It appears a suspension of the Lord’s Prayer from Sturgeon Heights School in St. Albert may be headed for a permanent expulsion. And it’s about time.
It’s shocking that a public school could still be starting its day with a Christian prayer.
After years of reciting the prayer over the school’s intercom each morning, school officials suspended the practice for this school year after a year-long parent-led opposition campaign. Meanwhile, the board of the Sturgeon School Division is scheduled to review its policy, which includes spiritual development on its list of responsibilities.
Sturgeon Heights was the only school in the division to still start its day with a prayer. Hopefully the board or school officials will not open the door to its return.
Getting rid of the prayer is the right decision but it shouldn’t have required such dithering to arrive at this conclusion.
In this country, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms — even though it ironically refers to “the supremacy of God” in the preamble — lists freedom of religion as a fundamental right of every person. Freedom of religion also includes freedom from religion.
Sturgeon Heights is a public school that is supposed to be providing a warm environment to all people. How does starting the day with a Christian prayer create a warm environment for Muslims or Jews or atheists?
Some parents are apparently not happy that the prayer is being suspended, arguing that the school is caving in to minority views, according to letters to the Edmonton Journal.
This is a predictable argument but one that doesn’t hold water. In this country people are free to pursue their religious practices but it is not the role of a public school to reinforce the religious views of one segment of its population at the exclusion of all others, even if the pro-prayer segment forms a large majority.
According to Sturgeon Heights principal Garnet Goertzen, the prayer was a holdover from earlier days that endured simply because parents liked it. The school did allow parents to opt their children out by having them go to another prayer-free classroom.
Thankfully, that work-around seems to have run its course. True inclusion doesn’t involve sending children to a separate room.
It’s time for the Sturgeon School Division to just do the right thing and be done with it — get rid of the prayer and concentrate on educating the kids.
That doesn’t mean that promoting basic human values like acceptance, forgiveness, sharing and fair play can’t be part of the school experience. After all, these concepts cross all religious lines.
There are plenty of options in St. Albert and Edmonton for parents who want their children’s education to be infused with religion but it’s out of bounds for parents to be demanding that the local public school be including a religious element.
If a spiritual element must exist in the public school system, it should be in the form of teaching our children, in a fact-based way, about the various religious beliefs that exist in the world, to foster knowledge and understanding of these differences.
This way our children won’t grow up fearing those who look or believe a bit differently.
Otherwise, let’s leave religious promotion where it belongs, in the home and the spiritual centres in the community.
