics.
The French Revolution turned politics into a religion, replacing Christianity with a secular faith in the Jacobin agenda. “The Jacobean atheism was integrated with rationalism, …and with the dismissal of Judeo-Christian scriptures.” Differences between Left & Right in their Psycho-Philosophic background


4. Don't you see the humor in your phrase "they just don't care and don't see a reason for religion."

[Robespierre] “is the prototype of a particularly odious kind of evildoer: the ideologue who believes that reason and morality are on the side of his butcheries. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot are of the same mold. They are the characteristic scourges of humanity in modern times, but Robespierre has a good claim to being the first.” Why Robespierre Chose Terror by John Kekes, City Journal Spring 2006

5. And if I wrote the script, this would be the next line: "I'd say that the state was a reflection of the people's will."
The French Revolution was based on the premise that the nation had to be ruled by an enlightened avant-garde who represented the ‘general will.’


I better stop here, because this is one of my favorite subjects.

I think it has more to do with the evolution of society.

The last poll I saw on religion in Canada was something like two-thirds of Canadians believed in God - more than 90% Christian - a quarter were agnostic, and everyone else - about 10% - were atheists. Yet, only 10%-20% attend church regularly. Those are not dissimilar numbers from what I have seen in Europe.

I lived in Canada and England before moving to America, and I was struck at how different people's views on religion were. Whereas maybe 20% of the population went to church in Canada and England, it is a mirror opposite in the Southern city to which I moved. And its a liberal city at that.

Generally, the demos break down along the lines of geography, education and income. Generally, the more income one makes and the more education one has, the less likely one is to be religious. Generally, one is less likely to be religious is one lives in an urban area. Generally, since society has grown richer, more educated and more urbanized, society has become less religious, at least in the developed world outside of the United States.

One reason why people turn to religion is for answers to questions that are hard to fathom. Religion offers those answers.

Education offers answers that people once turned to religion for. They may not always be the right answers, but it expands the set of answers one can choose from.

Of course, religion often offers bad answers. The last service I went to was on Easter at the neighborhood Catholic church - my mother-in-law is devoutly Catholic, and my wife doesn't like the church, so I often take her when she is visiting. The sermon was on Genesis. I just listened to it and thought that this was ridiculous. Here we are, in the 21st century, and the Church is preaching about God creating the world in six days.

I'm a Protestant Christian and I believe in God, but I am not particularly religious. And being an educated professional who tries to apply rationality to an often irrational profession, it strikes me as ludicrous that this is a plausible answer to the creation of the universe. Maybe evolution is incorrect, I don't know, but I certainly know that God did not create the earth and the universe in six days when science can show that light has traveled across the universe over billions of years.

At least that's my opinion. But I think it typifies what many people believe, at least in Canada and Europe.

So I think that much of society has looked at the world and religion's answers for the world, then looked at what science offers and have determined that more and more, science often offers better answers. This isn't state ideologues superimposing some agenda on the populace. It is the populace coming to general conclusions. It is a natural evolution of a more educated society.

"...science often offers better answers..."
One problem is the unspoken assumption that scienc is objective, and East Anglia taught that science is often based on human nature...