"Our school system is in a crisis." This provocative statement led an ODT opinion piece entitled "Consequences of moral decay" (3.2.23).
The article caught my eye then and continues to draw my attention. Why? Because it bothers me both as a person of faith and as someone who has committed a lifetime to public education. It deserves a response (albeit coloured by my own experiences and inbuilt biases.
The article covered a range of concerns. The attention-grabbing crisis (pandemic-related truancy rates) morphs into a discussion about curriculum (but current draft national curriculum changes and the Aotearoa New Zealand History curriculum are unhelpfully confused here). Education’s rationale (and its historical relationship with Western Christianity) leads on to questioning current directions in education.
The article makes a case for more home-based schooling by parents (and in my reading, this seems to mean parents who identify as religious or more specifically Christian however that might be defined).
None of this is inherently controversial. It helpfully critiques the industrialised education system that has prevailed globally since the mid-19th century (which is far from perfect). Recent educational initiatives amply illustrate the need to move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach to schooling. Unhelpful, though, is the author’s reference to the current New Zealand curriculum as government-controlled.
This is either unreflective or disingenuous. No curriculum, now or ever, exists independently of its environment, e.g. prevailing cultural norms, political or economic pressures, or social changes — in terms of what seems best at the time. This is clear, for example, when my students consider how the social studies curriculum has changed at least five times since the 1930s. Curriculum is always a co-dependent beastie. But to articulate this in terms of some kind of authoritarian diktat is mischievous, I suggest.
For me, the heart of the articles problem lies in these statements: that "New Zealand ... embarked on an education system which has actively excluded biblical truth from the classroom and I would confidently argue, our culture is now reaping the harvest of moral decay from this exclusion"; and that a "number of parents are waking up to this reality and are taking the courageous step of schooling their children at home".
I am most bothered by the fudging of two key issues: the place of religion in education and who is responsible for education. The two are different, but New Zealand’s educational history perhaps makes it easy for us to conflate them. The article compounds that misconception.
If this is a reference to the secular clause in the 1877 Education Act (instituting a national primary school system for settler children at least), then the article either misunderstands or misrepresents this. The Act did not intend to ideologically ban religion (here read Christianity) from schooling. Rather, it was a strategy to minimise rising public tensions, in education, between Roman Catholics and Protestants and equally between different Protestant groups.
My recent reading of the 1840s and 1850s indicates that, from the start, colonial religious leaders wanted a public schooling system for their children. And equally, they strongly believed that children’s religious formation (but not education per se) was best done at home or church.
Here education was viewed as a public good, with personal religious instruction more appropriately delivered within the diverse nurturing contexts of the family or religious community. None of this was unique to New Zealand. Similar legislation was enacted in other parts of the British Empire in the same period. It was not a deliberate plot, as perhaps the article implies, but a contextual response within a particular cultural and historical moment. To link current so-called moral decay to that moment therefore is a misreading of our history.
Historically, religion has never been absent from education in New Zealand. This relationship certainly has been fraught, often opposed, and now with many permutations of what it might look and feel like. But one of the unfortunate outcomes of this historical relationship is the perception that education is public and religion is private. As a result, we have low levels of religious literacy because we tend to dismiss it as irrelevant or privatised (and we are poorer for this).
So my take-home message is this. Education and religion each and together need to be viewed as a public good, for society’s health. First, religion (and cognates such as taha wairua, spirituality and values) is integral to education (however that is perceived), to help us better understand one another.
Second, education is both a social process and a collective, societal responsibility that we shrink from at our peril. At this stage in our history, we need people to come together. Retreating from public involvement and engagement is not an option, if the welfare of where we live and who we live among is central to what we believe or hold dear.
- Hugh Morrison is an associate professor in the University of Otago College of Education, and writes on the histories of religion and of childhood/youth.
