This month Education Minister Chris Hipkins changed the school system to discourage religious teaching in State schools. Previously it was an opt-out system but he has changed it to an opt in system. The opt-out system requires effort only from those opposed to religious instruction for their children but now that has been reversed. Now parents who support religious instruction are being treated as the minority and as such have to go out of their way in order for their children to be able to take part in it.
This is a significant change as it is treating Christianity as an abnormal/unusual choice instead of a mainstream choice relevant to the majority of the New Zealand population. It is a move designed to sideline and eventually remove religious instruction in schools, as parents are far less likely to opt-in than to opt-out because opting in will now take effort, which is the opposite of how the system previously worked.
Out with the old in with the new. Not coincidentally a replacement religion has been introduced to schools at the same time that Christianity is being pushed out the door.
[…] nature abhors a vacuum, and the Government had a quasi-religious substitute locked, loaded and ready to fill the gap. January 13 was also the date on which the far more significant news broke that climate change is to become part of the school syllabus for Years 7-10 pupils, which means those aged between 11 and 14.
[…] This was no sudden political impulse. The climate change curriculum emerged fully formed, with the Greens’ fingerprints all over it.
[…] Join the dots. Out goes religious instruction and in comes its secular substitute in the form of politically charged dogma surrounding climate change. The two announcements neatly complemented each other, serving as a kind of metaphor for wider political and social changes driven by the “progressive” Left.
[…] It is quite explicit about its goal, which is to groom a generation of climate change activists. Apparently drawing inspiration from Greta Thunberg, the teaching resource is threaded with statements such as: “Climate change poses a severe threat to children’s most basic rights”.
It’s a piece of work the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels would have been proud to call his own – one that targets malleable young minds in much the same way as the Hitler Youth did in the 1930s.
[…]Guilt is an unstated sub-text throughout. The message is that Earth has been put at risk through greed and complacency and we must act fast before the process becomes irreversible.
In effect, schoolkids will be captive zealots in training. Indoctrination isn’t too strong a word for this, and it raises questions about the morality of using the public education system to impose adult anxieties and political convictions on the young.
[…] Valid scientific scepticism is caricatured as Donald Trump-style craziness.
Nowhere in the teaching resource is there any acknowledgement that many of the statements it makes are scientifically contestable.
[…] If climate change alarmism is the new religion, then scepticism – or denialism, to use the more damning term favoured by climate-change activists – is the new heresy.
There’s a disturbing whiff of totalitarianism in the way this secular religion permits no dissent. If you believe that it’s dangerous in a democracy to allow one view to hold unchallenged sway, denialism starts to look like an honourable stance, purely on principle.
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