Religion.

During the Second World War, the government of the USSR mass-produced a poster that reads Religion is poison. Protect your children. In fact, as you can probably guess, it says that in Russian. But that’s the idea. What the poster is driving at is that modern citizens must give up religion for education. And they’re right. But here in North America, we missed that lesson. Or perhaps we learned a different one in Sunday School.

We have a school system that was originally church-run. Here in Canada, it was church-run a whole lot more recently than in other places. And it only completely eliminated the church in the late 1990s in Newfoundland. Apart from my sadness that it took so long, the issue that we are addressing is that it hasn’t really happened.

My personal views on religion are extreme at best. But I shan’t bore you with an ecclesiastical rant. There are teachers discussing morality and faith. Creationism is seen by many to be a valid perspective for classroom use. Our school system is called non-denominational, which implies that it accepts all Christian sects but nobody else. These are symptoms of a larger problem.

Teachers are using the school system as a pulpit from which to preach religious indoctrination. Church groups have power over schools and the government departments that control their curriculum. We celebrate religious holidays in schools. We allow a system to exist that implies strongly that Christianity has a monopoly on what is right and goes so far as to actually state that we are all people of faith, when we simply are not. While teaching the right answer is a spurious approach to education, teaching the wrong answer is definitely a bad idea.

I am not saying that people who believe in a supreme being make bad teachers. I know many, including my parents, who are excellent teachers and also religious. I am not arguing for an elimination of religion from the minds and hearts of teachers or even from those of the students.

It simply must not be part of the educational experience. We are no longer in the dark ages. The church is not the holder of knowledge. We have creativity, we have science, and we have thought. Teach those.