In the June 2010 edition of Southern Cross I examined five possible political endgames for the SRE/ethics debate. I numbered them from #1 - the church's worse case scenario where SRE is banned - to #5, the status quo.
With the release of the Knight report earlier this week, the likelihood that we will end up with my suggested scenario #3 - "a level playing field" - has firmed significantly, although the devil remains in the detail of the Department's response and the final wording of its updated guidelines.
I think concerned Christians should be heartened that this represents genuine movement from where we were 6 months ago. At that time, the way the trial was being implemented did raise serious question marks about the government's desire to marginalize SRE in the long-term.
The Knight report
It is important to recognise that the NSW Government gave Dr Knight and her team a very limited brief. For example, she was not asked to establish the deficiencies in philosophical or ethics teaching within either the mainstream curriculum or within SRE.
Given the constrained brief, however, I think it's a very fair report.
Some of the recommendations of the Knight report are interesting and obviously have taken on board some points made by the critics of the trial. For example the following two recommendations caught my eye because they pick up issues I had raised previously:
> Addressing the implied moral relativism in the course, recommendation number 3 includes a call that the full course includes "a consideration of the issues around moral relativism".
> Given that the course name created confusion given the vernacular meaning of ethics, recommendation number 5 says, "the ethics-based complement to Scripture be described as a course in philosophical ethics, or equivalently, a moral philosophy-based course, or given some such name to make clear the boundaries of its content".
I would hope that concerned Christians take the effort to engage constructively in the debate and hold the Government to the above two recommendations.
That said, the Report leaves unaddressed some major questions:
1. Given that report has found learning benefits in the ethics course, Dr Knight seems to assume that making the ethics course content available to SRE providers is all that needs to happen to make the arrangement fair and equitable to Christian (and Jewish, Muslim etc) state school parents. There are some incorrect assumptions here about the purpose of SRE.
2. How will the Department of Education's policy guidelines be changed to allow the course to be extended as an alternative to SRE has yet to be addressed. Will the Department simply allow ethics to be taught at the same time as SRE, or will it be ethics and whatever else a school wants to offer? Does Minister Firth realise this could undermine her protestations on September 21 that her Government strongly supports the continuation of SRE?
3. Will the St James Ethics Centre be the exclusive provider of the ethics course? The Report opens the door for other groups to be providers. Quite rightly, Dr Knight suggests that the providers must meet the same criteria as current SRE providers.
4. Should ethics be compulsory for non-SRE attenders? This is not addressed in the Report but it needs to be debated. Dr Knight repeatedly cited as her ideal the German model where ethics is compulsory. This begs the question - if the number of children opting out of both SRE and the ethics lessons remains a significant number, what will the Department then do? It would seem likely that pressure would build to make ethics compulsory.
5. The Report implies that the St James Ethic Centre's resources were stretched by the trial in the 10 schools. What happens when it is rolled out across all 1700 NSW State primary schools? Who will pay for the rollout and where will the volunteers come from?
Political reality
There should not be any doubt this is an entirely political debate from now on.
As I said back in June:
Although it wouldn't take a miracle for Labor to back down, this is a policy designed to pander to its green/left inner-city seats. what is often forgotten is that Labor is facing a serious challenge from the Greens in the inner city, likely to claim ministerial talents such as Carmel Tebbutt.
And so all attention turns to the Coalition for its response.
