Constructing National Identity in Canadian and Australian Classrooms by Stephen Jackson

Author:Stephen Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

3 Ossification and Reform in Religious Studies in Ontario

The case of Ontario presents a fascinating contrast to the Victorian experience of religious education. The main administrative difference in post-war religious instruction between the two systems was that in Ontario, the provincial education system administered the curriculum with regular schoolteachers from Grades 1 to 6. Clergy were permitted in the classroom for Grades 7 and 8, but there was no formal curriculum for them to follow, and many schools had no program for those grades whatsoever. The Ontario Inter-Church Committee for Weekday Religious Education (OICC), unlike the CCES in Victoria, had no part in actually administering religious education, but it was important in liaising between churches and the Department of Education. In Ontario, the state had a much greater role in religious education than in Victoria. As this section will demonstrate, this structural difference created several problems for religious instruction and hastened calls for reform.

From the very beginning, there was vehement opposition to religious instruction in state schools by a vocal minority of Ontarians. Groups like the Jewish Congress of Canada and the Association for Religious Liberty continued their attacks on the Drew Regulations and brought negative attention to the Department of Education. Their critique of religious instruction , in some cases already well developed by the 1940s, became a major issue in the press and a constant source of irritation for the Department of Education. The critique by minority groups began to pick up steam in the 20 years following the Second World War as a result of the expansion of the education system. Immigration added approximately 50,000 students a year to the Ontario public school system.59 These students came from a variety of religious backgrounds that did not fit well with the programs of the OICC. Much like in Victoria, the illusion of religious homogeneity was shattered by the early 1960s. Opposition to religious education became powerful much earlier in the Ontarian case.

In the 1950s and early 1960s authorities in education continued to conflate religious instruction with the national identity. In the 1952 Annual Report, the Minister of Education said the central objective of education was to create “loyal, intelligent, right-thinking, religious, and freedom-loving citizens.”60 But the Department of Education became increasingly concerned with preventing controversy at all costs, which effectively prevented any change to the system.

This tendency of avoiding conflict became evident in the early 1950s, when the OICC began to lobby for a formal expansion of the religious instruction curriculum into Grades 7 and 8. They cited the Hope Report of 1950, which lent its support to such an expansion.61 The Prime Minister of Ontario said in 1951 that the provincial government was not legally bound to the recommendations of the report.62 Since the Hope Report did not bind the provincial government, the Department of Education saw no need to expand the system and risk causing further controversy.

This is not to say, however, that there was widespread discontent with the new religious instruction program. Few reliable statistics

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