Your Stories

Tina sent me her story about how surprised she was to find out that there was religious instruction in the school that her children will attend when they are old enough. I felt exactly the same when my daughter started at school and it highlights how little awareness there is about religious pressure in state schools.

Schools often seem to give bible teachers far too much freedom within the school. This story is one example where the parent made it absolutely clear that they did not want their child to have any contact with the religious faith teaching going on but they were let down badly.

Pippa’s experience sounds very similar to my own. She was prepared to speak up for what she thought was right and managed to initiate some change. But without enough open parental support for her stand, the board limited what they were prepared to do.

There’s a common response from pro-religious instruction people that the classes “never did me any harm” or “what harm do they do?”. Aside from being a very self-centred view that because they don’t think they do any harm, therefore no harm is done, it’s simply not true.

I think that children from other religions (Islam in this case) often have it a lot harder than kids that simply opt-out without an apparent reason. I am certainly concerned that the stand I have taken against these classes will impact my daughter. If it does, I will certainly be knocking on some doors.

This story shows how religious bias from school staff can affect kids quite badly. In this case, staff at a small school were also promoting religious beliefs and mistreating children in private as well as in front of the class.

This is a too-common example of what segregating children based on religious beliefs does. It creates an us-and-them mentality with the kids being taught faith ending up with a sense of superiority.