SRE & Ethics

I wrote this letter to the SMH today. Let's see if it gets published!

Joan Bielski (letters April 21st) may have stumbled onto a key issue in the debate over SRE lessons. When she cavalierly dismisses many Christian SRE lessons as ‘amateurish’ she is simply stating a fact – the teachers are amateurs. One wonders if the government is going to pay for the training of Ethics teachers or if they are going to ask current School teachers to do this job – not really fair either way. However, if they ask parents and other volunteers to join in (as for SRE) then after the launch hype has died down (in a year or two) I can hardly imagine kindies skipping home gleefully on a Friday arvo saying, “Yeah, we drew a picture of an ethic again today.”

John Smuts, Lewisham