Simon Longstaff is in the SMH this morning, furiously avoiding a clear discussion of the issues and doing everything in his power to avoid tough talk with people who see “thinking” as a threat civic order. Rather than use his respected position as an advocate for education, and to rally his impressive public support for reform of teaching in NSW schools to formally embrace a modern curriculum that results in ethically sophisticated citizens who ALSO have a learned appreciation of religions of the world, Longstaff has set his sights on keeping his people in bondage, and that if they just work a bit harder to find the 4,000 people to teach an optional ethical inquiry in primary schools, that we’ve done the best we could.
We have a system which makes the religious opinions and beliefs of our citizens into the object of school policy, pumps massive amount of money into evangelical parachurches who are running recruitment for their absurdly anti education factions in a place where they can have the “maximum strategic advantage” (ie in places where children are required to sit and listen to them) – and the irony of all this is that it is being done to avoid having a real public conversation over the ethics of this:
Fred Nile can not distinguish between what he calls “the judeo christian ethic” and “religious doctrines” – and Simon Longstaff, who surely can, is complicit in this moral confusion, while a hopeful public, merely want our schools to be run by world class standards.
Note to Simon: World Class school systems do not, I repeat, do not, turn over 3% of the teaching time to evangelical outreach programs with names such as “genr8” nor do they outsource youth welfare work to Lausanne Covenant activists.
You’ve got a fantastic teaching idea Simon, it ought to be used by each and every one of our teachers, taught in all our Universities, and a foundational part of an Australian education, but creating an in school army of volunteers just so we can avoid plain talk about why SRE is corrupt, and why so many parents despise this imposition on their family’s privacy, and why so many teachers are against these programs – has caused you to join the corruption.
In your, well intended effort to provide a solution to this problem, you have become one of the biggest impediments to solving the problem.
Please, change course:
Advocate for a school system which does not accommodate this kind of proselytising – and which lives by the principles of our democracy.
Tell everyone, that you’ve changed your mind, that volunteer ethics is not the solution to this cancerous grown on the education system which is owned by and maintained for the people of Australia and therefore does not entangle itself with the religious teachings of any religion.