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Reposted from:
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=08876ab3-a800-4995-b9d0-7eea7a703938&k=60734

Even private schools in La belle province must adopt one-size-fits-all religious classes

MONTREAL -Since the founding of Quebec, its schools have given a central place to Christian instruction. Even today, parents in public schools choose whether they want their children to take a course in Catholic, Protestant or non-religious moral education. But that is about to change.

Beginning next September, Jesus and Moses will have to make room for Muhammad, Buddha and Glooscap as the provincial Education Department replaces its denominational courses with a one-size-fits-all class in Ethics and Religious Culture.

Covering Christianity, Judaism, aboriginal spirituality, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, the new course will be mandatory even in private religious schools, most of which receive partial government funding.

The reform has been sold as an effort to bring the education system in step with an increasingly secular Quebec, which broke from the Catholic Church in the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s.

But religious groups are worried the new program will undermine parents' efforts to instill the values of their chosen religion in their children.

"This is radical. Since the foundation of Quebec by the French, up until September of next year, we've had religion taught in schools," said Spencer Boudreau, an associate dean at McGill University's Faculty of Education. "It was inconceivable in the Catholic thinking that you could be educated and not talk about religion."

The new course is the final step in a secularization of Quebec schooling that began with a 1997 constitutional amendment replacing the province's denominational school boards with linguistic ones. A 2005 law changed Quebec's Education Act and its Charter of Rights to eliminate parents' right to choose a course in Catholic, Protestant or moral instruction, and the changes come into force at the end of the current school year.

The reform has been a hot topic during province-wide hearings underway to examine how Quebec should accommodate religious and cultural minorities. Catholic parents have complained that the new course, designed to increase understanding between different cultural groups, is depriving them of their right to decide which values their children will be taught.

Quebec City Archbishop Marc Cardinal Ouellet, appearing this week before the travelling commission, accused the Education Department of imposing "a dictatorship of relativism."
Private Catholic schools will have to marginalize their own religious instruction to make room for the state-mandated course, he said. "No European nation has ever taken such a radical direction, upending the convictions and religious freedom of citizens."

At Montreal 's Loyola High School, principal Paul Donovan is not sure how the new course will be incorporated into the private Jesuit school's teaching. Students at Loyola already learn about world religions, and Mr. Donovan hopes the Education Department will agree that the material covered in the new course is already part of the Loyola curriculum. If not, the school intends to continue its Catholic instruction, but it will be in addition to the provincial curriculum.

Mr. Donovan's biggest concern with the new course is not the inclusion of other religions but its "squishy" approach to ethics. "We teach kids that there is some kind of morality that we need to search for," he said.

"I would have a problem teaching what is effectively a much more relativistic moral code than what we do with our kids. In an effort to try to be pluralistic, it essentially won't take a stand."

For example, the existing Catholic education course approved by the government strives to help children "take an enlightened position on situations involving a moral issue." The new course, conscious of avoiding conflict, merely aims to have students "reflect on ethical questions."

Barry Levy, a professor of religion at McGill University specializing in Jewish studies, says the new course could be seen as an attempt to cultivate a common Quebec culture.

"At the moment, I think Quebec society is challenging the value of religion altogether," he said. "This has to do with its recently developed secular postures, it has to do with the rejection of the Catholic Church, it has to do with fear of ethnic groups, many of whom are coming from outside the country and bringing religious practices that seem inappropriate to some Quebecers."

While he supports the program's goal of increasing understanding between communities, he said the government's approach is heavy-handed. Orthodox Jewish schools will have a hard time accepting that they need to teach the gamut of world religions, he said.

"Once you start teaching little children that Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza and occasionally Ramadan all come together and are all of equal value and authority -- either that's going to be the message or the message is going to be [that] none of these things really matter -- people who are committed to one of these celebrations are going to find it very difficult to teach their children."

And the list of celebrations does not end at Kwanza. The curriculum gives a privileged place to Quebec's religious heritage, which it defines as including Catholicism and Protestantism foremost, followed by Judaism and aboriginal spirituality. But it includes other religions and even non-religious expressions that "define the sense and value of the human experience." So Mother's Day, Father's Day and birthdays make it on the list of holidays that elementary-school teachers are encouraged to discuss with their students.

Critics wonder how teachers will be able to knowledgeably cover the new curriculum's broad expanse. "The big challenge in my mind is going to be the qualifications of the teachers to do a good job with this," Mr. Boudreau said.

"Because a lot of them don't even know their own tradition very well. So how do you delicately present someone else's?"

His concern was echoed by Mr. Levy, who says he considers it a success if his university students have mastered a single religion when they graduate.

"What's going to happen in these contexts is it's going to be totally shallow, totally meaningless. The only message is going to be [that] they are all of equal value. And the people who are genuinely committed can't buy that argument."

Even groups pushing for secularism have problems with the reform. Henri Laberge, president of the Mouvement laique quebecois, called the elimination of denominational teaching "great progress" but questioned how well the new course will work. He said that instead of starting in Grade One, the new course should wait until high school, when students have a more developed critical sense. "We think it is up to each religion to give instruction to its supporters," he said. "It's not up to the public schools to do that."