Well, I was brought up religious, had to go to Sunday School when I was a kid, but am no longer religious
at all!!!
Unfortunately I live in quite a conservative, non-progressive province and religion is still too involved in schools.
Here is something that I find absolutely outrageous that is happening in 2011!! This is my own personal beef at the moment, so will probably be boring for most of you!
The city I live in and the area around was settled by French Catholics. So, most of the schools were originally Catholic schools... NOT private, but publically funded Catholic schools. Now, the majority of people are not Catholic, but there are still a lot of ( about half) of Catholic Schools.
Edmonton and surrounding cities and suburbs all have their own school boards. So there are public schools and Catholic schools.... but essentially, the Catholic schools are public too; they get the same amount of funding. So there is an Edmonton Public, Edmonton Catholic, St. Albert Catholic, St. Albert Catholic, St. Albert Public, Sherwood Park Catholic, Sherwood Park Public etc etc.... Probably about 11 different boards with the city and area. Then more throughout the province ( each area having public and Catholic board)
If you are NOT Catholic and don't have a letter from a priest saying you were baptised in a Catholic church, then you can't apply to work for a Catholic board. Now, there are plenty of students who are of other faiths or non-faiths who attend Catholic schools, but you can't apply as a non-Catholic teacher.
Of course, public schools don't ask and can't ask for your religion, so essentialy, if you are Catholic, you have double the job opportunites!!
I don't want to work in a religious school, but when it takes up half ( no kidding) the schools, then how is this fair? Especially when they are publicly funded!!
There are a few other schools, Orthodox Jewish/Muslim schools, but interesting thing is, they will accept anyone of any faith to work there, you just have to agree that you are teaching in a religious school.
If there were only a few Catholic schools, then that would be fine, but they take up half the schools.
A Catholic person can apply for any school, whereas someone who is non-Catholic can apply for half of them.
I think public (I know this has a diffferent meaning in Canada than in the UK) schools should be completely secular.
The worst thing is, now some of these "secular" schools have what they call LOGOS streams, which are Christian streams within a public system. So even when you are looking for jobs within the public system you see these LOGOs jobs so one grade 1 class might be regular, the other Grade 1 class might be 'Christian'.
There are a lot of people upset over this and some even saying that it's a human rights issue; essentially they are discriminating against people of a certain religion. But since the Catholic boards are so huge and it only really affects non-religious teachers like myself, no one really cares. There have been a few people who speak out against it, but I doubt anything will ever happen.
Funny thing is, friends of mine who are Catholic, some of them haven't been back in a church since they wer baptised and have said there isn't much religion in their class anyway. One of my friends who is a teacher in a Catholic school says all she has to do is make sure there is a bible on the bookshelf so if a students needs it, it's there. Other than that, no God talk or anything.
These Catholic schools aren't private... they are all public!!
Ridiculous!!!
Edit: I realise I went way off course to what everyone else in the thread was talkling about!!
