Parents won fight against mandatory religious class
From Aftenposten
Friday July 06 2007
Parents who sued the Norwegian state 10 years ago over mandatory religious classes in public schools could finally claim victory on Friday. The European Court of Human Rights narrowly ruled in their favour.
The court in Strasbourg ruled that Norway's so-called KRL classes in elementary schools (an acronym for the Norwegian words for Christian education, religion and lifestyle) violated Article 2 of the European human rights convention. The parents wanted to exempt their children from the religion classes but weren't allowed to do so. They sued, and the legal appeals process took them all the way to Strasbourg.
"Think that our boys would be old enough to drink champagne by the time this case was decided!" exclaimed one of the plaintiffs, Carolyn Midsem. She was the mother of a 10-year-old boy in 1997 who she didn't think should have to sit through the religion class. "It's almost unreal that it took this much time, but now we have confirmation that we were right," Midsem told new bureau NTB. The secretary general of The Norwegian Humanist Association (Human-Etisk Forbund) hailed the court decision, saying that the schools must now conform to the court's decision.
The court noted that schools in Norway, where there's no separation of church and state, have Christian goals and that Christianity has a dominant position in the curriculum. The state religion is evangelical Lutheran. The court wrote in its opinion that it's therefore difficult to accommodate minority groups with other religious rights by only offering a KRL class that stressed Christianity. The Humanist Association claimed the state school system can now no longer use public schools for religious classes aimed at influencing students.
Seven families had sued the state, and lost at the local, appeals and Supreme Court levels. Four of the families then appealed to the European Court of Human Rights. Education Minister Øystein Djupedal said he'd take the court’s ruling under advisement.
[Rather interesting I thought. I wonder what implications this legal precedent will have in other parts of the European Union.]
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4 comments:
I think most countries have a separate religious education lesson, so exemption is possible.
Although in the UK, it's kind of pot-luck:-) My primary school had RE lesssons, which a couple of kids were withdrawn from - but then we had a christian assembly every day which was compulsory, and the school took the "broadly christian curriculum" ethos pretty seriously and squeezed mild christianity into many subjects (music, art, project work etc) too.
Still, I don't withdraw my kids fromm RE - all it does is mark them out as different fromm the other children. Home indoctrination is far more sucessful than school indoctrination and I have no worries about Mstr A suddenly finding God because he learned a bible story at school:-)
I spent my formative years in Church of England schools so I don't remember much in the way of Religious 'education'. I've obviously picked up the basics from somewhere but that's culturation for you. Our RE classes didn't (on the whole) teach anything about religion - that I can rember. I don't recall any discussion about the miracles of Jesus or The Exodus or anything like that. Maybe we did stuff like that?
There was most certainly no indoctrination into the Faith. Or if there was it was of such a mild form that it didn't make much impression - and this was before Political Correctness or Multiculturalism.
I don't think that if my parents had pulled me out of RE classes that it would've made any difference to me. But I suppose that its good to have the option.
I think I would be fine with this if the classes had any sort of comparative emphasis at all. It sounds more like religious indoctrination classes than religious education classes. Maybe if they offered the latter instead of the former religious minorities wouldn't have such a hard time assimilating in certain EU countries. We'd probably all have a healthier understanding of one another and realize that we have a lot in common regardless of dogma.
We were nominally jewish as children. The only other jewish boy in the school was removed from RE and he took a lot of stick for it. Plus, as I said, it didn't remove him from the christianity that permeated the school, in a mild way. As the national curriculum still states that education should be "broadly christian", kids still grow up learning about Jesus, Moses and Adam & Eve - or at least singing hymns regardless of their actual beliefs.
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