Modern Australians have always had a choice about what type of education they could set before their children. Parents could choose either a faith-based education or a secular, state-based education.
However, today the state is seeking to remove the faith from faith-based education, thus removing that parental choice.
The recent recommendations of the Australian Law Reform Committee (ALRC) concerning faith-based schools has targeted a destructive attack on those schools. In recommending the removal of faith-based schools’ ability to hire faith-based staff, it will remove the faith from faith-based schools in Australia.
This extraction of faith from faith-based schools will turn those schools into state-based schools. There will be no difference between the sort of education in the faith-depleted, faith-based schools and that of state schools.
Why would the state seek to do this? One wonders whether the state is worried about the growing popularity of the faith-based schooling sector?
The teachers and staff of faith-based schools embody the essence of their schools. They emulate the philosophy, beliefs and practices of their faith in their schools. They live by its teachings, they pass on the treasures of their faith in their words and by their lives. They are the living embodiment of the faith they teach.
It is impossible to have a faith-based school without faith-based teachers.
More than 40% of Australian parents with school-aged children choose a faith-based, value-laden form of pedagogy. They pay for this education with fees, just as they also pay for and supply food and shelter for their own children. These parents want a faith-based, value-laden education for their children. They aspire to an education that will teach right from wrong and why it is right and why it is wrong.
These parents believe that there is a “higher authority” to whom they owe their allegiance and from whom they derive the values of right and wrong. They deem the “higher authority” to be a higher authority than the state. It is higher than the individuals who operate the powerful levers of the state. It is this “higher authority” who has given us our life and to whom we all must give account.
Parents who do not want a faith-based education for their children get that option in bucketloads by means of the nation’s plethora of taxpayer-funded state schools.
Whilst all Australians live in accordance with the lawful requirements of the state, we understand that since the days of Magna Carta, that the state has its limits. There are places in our lives where the state should never invade.
The state has its legitimate sphere of influence in the civic arena to uphold the rule of law and to protect society from evil. Similarly, the family also has its legitimate sphere of influence in the private familial arena for the raising and the nurturing of children. The family is the setting for teaching children the spiritual and social virtues, and the difference between good and evil.
The state is a political entity. The state does not determine what is good and what is evil. That is the province of the “higher authority”, who has set the bar for what is right and wrong.
To have the state dominate all education is to politicise education. Politicising education makes education of the young the tool of the state. Such education becomes subject to the state’s political preferences, ideologies, and dogmas as it propounds its own currently convenient politics, morals and values. Such monopolising of education initiates the process of morphing a society into the dystopia of Huxley’s “Brave New World”, and Orwell’s “1984” at the “Animal Farm”.
For this reason, it has always been appropriate to separate the defining of morality and that of good and evil from the responsibility of the state.
Should the Commonwealth accept the ALRC’s recommendations, all schools will be required to conform to the state’s legislated, secularist, neo-Marxist view of the world - a worldview devoid of spirituality, religious beliefs and objective morality.
Removing faith from faith-based schools, removes difference and dissent to the state’s promulgated educational point of view. It disintegrates the possibility of there being another worldview, independent of the state.
Historically, formal schooling in Australia was initiated by Christian churches. They were committed to carrying out their God-given mandate by delivering to the colonies’ children the gifts of literacy, numeracy, and knowledge, and to present decency and morality to the upcoming “currency generation”. The Anglicans, Presbyterians, Catholics, Lutherans, and the various “dissenting” religious groups brought schooling to this nation. The state later played the role of educational catch-up, with the advantage of using public funds, to establish its own system.
In 2023, the state’s latest ploy via the ALRC is not simply to play catchup, it is set on a seek and destroy mission. Its aim is to eliminate the competition.
Education and schooling is for the physical, intellectual, social and spiritual development of children. It is not a toy for the state to dominate and manipulate towards soft, neo-Marxist ends. Real educational alternatives must be available for parents to choose from, as they are the ones responsible for the raising of children.
The ALRC’s inquiry into faith-based schools has made recommendations that will remove the genuine faith from faith-based schools. The recommendations, if accepted, will extinguish the essence of what makes a faith-based school distinct from secular schools. The ALRC has made an outrageous, direct attack upon the school system that has been a successful part of the Australian educational landscape for 225 years.
The Commonwealth should reject the ALRC’s deplorable attempt to destroy Australia’s faith-based schools. In terms of a “fair go” the Prime Minister should call into question the legitimacy of the Australian Law Reform Commission.
About Dr Terry Harding
Dr Harding is one of the pioneers of both home schooling and non-government distance education in Australia. He has been influential in the development of both forms of education and has been the manager Australian Christian Home Schooling for 28 years. Dr Harding continues to inform both state and federal governments concerning home schooling and non-government distance education, as they develop policy for both of these modes of education.