“Culture shapes education and education shapes culture.” Culture’s present in education has influenced the ways students see about the world, their own identities and how they fit into that cultural world. Especially when students at the very young age and they unconsciously absorb everything they learn and experience in everyday life, culture becomes a base for them to build everything upon it. It is not really a good thing for them to give meanings to the world around them based on specific culture and religion. One example on the recent media is about multi-faith primary schools are forced to hold Christian religious classes even if the school does not want them.
Ormond Primary is one specific example of the issue. The school principal said it was not the school’s purpose to adopt the Christian classes for the students. It is forced to open weekly thirty minutes classes. Parents have choices whether to let the kids participate in the classes or not but the school has no choice but to open these classes. Ormond Primary is a multi-faith primary school and the question is ‘Why do the Christian classes take place as an essential part of the school education while it is a school with different cultures and religions?’ This issue has worried those parents with different culture backgrounds who do not want their kids to be separated from their classmates and it could result in more ways of discrimination.
Multi-faith school is a society where students with different culture backgrounds can belong in same environment and connecting with others. Different cultures have shaped students to think differently about who they are, feel different about the world around them, how they behave and provide them with different choices to operate in that world. For example the choices they make to dress up, identify themselves in society, the food they eat, the way they response tell who they are. Adopting Christian classes into educational program of multi-faith school influence the values, meanings and believes of young students. It also could create a classification systems in the school such as Christian group, Jewish group, Buddhism group... which could lead to serious discrimination in school. As postcolonial theory’s main theme is about cross-cultural meeting, exchange and mixing, multi-faith school supposed to be a multicultural family with no boundaries between students, it is not meant to be divided and be separated into subgroups of cultures.
References:
- Susie O'Brien, Christian classes mandatory at multi-faith primary school, Herald Sun available at: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/christian-classes-mandatory-at-multi-faith-primary-schools/story-fn7x8me2-1226292536070
- Wadham, B.Pudsey, J. & Boyd, R. (2007). Culture and education. Sydney: Pearson Education. Chapter 1: What is culture?
Dear Xuan,
ReplyDeleteAn interesting post using post colonial idea. You could do another post on the issues of chaplains in schools, and on Scripture (the week before last's tutorial topic), and see whether post colonialism helps analyse these issues (See Leonardo's chapter for this).
Regards,
Kal