Religious Education

A friend recently told me a story regarding her four year old son, who has recently started prep at a local state school.

They were on a long car trip and she had been coming up with games to prevent him from getting irritable. In one game, she named an object and he had to think about how long it would take to build. It was a particularly good game because with limited input she could keep him occupied for quite a while. The question "how long would it take to build a house?" became a discussion about what parts a house has and how long it would take to build each of them. This game was going well and the boy was getting better at it, so she thought she'd stretch him a little with "how long would it take to build a whole city?". The boy replied "don't be silly, God made the cities".

This response obviously came as a surprise to someone with no record of church attendance and a child at a non-denominational school. It turns out the school had introduced a religious education program.

The fact is, kids are fed 'information' from a whole lot of sources and I don't consider the occasional hour of RE to be a major concern. I spent most of my school days at either Catholic or Anglican schools. While most of those who conducted my theological educaltion were intelligent and well-rounded, I did come the occasional crazy who had weasled into a school to try and push an ideological agenda onto impressionable minds. I find comfort in the lack of success in attempts to indoctrinate me.

Years of listening to Christian sermons basically just left me with a good store of parables and a better understanding of the frequent biblical references in literature and movies. By way of contrast, years worth of advertising have meant that now, in my late 20s, I still occasionally feel compelled to buy a box of Coco Pops.

The thing I find concerning is that someone has evidently told this kid that "God made cities". Despite my many years of attending chapel services, I can't say I remember that part of the bible. From a teaching perspective, this is like having your kid come home and tell you that "their" and "there" can be used interchangeably, because their English teacher couldn't be assed explaining the difference.