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The Forum > Article Comments > Christians, their schools, and the threat to public education > Comments

Christians, their schools, and the threat to public education : Comments

By Alan Matheson, published 30/3/2007

Are Christian schools, by their very nature, a denial of the Gospel they preach?

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BOAZ_David, I posed my questions seriously. I guess I'll have to turn the sarcasm level down a bit in future. Apologies for any offense caused.

I simply don't agree that the public school system is a "value-free" zone. My opinion of public education is based on my own experiences. My father was a teacher of 30 yrs experience and a self professed "secular humanist". I won't go on about his qualities, suffice to say his view was that education was designed to teach students to think for themselves.

I'm not suggesting the public system is perfect, but it is simply not the drug-addled, pinko-nihilist hell portrayed by some posters on this forum. And speaking of existentialism, what's wrong with Camus? Literature should be challenging and thought-provoking. Camus is not a personal favorite of mine, but a writer worth studying nonetheless. Who else would you like on the banned list?

GrahamY, you may be right about cost shifting, to an extent. However, a public school must accept kids if they are in the catchment for a school. It is probably more a case of not building more schools near a disadvantaged area, forcing parents to choose a private school over a public school with real problems. Bits of Campelltown in south-western Sydney are in this sort of situation
Posted by Johnj, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 1:04:08 AM
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runner: you're effectively saying that religious morals are inherently better than humanistic ones, and that this is why non religious people send their students to christian schools:

I have a big problem with this. Essentially runner, you are saying that a moral code based on god's view is superior to reasoning without religion.

Are you are saying that people should simply follow the tenets of a religion, rather than exercising their own judgment?
Funnily enough, this is precisely the argument used by Islamic fundamentalists to justify the most heinous crimes.

This tends to be the point where Christians like to point out how much better their brand of god is.
Funnily enough, Exclusive Brethren are capable of interpreting the christian faith in a manner that doesn't allow women to cut their hair, or have contact with people outside the religion.

The crusades, the inquisitions, the witch hunts - all interpretations of christianity.

My point is, that just like a humanistic philosophy, christians have to interpret morality. They have to make their own judgment calls.
Unless of course, you are going to take the bible literally, and start hunting witches. If you start taking the minutiae of religion too seriously, you will end up being a fanatic - and fanaticism causes humanity much more grief than humanism ever will. In fact, any one of the major faiths, historically speaking, has much more blood on its hands than all the humanists in the whole wide world.

You can say that there is one proper interpretation of christianity. Funny... was that the Anglican version or the Catholic version?

With regard to the schooling: I went to a christian school for the last two years of my schooling.
There wasn't any private sectarian schools. The vast majority of private schools are christian.
Private schools get funding from private means as well as government means. They often have better resources.
They also have the ability to reject troublesome students that make it difficult for genuine students to learn. State schools can't. Thus, private schools can cherry pick students, and have been known to poach them.
Posted by TurnRightThenLeft, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 10:30:34 AM
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TurnRightThenLeft,

'Runner: you're effectively saying that religious morals are inherently better than humanistic ones, and that this is why non religious people send their students to christian schools:'

You have summed it up better than I could of. People look at the outcomes of the philosophies (taught or implied) and choose what they believe to be the best. Obviously many non believers choose those outcomes from private schools.

Humanistic/atheistic philosophy I believe leads to nothing more than death. This is reflected suicide and abortion. The ignoring of man's soul and spirit lacks reason.

You also should know that it is by not taking Christ's teaching (love your enemy) literally that led to the witches being burned. The problems are when we don't take Christ's teaching literally. The problem commences when we don't take Christ and His teachings serious enough not when we take Him to serious.
Posted by runner, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 12:02:01 PM
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I’d like to respond to Michael2 (or perhaps even to John Rennie).

When we agree on so many individual points above, its funny how we come to opposite conclusions.

We agree that the public at large remain unconvinced about the truth of evolution.

We can both note that creationists are present in the most scientifically advanced nation the world has seen. Although, I don’t see this as a contradiction. Bible believers and science have always gone together. Or maybe it is just a coincidence that science advanced most quickly in the countries where reformed Christianity had been preached most solidly (namely, Western Europe).

We could even agree that scientists in Darwin’s day were persuaded by the arguments for evolution that they were presented with.

However, my contention was that scientists of the 19th Century only knew a fraction of what we have since come to discover. For example in biology, Darwin thought that a living cell was like a simple blob of plasma. As our knowledge has progressed to reveal more and more detail of the intricacies present in a living cell, beyond our conception of how we envision a city (factories, roads, transport, waste disposal, etc.), it has become more and more counterintuitive that a living cell could just spring into life from non living matter. And increasingly, many have become sceptical.

Looking at some others born in the 19th Century, even the ideas of Marx (economics) and Freud (psychology) were once considered as ‘scientific’ but these since have been relegated to fads or philosophies.

At which part of the story is science really confident that it can explain how the protozoa became the pelican or the pineapple
Posted by Mick V, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 4:01:00 PM
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To TurnLeftThenRight, I would roughly agree.
If an ideology is worth believing, its worth dissecting.

I don’t deny that there are holes and difficulties with creation theory. My goodness, we are arguing about what happened thousands (if not many thousands) of years ago, and ultimately science is not capable of deciding a question of history anyway. That is why murder cases that happened only weeks before are settled by jury on the standard of ‘beyond reasonable doubt’.

However, I’m not sure what point you were making about dinosaurs, etc. Dinosaurs and Australopithecines were animals, and thus (if you believe the Scripture) were made and once lived concurrent with people (note the legends of ‘dragons’ from around the world, & Job 40, 41). We could argue about dates but ultimately, the bones don’t come out the ground with little “use by” dates stamped on them. Neanderthals, the latest theories suggest, were human. Give them a hair cut and a shave and let them catch the train with everyone else, and no one would look twice.

Regarding Boaz, and Albert Camus’ ‘the Outsider’.
I once read it (though I haven’t actually read that many books in my life, which people who have read my posts probably would not find surprising) and found it impacting, and thought provoking, even if quite depressing and melancholic.

I also struggled to see the point of what Boaz was trying to say about it. However, the main character is hardly a desired role model, and I would agree, from my dreary experience of English in High school, that these types of books could be balanced with something more encouraging and uplifting to the spirit
Posted by Mick V, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 4:03:50 PM
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"You do not have to live in a school’s catchment area to go to it. You are free to go to any government school you like in Victoria if it has room, and have been for decades. The zoning gives you the right to attend your local school – even if it doesn’t have room."

ChrisC: Sure, and theoretically, anyone who was born in the U.S. can become its president.

There was an article in today's Herald-Sun about the desperate measures some parents are going to in order to get their kids into good state schools.

The fact is that schools do have enrollment zones because the demand is too great. See this link as an example:

http://www.mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au/enrol.htm

Taken from the third paragraph on that page:

"Typically, we have to reluctantly turn down 100 year seven applications each year because there are no places available."

Likewise, have a look at this study:

http://econrsss.anu.edu.au/~aleigh/pdf/SchoolQualityHousePrices.pdf

"We find that a 5 percent increase in test scores (approximately one standard deviation) is associated with a 3.5 percent increase in house prices. Our result is in line with private school tuition costs, and accords with prior research from Britain and the United States."
Posted by shorbe, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 9:42:15 PM
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