The Rise and Rise of Religious Education

The Sunday Herald Sun report today:

DEMAND for Muslim schools has soared in Victoria, with waiting lists of more than 300 students at some campuses.

Australian Council for Islamic Education in Schools chairman Abdul Rahman Najmeddine said demand for Islamic education was unprecedented, with a need to build more schools.

This is not surprising and would seem to reflect the overall trend towards private education. Whether or not one views children being educated outside of the state system as a good thing depends largely on whether one believes parents have more right to decide what and how their children are taught than public servants.

The article quotes opposition from a group cleverly named Parents Victoria. The group, in fact, does not represent all Victorian parents but the gradually decreasing number of parents who choose to keep their children in state schools.

But Parents Victoria president Elaine Crowle said she was concerned too many students were being segregated based on their faith.

Ms Crowle said in an “ideal world” all students would attend state schools and receive their religious education outside school hours.

As soon as someone talks about something existing in an “ideal world”, then they really mean in their ideal world. Did it ever occur to Ms Crowle that not everyone shares her utopian vision and that this diversity of thought is reflected in the growth in private education? It seems not.

“Students would learn to mix better,” she said.

As far as I am aware, there is no evidence that people who attend Catholic, Jewish or Islamic schools find it difficult interacting with people of other faiths later in life. Likewise, I am unaware of any evidence that people who attend state schools in affluent suburbs find it difficult “mixing better” with people from lower socio-economic backgrounds. People self-segregate in all sorts of ways — some willingly and some unwillingly — and yet it rarely results in people not being able to communicate or associate with one another.

She said the growth in religious schools could also reduce Government funding for state schools.

“We wouldn’t want to see lots of Government funds going to a school that’s exclusively for a religious group,” she said.

If there is a growth in religious schools, it is only because more parents are putting their children in them. Schools don’t grow otherwise. Given the parents of these students — even religious parents — also pay taxes and a portion of that tax goes towards funding education, it is only fair if that money goes to the schools that they choose to put their children in. Therefore, private schools are more likely to be the beneficiary of a decline in public education than a cause of it. If you want to reverse the trend, then look at how public schools can be made more attractive to the parents currently using private alternatives.

One can assume Ms Crowle doesn’t like the idea of secular parents funding religious education but, likewise, many secular parents might not like the idea of a percentage of their tax dollars going to fund the education of other people’s children in the government system.

Perhaps a better solution might be if governments didn’t fund education at all but parents funded it directly: whether through a voucher system or simply through direct payment in a similar fashion to how we pay for the provision of other goods and services.

Under such a model, all schools would compete with each other and rise and fall on their merits. This would satisfy concerns about other people’s money being used to fund religious education and it would also satisfy the need of parents to have their children educated according to their own religious and moral views.