Quebec parents battle to keep religion in classrooms
Proposed
changes to religion-based
schools don’t sit well with parents
By Art
Babych
Special to ChristianWeek
MONTREAL–Religion could be removed from the public schools of Quebec by the fall of 2001–but not without a fight from Protestant and Catholic parents in the province.
An eight-member task force headed by Jean-Pierre Proulx, an education professor at the University of Montreal and a devout Catholic, released a sweeping 300-page report April 7 that calls on the Quebec government to revoke the denominational status of Quebec’s 3,300 mostly-Catholic schools.
The current religious education system violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms because it excludes other faith groups in Quebec’s new pluralistic society, he said. However, schools could still offer classes for different religious denominations, but not as part of the school curriculum, not during regular school hours and if parents pay for the classes, the task force said.
Many parents are upset. "I have four kids and it’s important to me that there be some continuity between what I teach my children at home and what they are taught in school," Bernard Racicot told ChristianWeek. But if the task force’s recommendations are adopted, he said, "my kids will have to stay after school and miss their school bus and that’s a big problem."
Racicot is in charge of religious animation for Christian Direction, a Protestant organization that has 32 religious animators working in the handful of Protestant public schools in the two cities. The task force’s idea is to replace Christian animators with "a kind of spiritual animator" that could teach a course on all religions, he said.
Betrayed trust
Last year, the federal government amended the Constitution to allow Quebec to change from a religion-based education system to one divided along language lines.
The Catholic bishops of the province did not oppose the change to linguistic school boards, but said religious education guarantees must be maintained "because they correspond to the will of the great majority of Quebecers."
But the task force proposals would eliminate those guarantees even though its own surveys show that 72 percent of parents approved of state-provided religious instruction and 56 percent of Catholic parents want the denominational identity of their schools retained.
More than 85 per cent of Quebecers declare they are Catholic.
Catholic Church officials say the task force recommendations, if adopted, represent a betrayal of trust on the part of the Quebec government. Catholic parents, too, point out that the link between church and school remains strong. The Association of Catholic Parents of Quebec says 70 per cent of parents choose Catholic religious and moral instruction, and 30 percent choose Protestant religious and moral instruction.
The government has pledged not to make any changes to the education system until the fall of 2001. Public hearings on the task force proposals are being scheduled and the government has said it won’t make up its mind until after the hearings end in the fall.
Racicot, however, believes the government has already made up its mind. The government is trying to give the impression that it doesn’t want to take religious education out of the schools, he says. "But we know that the government wants that, to take it all out, but they’re taking it out slowly."