The Extreme Part of Secular Education

During my years of education I have been rather complaining about the lack of plurality in education, based on my experiece as a high school student. During my highschool years, I've been to an assortment of schools, in which I want to categorize them as Catholic, Protestant, and Buddhist schools. In these schools, I've found that religion has placed from a rather liberal to in some schools a conservative and integral part of the school life.

In the example of one highschool I went to, one of the core required course was Bible Studies, in which I had an awful straight D score through my school year. During these years, I've been complaining and campaigning against forcing religious studies in HighSchool without giving an alternative choice. Though I was banking on the support of my classmates who were Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, and people of other religious background, I learnt at that time that it was highly inadequate to start a movement. The reason why I came to that conclusion lies on the fact that most highschool students were not mentally mature enough to understand the implication about how the abuse of religious freedom is dementrial to them. However they understood the importance of highschool grades - and the majority of them temporarily converted into good Christians to get good grades. That was something I could not comprehend, and thus a big struggle of my later highschool years - my crusade against the lack of religious pluralism in school.

Based on the lessons there, I found out that the majority of people, though what religious background, most of them were self-serving bastards, and will not stop at all ends to get what they want. That may be a rather harsh observation, but as I considered myself to be a socialist, its not strange to have such a observation. Though I have been highly cynical, one of the good points I've noticed is that it doesn't matter what religion, the students are in, they have a common understanding of each other as human beings with their instincts for survival. This pluralism, though in a rather odd way makes me believe that religious pluralism is indeed possible, only if the people have other agendas to focus on - where the energies won't be directed against each other, but to a common goal.

Anyway, reading the news of the education system, I have been increasing amused at seeing the opposite happen at France, where many schools have banned all religious artifacts in school. The example of education in France is called secular education, and what we see there is a case of extreme Secularism. The hot issues that were faced dealt with the ban of clothing related with religion. Religious necklaces were banned. Sikhs were banned from wearing turbans. Female Muslims were banned from wearing their Islamic veil and robe. This has caused a rather large stir in many religious circles for the zero tolerance against all religions - and a huge dent in world-wide confidence in the secular educational system.

I'm rather horrified to see the secular movement resort to such extreme measures where students - who many don't know of their religious upbringing in detail, have to derived with the freedom of religious expression. By taking out the right of religious identity, this has caused a huge void on the highschool students in France in understanding about the unique balance we have in the world with all the religions and how human and how similar each of them are like with each other. Once these students have friends of different religions, they get to see how students of other background are just like they are. This is a better way to control the ethic, religious tensions these days than just a token show between the religious leaders. Common misconceptions and distrust cannot be healed in one generation, but in many, in which it should start here with the youth.

As mentioned earlier, there should be no place for extremists in our world where they seek to bend everything in a skewed unilateral viewpoint. Our world is a huge place where humans of many social standings, races, and religions interact, and thus the only way can go forward to keep an open mind and a flexible moral integrity in dealing with situations as an informed moderate.