Special Religious Education - How to keep all the students thinking.

I watched the Insight program from SBS on religious education in schools. Insight was fantastic as always and really dug into the issues. I have an opinion on what my kids should be taught in relation to religious education, and I recommend a course of action.

Some background. educational acts of the various state parliaments  indicated education in australia should be 'secular'. It made provision for General Religious Education - where a teacher could provide information about a range of religious beliefs. Later legislation introduced the concept of Special Religious Instruction or Special Religious Education. This is an optional time where religious groups can offer accredited volunteers to educate students about specific religious tenets and beliefs.

The insight programme focussed on a trial in the NSW education system of an ethics class as an alternative to special religious education. Religious is a polarising issue, and this can be seen in the commentary. Eg Here and Here.

I am an athiest, and I believe in a secular society. My beliefs are but one of the range of beliefs students can adopt. I am not averse to students being exposed to the details of multiple religions. I also want an athiest view point put forward.

How can this be possible in the legislation. I am from Victoria, so I will use our legislation: The education and Training Reform Act 2006. Section 2.2.10 covers 'general religious education' and section 2.2.11 covers special religious instruction.

SRI says: "the persons providing the special religious instruction must be persons who are accredited representatives of churches or other religious groups and who are approved by the Minister for the purpose"

and "(5) In this section special religious instruction means instruction provided by churches and other religious groups and based on distinctive religious tenets and beliefs."


How best to achieve my objectives within this framework? 


Option 1: Find a set of accredited people in as many religions as are in Australia, and get them into schools. This goes with the spirit of the legisliation, and for me, ensures there's a pluralist, secular nature to the SRI class.


Option 2: Get an Ethics class as an alternative. How can ethics fit? It's not "distinctive religious tenets and beliefs" right? Well, it could be: Let's check the dictionary: 

1.

a. Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe.

b. A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship.

2. The life or condition of a person in a religious order.

3. A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader.

4. A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.

I like 4 here. It's about the cause, principle etc. This is about a different approach to dealing with life. It's complementary - you can take a spiritual view, but you need to also take a reasoned view. There is strident belief that this is important. It's up to you if you augment with a spiritual aspect. So, let's ensure ethics can enter the class. If you're not learning to reason with religious beliefs, you should be able to reason with ethicial approaches.

Hence get ethics class defined as special religious tenets or beliefs, and put it up for SRI. Pragmatically - this is a long shot. It's about a lot of red tape, argument, policy change etc. Very hard to do.

Let's go back to option 1.  It's about getting a series of classes ( a curriculum) that is acceptable. Then getting enough people accreddited and available in all locations to give that curriculum. I think that takes money. we need to approach enough religions and have a representative trained and available.

So that's my take - fight it, or deflect it. either way, the secular spirit must hold true.

What do you think?

Science it seems, IS a contact sport

There is a book out just now of the same name as I have said above. It's coming to me from "Santa", so I'll let you know what it's like. 

What is unseasonally uncharitable, and gets my f'ing goat is dirt being used to fight a climate battle. It's an old pattern. In AFL here in aus there is the saying go the ball, not the man. Saying - you should always try and get the football, get the possession and then do something to score points. NOT hit the other guy. It's a negative way to win a game, and it damages you, the game, them. Nobody really wins. 

So too it seems is the hacking of the CRU and spreading emails of Phil Jones. Check this open letter from Ben Santer (realclimate.org) for more:

http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/index.php/csw/details/ben_santer_open_letter/&nbsp;<br>

Stop the nonsense. The planet is warming and the copenhagen thing is just the icing on the cake. It seems my grandkids will be MUCH worse off than me.

'The Inconvenient Fact' - really?

I just read an article in "The Age" here in melbourne that showed senator fielding with a graph of 'the inconvenient fact' showing that the last decade has shown no change in temperature and yet there has been a change in CO2.

The graph - available  here shows the senators point.

RealClimate.org discussess global mean tempature and the anomoly here:

I don't understand all of it. But what I wanted to see was more than a decades worth of data of temperature. My understanding is - there's been 55 million years or so of temperature rise. Is the last decade indicative? Is there a lag in CO2/temperature etc.

Apparently a guy called hansen presented to the US congress and then revised predictions in 2006. Here's the graph I like and believe shows that temperature has changed over the last 40 years at least, along with CO2 and so IS NOT an inconvenient fact.

See the CO2 emissions one from the report from Garnaut:

To be really conclusive, I would like to see the temperature data before 1960 to see how it rose or not.

Let me know what you think

Climate Change - how to understand it?

I've been trying to decide my opinion on Climate Change. My instinct says that yes the climate is being altered by man made processes and we need to go towards sustainable least environmental impact business practices.

But what does the science and data say? What is the right policy decision? I'm trying to read various reports to get a sense of it. Why does Tony Abbot think it's "Crap"? What did Garnaut originally propose? What does the "intergovernmental panel on climate change" do? What is AR4 and AR5? and what were the East Anglia emails all about?

I haven't read enough. that's for sure. But - here's the deal as I understand it. Firstly, there are a bunch of gases - carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide ( see p26 of the garnaut final report). these gases cause the effect of warming the average global temperature which causes changes in the climate - longer hot spells, more extreme events.

If the parts per million of these gases is not held at a certain level we will have more than 2 degrees change in the temperature by 2015. The increase in ocean height from more water will be to go up enough to put bangladesh and the maldives underwater.

Wow.

The argument is about how much each country should reduce their emissions by, and, if you're developing and can't afford the bigger price for cleaner tech, then the developed world should pay for you.

That's hard and I'm not going to address it here.

In fact it's too late - I need to go to bed. I'll come back to this and address my thought issues later.

What's the truth on refugees?

ABC just ran a story on how the libs say australia is a soft target for people smugglers. Instantly the response is back from labour and they are 'tough on people smuggling'. What are the facts?

UNHCR reports on the 2008 statistics on IDP's, Asylum Seekers. To Quote: "Although the overall total of 42 million uprooted people at year's end represents a drop of about 700,000 over the previous year, new displacement in 2009 has already more than offset the decline."

My conclusion: we are getting more people coming into australia due to an OVERALL increase in UNHCR people of interest - all due to those 3 words "new displacement in 2009"

while you are at the link, check out the actual report with numbers in detail showing how many people come to various countries. The tables in excel are avaialble for your analysis. "There were some 42 million forcibly displaced people worldwide at the end of 2008. This includes 15.2 million refugees, 827,000 asylum-seekers (pending cases) and 26 million internally displaced persons (IDPs)."

Some of the numbers of refugees: Australia - 20,919. Chad - 302,687, Indonesia - 369, New Zealand - 2,716. Italy - 47,061. United Kingdom - 292,097 and USA - 279,548.

Are we taking enough of the 42 million? Why would we? Why should we?

The policy is that we lock them up in various outside detention centres. we don't help asylum seekers at all. Have a look at the asylum seeker resource centre (asrc)'s report http://www.asrc.org.au/uploads/File/Locked%20Out.pdf . they are denied all sorts of housing assistance.

For god's sake. These people are fleeing a conflict. They'll get shot, raped or persecuted in some way (and already have been). The overwhelming reason they come is to relieve their suffering. So, those that do make it through the processing, let's at least treat them well. Let's welcome them and give them what they need to get well, earn a living, contribute back to society here in australia. If they want to go back afterwards - fine. If they want to stay - fine. Contribution is the key - we help them, and they help us.

Hey - here's an idea - let's take a few more.