Page 2562 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 2 July 2008
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Parents are rightly concerned about what their children learn at school. They want to ensure that their children are learning core skills such as mathematics, reading and writing that will give them the intellectual base that they will need to prosper as adults. Unfortunately, many children are being short-changed by a public education system which, instead, diverts much of its attention to attempts to inculcate children with the social beliefs and behaviours preferred by education bureaucrats. And I must say it is not confined just to the public system because I have observed similar scenarios in the private system over the years. But this bill seeks to address what is the responsibility primarily in the territory in the public system. In short, our public school system has been guilty of neglecting core skills—
Mr Corbell: Don’t you believe in small government?
MR MULCAHY: I do believe in small government, but I also believe that we ought to give parents some measure of confidence about the politicisation of their children while they are in the care of the education system.
In short, our public school system has been guilty of neglecting core skills in favour of indoctrinating students with political correctness. The practice is completely hostile to the purpose of education. Genuine education, particularly to young children, is about imparting factual information and core skills, while developing children’s capacity for critical thought.
The Education Act already has some protections for parents to ensure that the government is not able to step over the boundaries of parental responsibility in matters of religious education. We quite rightly recognise that, in public schools, children should not be exposed to the teaching of specific religious principles without the consent of the parents, and this is already assured by section 28 of the Education Act. In other words, parents have the right to determine for themselves how their children should be brought up as regards matters of religion. This is a valuable protection, as it prevents the government imposing a particular religious orthodoxy on young children against the wishes of their parents.
The bill that I am introducing today expands the existing protections in the Education Act by giving parents control over education involving sensitive subjects like politics and sex. Just as with matters of religion, it is not for the government to impose its own prevailing attitudes on children with regard to political or sexual matters, and this bill protects parents from this kind of interference.
In order to achieve this goal, the bill introduces a new section 29A into the Education Act, which requires public schools to ensure that their students do not receive education or activities about matters of a political or sexual nature without informed parental consent. A school is taken to have received informed parental consent only where it receives consent from a parent after first giving details about the nature of the education or activity, including the facts, ideas, doctrines, opinions and material that will be presented to the student and the name and affiliation of the presenter.
In practice, this would require public schools to give parents some kind of course outline or activity outline for courses or activities which involve matter of a political
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