On faith based schools
What they do, what they don't do, and what they've done for me
There’s a trend in Australian education that has been throwing up paradoxes and puzzles for leaders and, I’m sure, parents and students. We live in a world that increasingly values diversity, but it seems that in Australia, families are making more conservative decisions, when it comes to schooling anyway. In the US, the trend is the opposite, where Christian students battle for religious liberty on campus. Diversity is king, never mind the fact that the diversity conceptualised is exceptionally hegemonic. Take a deep dive into the Claudine Gay scandal at Harvard recently if you need any more evidence of the ethical paradoxes that plague their elite colleges. In Australia, it seems that education is going in a different direction, with rising numbers of families opting for religious schools.
One argument could be that families are now outsourcing moral instruction. Schools have taken the place of many community institutions and perhaps church is one of them. We have rising numbers of atheists, but growth in the religious schools sector. One parent says, “It was important to me and to us as parents that there was a code of conduct or a set of values which were going to be instilled into our children … It didn’t have to be religious but there had to be some guiding principles.” The role of the family is not entirely clear in statements like this, especially considering it’s not the adult getting the moral instruction. How (or whether) this is followed through at home is a pertinent question.
Equally possible is that people in the contemporary world crave structure and clear lines around right and wrong. The Harvard story (and many others just like it) show a morally relativist and out-of-touch world of elites, which shapes a lot of media. I like to think of Aussies as having great ‘bullshit detectors’ and as such, they’re less susceptible to these kinds of trends. Perhaps people aren’t yet willing to give up all of their rituals and organising structures, but at the same time aren’t willing to give up their Sunday morning to do this. School is a neat way of ticking several boxes. I have no problem with this per se, but it is a bit of a shame that families have one fewer event to share. The convenience of a faith/school mash-up means that church has gone the way of the nightly family dinner.
I’m not completely persuaded by either of the arguments I’ve put forward. Parents also seem to enjoy the idea of the ‘whole child’ being educated, as opposed to just their ear, or elbow or God-forbid, their brain. Faith schools tend to offer fairly well resourced social and emotional learning programs. But as I have written before, these tend to encourage students to look inward, doing very little for their character formation. Further complicating things is that as long as faith schools charge fees and therefore open their doors to all religions, they’re at risk of diluting the structures, rituals and belief systems that make them unique. Do Christianity-lite schools even offer a place for the devout to be together or practise their faith in an authentic and reverent way?
It’s my job to be sceptical about pretty much anything that comes up in education, and it might sound like I don’t support faith schooling. In fact, I feel the opposite. I feel strongly that schools should maintain any value that doesn’t discriminate, but that students entering a faith institution (including schools) should immerse themselves in whatever that faith has to offer. For the record, I am an atheist who believes strongly in the power of religion. I have benefited from working at a faith-school in ways that have only emerged with the benefit of hindsight and maturity. I experienced seven years of ritual, and a sense of history and continuity. I love the aesthetics of Catholicism. The cycles of struggle and epiphany suit my nature and I consider myself a vicarious Catholic.
I can only speak to one truly authentic faith experience in education, but after seven years I saw the full cycle play out for the girls that I taught from Year 7. I’ll outline the benefits here.
How to be still
More than ever, children live in an always-on world. There is a certain behaviour expected in chapel that requires reverence, stillness and for the world to be put on hold. For some students, this will be the only time in their day/week/month that they will be invited to inhabit that state. Faith schools don’t just demand this at Christmas and Easter; it’s made available to students regularly and the prayerful state becomes something that they can eventually conjure at will. Recent research has shown that social media, and not school-pressures, have been responsible for rising rates of depression, especially in girls. Perhaps schools can offer more opportunities for stillness and reflection in the context of faith.
How to articulate values
Schools who do values education really well are the ones that make the language second nature. Those values are unpacked, articulated daily and represent ‘the way we do things around here.’ They’re not just part of the school motto. At first I thought this was quite quirky, but at a previous school, we would spend a year unpacking one value. Values need to be reflected on, grappled with and understood because life is so complex. I realise this sounds contradictory to my previous statement about morality not being teachable, but shared language means that there can be the expectation that students abide by the same code. I’d like to think it translates beyond the school gates, but at least during the course of a student’s time at school, well-articulated values mean that everyone can expect to feel safe and respected.
How to serve
Learning about servant leadership was invaluable for my practice. My vision was in part about sustainable practice for my team, who in turn were better able to serve our students. Decision-making becomes simplified under this kind of model. Even more important is counteracting the main character syndrome that seems to be a key feature of being a teenager. Service, done in an authentic way, almost always achieves this. It’s far more powerful than universal wellbeing programs in that it instils feelings of gratitude, optimism, and even gives students a greater sense of control over their own lives. We can’t hand students wellbeing, but we can nudge/force them into giving relationships that give rise to protective factors.
I’ve made a strong case for schools to ‘lean in’ to what makes their faith distinctive. But what if schools don’t actually need religion to create the conditions that promote human flourishing? In a way, faith structures are prefab — they’re ready to go, they often benefit from a broad familiarity in the community and the structures have existed for sometimes hundreds of years. But really, there’s nothing stopping schools from creating their own standards of behaviour, their own codes and rituals, and a culture of service to others. Perhaps in Australia, school leaders should take this as a provocation. Many already have.
My theory is that the trend towards religious schools is simply because parents see them as more exclusive. The more you pay the better the education...or so the thinking goes. There is a moral aspect. I've seen this with a lot of my friends who are deciding where to send their children. They worry that not sending them to a religious school, even if they have no connection to that religion, is depriving them of certain opportunities.
Religious schools are usually founded on admirable values that can benefit students. And I agree that time for quiet contemplation is hugely beneficial for students these days! However, I believe that these schools need to walk the talk more. The Catholic school I worked at espoused views about humility and compassion, whilst acting in a manner that was completely contradictory. At the end of the day, no matter how they try and spin it to parents, these schools are businesses, and it is a challenge to balance business decisions against these values.
I feel it is important for parents to understand these contradictions and to ask schools these hards questions. Otherwise, like one of my colleagues used to say, these values just become another dot point for the website.