Friday, 17 August 2018

The Kids Are All Right

What I read

According to Pallavi Singhal in "Religion in decline in Australian schools" (2018), religious schools report that they are happy to accept students with a range of beliefs or no religion when their parents want them to benefit from the education offered by religious schools. This follows a recent report showing that the general trend in Australian society towards not having a religion, which had risen to about 30% of the population in 2016, is also seen in increasing numbers of school children who say they have no religion, at 37% over all, varying from a high of 45% at government schools to a low of 14% at Catholic schools. 

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My response 

How things change! Since my parents were Catholic, my brothers and sisters and I all went to Catholic schools for all of our primary and high school. Back in the 1960s and 70s, no one at my schools would admit to not believing in the Catholic religion, although I'm sure that a few students in higher years had doubts. But even back then, things were changing. By the time I'd finished high school, it was clear, as the article suggests, that Australians were becoming less religious. Even in my own family, although my father continued to serve on the local school board, less importance was attached to things like going to mass every Sunday, and today, even my mother no longer does that, and none of my brothers or sisters go to mass except for a special occasion. For example, my youngest sister recently had her youngest daughter baptised a Catholic, although I'm not sure what her reasons were: perhaps, as one of Singhal's sources says, it was to give her a better chance of getting into popular Catholic schools later. 

One thing I liked in the article is that the decline in religious belief is not seen as a problem, even by the people running religious schools. And I'm pretty sure that as religion has become less important, morality has improved. Australian society, and Australians, are better than they were in the past when more people were more religious. They care more about justice for all people, for fair treatment of all, and for making the country a better place for everyone to share. This can be seen in awareness of traditional prejudices such as sexism and racism, which are not tolerated as they used to be. The same is seen in changes to the law earlier this year that allow same-sex marriage, something that has wide support among the Australian people today, which is a massive change from social attitudes in the more religious bad old days of my childhood. 

Aussie kids like my nieces and nephews are doing well. 
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My question

Is the world getting better than it was in the past? 
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Reference

2 comments:

  1. We don't usually include percentages in a summary, but in this case, the numbers are important, so I have included a few in the 109 words here as counted by Google. (I don't recommend counting words by hand — Google Docs, MS Word and similar word processing programs all offer Word count tools.)

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  2. Actually, I am quite happy living in this era. One main reason is that we have the internet. This means people all around the world can share their knowledge or any information to each other with much cheaper costs. There are many education websites or online communities in which people can learn any subjects they are interested in or even ask for some advice for free. Now, many universities even offer free online courses in various topics in which you can learn on your own pace. I think this platform gives opportunities for anyone who would like to try learning new thing informally regardless their backgrounds. In other words, we have equality in education more or less, as long as you can access to the internet and understand English. Imagine If I would like to learn something new in the past, the only option for me is to go to libraries which is much worse compare to what we have right now. Although there are many other benefits of the internet, but sharing knowledge is the one that interested me the most. And this is why I think the world is getting better than it was in the past.

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