THE FREEDOM TO EDUCATE: For a True Pluralism

COMMUNION & LIBERATION

There is no practical difference between exposing the adolescent to different
conceptions of life that pretend to be neutral and to respect freedom of choice, and offering ideologies that by their very nature and history cannot begin to fulfill thisneed in its entirety. Both approaches are founded on an illusion: …the false beliefthat the personality evolves by finding within itself the criteria of maturity;
and…the claim of reducing the whole of reality to a partial worldview.

-----Luigi Giussani

The Ethics and Religious Culture program recently launched by the Ministère de l’Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport, surreptitiously promotes a project of
homogenization in the guise of pluralism. The ERC, which operates from the earliest elementary grades to the end of high school, introduces children to religious cultures. It loosely ties a cultural approach to training in ethics. Students are taught to “dialogue” and develop ethical judgments on their own without interference from teachers. The aim is to have children grow up with a way of relating to each other, a model of “harmonization” taught by the State.

The program is compulsory. There are no practical exemptions from the courses, either for schools or students. For example, a Catholic or Jewish school is not allowed to teach the program from its own perspective because it does not share the same aims for the course as the Ministry.

The ERC program is an example of the State’s undue intrusion into the lives of its citizens and intermediary institutions. It shows a lack of awareness about what constitutes education. Education does not involve feeding purportedly neutral information to students. This makes them uncertain and calls into question the truths they have apprehended in their upbringing.

A true education introduces students to reality beginning from the culture in which their families have raised them. The ERC program attacks the age-old freedom of parents to have their children taught, and religious schools to teach, religious culture from their own perspectives. The Ministry must recognize this freedom in the name of a true pluralism.

Freedom demands responsibility. Let us become aware of what is at stake: the value of the person. A person is not a pawn for the State’s experiments but a relationship with the Infinite.