MARION MADDOX
Allen&Unwin, 2014, 248 pages, $29.99 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
To the traditional ‘three Rs’, Australia has added a fourth
– religion – as religious private schools, religious instruction in public
schools, and religious counsellors have found generously-funded favour with
successive federal and state governments, writes Macquarie University politics
professor, Marion Maddox, in Taking God
to School.
The taxpayer-funded rise of private, religious schools, many
of them extremely wealthy, is a massive retreat from the demands of the
egalitarian, nineteenth century education reformers whose campaign for ‘free,
compulsory and secular’ education gelled with a ‘nation-building’ capitalist
state which needed, for social cohesion and economic reasons, an educated (and
obedient) workforce beyond the minority catered to by the fee-charging,
church-run schools of colonial times.
From the mid-1970s, however, Whitlam’s federal Labor
government, in the first outing of a repeated “quest for electability”,
instituted significant government funding of private schools (90% of which are
religious) and, with every successive government being quick to pander to the
lobbying zeal of the churches (mainstream Christian, ‘happy-clappy’ Pentecostal
and non-Christian) by promising that ‘no school will lose a dollar’ under their
watch, the fiscal disparity between the private and public education spheres
has worsened.
Religion has also been favoured with beachheads in public
schools through government-funded religious instruction and through outsourcing
student welfare services to private religious providers through a school
chaplain program (massively expanded under Labor’s atheist Prime Minister,
Julia Gillard). A majority of these are
provided by aggressively proselytising, conservative, evangelical versions of
Christianity.
All governments have subscribed to the “neo-liberal” chant
of ‘public bad, private good’, defending their privatising educational push
under the rubric of fostering ‘choice’, leaving public schools under-resourced
and stigmatised as inferior whilst only those who can afford it get to ‘choose’
government-enriched private schooling.
Government hand-holding for religion in education should
matter, says Maddox, because what is taught (creationism and Bible literalism,
for example) is anti-science, how it is taught is antipathetic to critical
thinking, and who it is taught to, and by, is exempt from laws against discrimination
by, for example, sexual orientation or marital status.
Maddox goes beyond this standard atheist critique of
religion in education, however, by arguing against the influence of both “money
and religion” which are tightly conjoined in the Australian education
system. She reminds us that wealthy private schools are public-funded
breeding grounds for entitlement to private privilege - in the top echelons of
business and government, the privately-educated disproportionately predominate
(St. Peter’s College in Adelaide, for example, has produced nine State Premiers
and two federal education ministers).
Both the dollar and the dog-collar, she concludes, need to
be minimised in Australia’s schools. In
fact, with the modern capitalist state now firmly wedded to private, religious
education, the old reformist demand for all education to be free and secular,
divided by neither creed nor class, is now deliciously revolutionary.
