MARION MADDOX Taking God to School: The end of Australia’s egalitarian education? Reviewed by Yvonne Perkins
Should religion be part of children’s education? And what kinds of religion are being taught in schools? Marion Maddox makes her case for a more secular system.
Australians have never been satisfied with the way religion has been handled in education, but we have never agreed on the solution either. The debate about religion in schools has been one of Australia’s most enduring contentions since the early days of European settlement. Marion Maddox is a well-known participant in the current public debates about these issues, who advocates a move towards a more secular education system. This book encapsulates her views.
Taking God to School is a wide-ranging book that covers the big issues of school funding and religious education in public schools, as well as anti-discrimination laws and school chaplains. Maddox applies her skills as a political scientist, her knowledge as a theologian, and her personal views to mount an argument against the way religion is currently handled in our school system.
Maddox is not only concerned by what she finds, but she is also concerned that this has not been a matter of public debate:
Perhaps the founders of our system got it wrong, and it is better for children to be educated in separated religious enclaves. But, if so, I don’t recall the public conversation deciding on that experiment.
Maddox wants Australians to be concerned about the current state of affairs and to start discussing it. She prompts this discussion by explaining the broad issues and focussing on a few specific examples chosen to support her point of view.
While she does refer to the old traditional private schools in places, her main focus is on the new non-denominational Christian schools, which are often based in outer-suburban areas and charge low fees. She describes them as the ‘fastest-growing sector’ in the Australian education system. Maddox reveals to the reader the underlying beliefs of the organisations and founders of several of these schools. Some of their schools, Maddox says, ‘make clear that they do not teach evolution’, citing one school in Western Australia who in a ‘position paper’ no longer available on the school’s website, said that Darwin’s theory of evolution should be studied with a view to refuting it.
Maddox provides more evidence to support her concern about school networks that argue that parents are the pre-eminent authority under Christ in their governance of schools, even above the State or Church:
So, the significant shift in funding priorities towards such schools means that, in this area, Australia now institutionalises a kind of one-way religion-state separation, where the state provides benefits, but can only expect limited accountability in return.
Yet Maddox does not provide evidence of any schools refusing to comply with government requests for information or compliance. She points out that many Christians would disagree with the beliefs promulgated by the few schools she mentions.
The depth of knowledge Maddox has about the Bible and the history of the development of churches is valuable when she discusses the religious beliefs behind several of these schools. She guides the reader through a world that would be unfamiliar to many people. This section of the book is not an easy read. Yet this is the point of this book: we tend to avoid that which is unfamiliar and need to engage with what is being taught. Maddox argues that we should make the effort because of the importance of the issues. The education children receive at school affects them for the rest of their lives.
It may surprise people to know that religious organisations are exempt from some anti-discrimination laws with regards to employment. As the religious schools sector grows, so do the number of teachers employed by these exempt institutions. Maddox recognises that not all religious schools avail themselves of this exemption and some are clearly making a great effort to abide by the standards expected of these laws. However, she notes that in a country where 34 per cent of students attended government-funded, but non-public schools in 2010, a growing number of teachers may be vulnerable to workplace discrimination and cannot seek any redress.
Maddox also examines the role of religion in public schools. She covers the issues surrounding special religious instruction (scripture, RE or SRE depending on your state) and school chaplaincy. Many of the matters she raises have been covered in the popular media in recent years, but her inclusion of the words of a former school chaplain explaining his experience is an effective means of conveying the dilemmas and difficulties school chaplains can face in their work. Working for the Christian organisation, Scripture Union Queensland, Beau Walker struggled with the requirement of his organisation that his work should be infused with Christian beliefs:
I ran into children of multiple faiths, and it became very difficult … For example, a child who might be from a family that believed in Wicca. It became a hindrance to my ability to care for these kids, if I’m meant to be there to look at these children unbiasedly, and yet I’m looking at them and thinking, ‘the Bible says that witchcraft is from Satan’, and here’s a child who’s dabbling in evil …
The book devotes two chapters to the history of religion in schools. The history is interesting but lacking. The key issue for much of the 19th century and a substantial part of the 20th century was the animosity between Protestants and Catholics. The 19th-century political debates focussed on the need to remove sectarian influence from public schools but Maddox gives the reader the impression that all religious references were removed from ‘secular’ public schools of the late 19th century. A review of readers used in public schools during the late 19th century reveals numerous references to God. Maddox states that in Victoria ‘literary works mentioning God or Jesus were purged’, yet the Victorian Rogers-Templeton Royal Commission of the early 1880s included a lengthy list of extracts from the edited Royal Readers, which mentioned God. There were campaigns throughout the late 19th century to introduce more religious teaching in public schools, culminating in referendums on the issue in South Australia and Victoria. Maddox discusses these but does not mention the important referendum held in 1910 that resulted in the reintroduction of religious education in Queensland’s public schools.
The problem with Maddox’s portrayal of this history is that the reader is given the impression that children in public schools in most of Australia’s colonies received what we would regard today as a secular education. Yet Australian society over 100 years ago was very different to today. Public schools aspired to provide education that was acceptable to adherents to all Christian denominations and to Jews. This education may have been called ‘secular’, but in practice God was mentioned far more often in Australian classrooms during the late 19th century than today.
While Maddox advocates a substantial reduction in the religious involvement in government funded schools, whether public or private, she does not advocate totally secular education. She makes a strong case for general religious education taught by professionally trained classroom teachers: ‘[S]tudents need and deserve education about religion devised and delivered with the same seriousness and professionalism that characterises every part of the curriculum’.
The issues covered in Taking God to School have been discussed on and off for many years but some Australian parents have little awareness of this. In a revealing discussion Maddox turns her gaze to parents and how some choose schools for their children. Describing Australia’s ‘easy-going secularity’, Maddox observes:
In general, Australians know something of Christianity and hold the ‘brand’ to be overall well-meaning, charitable and fairly benign … Parents with little or no religious enculturation send their children to low-fee private schools in quest of ‘discipline’, ‘values’ and ‘standards’, likely unaware that they may be buying a side-serving of conservative, often prejudiced and authoritarian dogma.
There is much in this book to indicate that parents should enquire further about what religious values and views their children are imbibing in their school environment, whether private or public. Most schools would welcome parental interest in what their children are learning.
Yet in this passage Maddox is talking about a handful of extreme cases amongst new non-denominational schools. She desires a school system where children of all backgrounds mix together but she doesn’t fully explore why so many parents are choosing to make the difficult financial decision to send their children to a private school. These parents have voted through the enrolments of their children, indicating that they no longer believe a ‘one size fits all’ approach to education works well enough for all children or they perceive that there are problems at their local government schools. Maddox reveals there are problems at the edges of our private-school system which need to be addressed. She does not raise any issues with the content of the education provided in the majority of Australia’s private schools run by religious organisations; although she does discuss her objections to the amount of funding they receive.
Taking God to School is a polemical work in support of moving towards a more secular school system, using a limited number of examples to support Maddox’s opinions. The personal nature of the book is made clear to the reader as the author punctuates the narrative with her own experiences. The issues she chooses to raise are backed up by extensive references demonstrating considerable research.
At the outset of Taking God to School Marion Maddox states that she wants it to start a ‘religion conversation’. She successfully demonstrates the need for Australians to examine and debate these issues, yet the absence of alternative points of view will limit the impact of this book. Taking God to School will be lauded by those who already agree with its views. Those who already disagree with Maddox will be able to find evidence not included in this book to support opposing arguments.
The most important contribution the book makes is that it demonstrates the need for parents to enquire further about the religious influence in any school in which they are considering enrolling their child, whether public or private. It will be interesting to see whether those who are not already informed about this area will read this book and explore the issues of religion in Australian schools further.
Marion Maddox Taking God to School: The end of Australia’s egalitarian education? Allen & Unwin 2014 PB 272pp $29.99.
Yvonne Perkins is a professional historian who has researched school readers in her work on an ARC-funded project, Teaching Reading in Australia. She received first-class honours from the University of Sydney for her thesis ‘Queensland’s Bible in State Schools Referendum 1910: A case study of democracy’. She is a volunteer Baha’i scripture teacher at a Sydney school. She writes about history on her blog www.stumblingpast.com
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