“EDUCATION IN CRISIS” CONFERENCE - CURRICULUM 2005

Date: 10 November, 2001

Speaker: Louis M. Green MP (African Christian Democratic Party)


SHOULD GOVERNMENT DEFINE EDUCATION FOR US?

I wish to thank the chairman of the Concerned Communities for Education (CCFE), Karen Cerff, for inviting me to speak on the issue of who should define education for us.

It is not the function of government to define education for a nation. In order for us to remain free from the shackles of a dictatorship, it is imperative for us to remain in control of the education of our children.

Why can we not entrust civil government to define education for us ? Because every civil government is under girded by certain party political principles which prescribes to a particular worldview and which may, and often is, in conflict with the worldview held by an individual or a community.

Every person’s decisions and actions are based on a worldview. Not everybody has the capacity to articulate a worldview, but everyone has a worldview.
The Bible says: “As a man thinketh, so is he.”

In our country, many South African Christians do not have a consistent, biblical worldview. They may hold very ‘conservative’ views concerning their personal, moral standards, (because of their Christian principles) but often would support organizations and a government which promote very ‘liberal’ views on sexual morality, such as the legitimization of homosexual relationships; the distribution of condoms amongst school going children and unmarried young people; supporting abortion on demand; and many other ‘politically correct’ (but not Biblically correct) views.

One of the main reasons why Christians do not have a consistent, biblical worldview is because they limit the teachings of the Bible to exclusively the church and personal morality. They fail to apply the Bible to every area of life (especially to government, politics, culture, labour, Economics, and especially education).

That is why there are many believers who find no issue with Curriculum 2005; it is because they fail to examine the new curriculum in the light of God’s Word.

The reason why we cannot entrust this government with the education of our children, is because it has chosen to make secular humanism the new state religion. The drafters of the new curriculum have carefully selected certain constitutional values and human rights (at the exclusion of other more important human rights) to serve the purposes of the new state religion.

When we exercise our Constitutional rights of freedom of religion, belief and opinion, when we exercise our right of freedom of expression by criticizing the new curriculum, when we decide that we want to demonstrate, picket, petition and mobilize the masses against the new Curriculum, which are all perfectly legitimate in terms of the S.A.
Constitution, then minister Kader Asmal becomes paranoid.

His latest ranting and raving against what he calls “those fundamentalist Christians” has been reported by SAPA on the 8th of November when he said: “Regrettably there are fundamentalists – mostly Christian fundamentalists – who object to tolerance and respect for others, in the belief that they alone are custodians of the truth… I intend to resist these right-wing conservative tendencies, and I will use the Constitution as the sole basis of my approach.”

Doesn’t this remind you of the 1980’s, of the days of “die groot krokidil” when he ranted and raved against those communists and terrorists.

Minister Asmal’s latest tactic is to demonize legitimate opposition to the new curriculum, by referring to the opposition as “ fundamentalist, right- wing Christians”.
He also tried to demonize one of the biggest prayer meetings in Cape Town when more that 40,000 Christians assembled on Newlands stadium to pray on Human Rights day, but he retracted only because Dr Allan Boesak challenged him in an open letter to the media.

Asmal’s unabated verbal attacks on Biblical Christians in South Africa reminds us of what happened in the Soviet Union in the 1930’s, despite the fact their Constitution also guaranteed the freedom of religion. Churches were declared counter revolutionary and shut down; Christians were demonised and called “members of secret counter revolutionary organizations” and that gave the Soviets the excuse to close down the churches.

Minister Asmal must know that every education system presupposes a worldview; each discipline is value-laden with worldview implications; each one demands basic assumptions about the nature of reality and no amount of ranting and raving from him him will silence us.

As parents and teachers we must assess the new curriculum by carefully reading the documents and our response must be based not on emotion, but on fact.
If we allow any civil government to control the thinking of our children, the freedom of this nation will be short-lived.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUES IN CURRICULUM 2005

Mr Leendert van Oostrum correctly states in his article entitled “Summary of issues arising from the Curriculum”:

“ Curriculum 2005 claims to uphold the constitution, but in reality, it abuses the constitution in order to impose totalitarian control on South African society.

To analyse this very serious charge, we should consider first the ends and then
the means.

The most important indications that the curriculum will result in totalitarian control are:
a) de-individuation (lost of individuality) of learners;
b) homogenisation of religion and culture (including the imposition of revisionist history suborned to government policy) and, ultimately,
c) demonisation of alternative viewpoints ( and particularly if you are a committed Christian with a biblical worldview – that in itself will be regarded as a cardinal sin );
The principal devices used to justify the imposition of totalitarian control comprise
a) an inversion of the legal meaning of the term “rights”;
b) proceeding to derive a selective set of government approved values from the perverted meaning assigned to “rights” and
c) compelling children to confess this set of values and to act them out.”
Our Constitution emphasises individual rights for children in section 28 by stating:
“ (1) Every child has the right –
to a name and nationality from birth;
to family care or parental care care, or to appropriate alternative care when removed from the family environment;
to basic nutrition, shelter basic health care services and social services;”

The Minister of Education says he will use the Constitution as the sole basis of his approach to resist right-wing conservative tendencies.

If our constitution expressly protects the individuality of the child, why is so much effort made in the proposed curriculum to promote the loss of individuality?

Allow me to quote Van Oostrum again:
“ an unbalanced emphasis on shifting identity is likely to cause a loss of individuality manifesting in diffuse identity among children and young adults. Diffuse identity will exacerbate phenomena such as peer dependence, will devastate children’s assertiveness, and bring them under the control of the collective. Clearly, whoever controls the collective will, therefore, control the individual. ”

Therein lies the answer; destroy the child’s assertiveness, diffuse the identity, increase peer dependence, and it will become easier to guide the child to make the ‘correct’ political choices.

The S.A. constitution states in Section 9 that ‘ the state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including … religion, conscience, belief, culture …’

Religious and cultural beliefs come from communities, not the state. We, as parents and tax payers have the constitutional right to teach our children our religion and our culture. The constitutional right of children ‘to family care or parental care’ includes attending to the spiritual needs of children. That is why we have Children’s ministries at church and appropriate children’s literature, such as children’s Bibles. That is why we need to exercise our constitutional right to religious observances at schools.

Section 15 of the Constitution on ‘Freedom of religion, belief and opinion’ is the only section throughout the Constitution that deals with religious observances at state institutions, such as schools. The drafters of Curriculum 2005 has ignored this right completely; nowhere in the curriculum are children taught to practice their own religion, to exercise their constitutional right to conduct religious observances, such as prayer meetings, Bible studies and related activities.

The Constitutional rights of children and parents are undermined by the incessant and nauseating insistence of the drafters of the new curriculum to homogenise religion and culture.

Van Oostrum is correct in this regard when he states: “ De-individuation ( or a loss of individual identity ) promotes cultural assimilation. A deliberate programme of de-individuation would establish fertile conditions for obliterating cultural and religious diversity by suborning the individual to the might of the collective. And, indeed, the curriculum reveals such an aim.”

This curriculum claims to promote “tolerance” of diversity. It does not. In the case of cultural diversity, it explicitly requires that children who wish to qualify for the GETC at the end of Grade 9 must demonstrate that they have acquired values from other cultures and belief systems. This requirement is merely an explicit formulation of a theme of assimilation that runs through the entire document.” And this requirement is in direct conflict with our country’s Constitution.

Freedom of conscience, religion, thought, belief and opinion does not mean that we must abandon our own world view in favour of a politically correct, government sanitised world view, which of course, we all know is secular humanism. To do this is to undermine the fundamental principles of our faith, but the Minister of Education demands us to do so to satisfy his perverted notion of the concept of tolerance.

My understanding of tolerance is “to endure phenomena which one does not agree with, or which one does not find congenial”.

But what Learning Outcome 2 for the Senior Phase of Life Orientation does is to preach tolerance, but in practice not to accept that children may have the Constitutional right to have different world views at school.

And herein lies the biggest failure of Curriculum 2002, let me quote Outcome 2 for the Senior Phase of Life Orientation:

“Sensitivity to diverse cultures and belief systems” is demonstrated when “Values from a variety of cultures will enrich their lives, contribute to their own emerging world views…”

The intention here is not to ‘contribute to the emerging world views’ of children. The main aim here is to alter, to mould the world views of children to one which is politically correct. This is not education for liberation, but indoctrination for enslavement.

In a recent case, the Constitutional Court ruled that cultural decisions are so important to self-identification that they must be protected from interference by the state.[1]

This is why Van Oostrum’s assessment of the failure of Curriculum 2005 is correct when he says:

“ Children are not only required to learn useful and important information about other religions. Few would be able or willing to fault such an aim. In this curriculum, however, children are compelled to interpret their social and political environment from the perspective of other religions. In effect, therefore, children are compelled to adopt values from other religions on those occasions that they are required to perform these tasks. Given the highly destructured organisation of the curriculum, this manipulation of children’s religious perspectives pervades the entire curriculum.

Homogenisation of religion and culture will, as was shown with respect to individuation (loss of individual identity) enhance social control by controlling the values that result from the process of homogenisation. For the religious values that will be taught will not be the values esteemed by each religion as seen by its adherents. The intention of the curriculum, as implied in the overview and repeated throughout, is that the “religious” values taught to children will be those values from each religion that have been selected by government, that have been sanitised and found to comply with the purported values of our secular constitution.

As we argue further on, the aim of imposing a defined set of values in itself is not only questionable, but is contrary to the constitution, even when they claim to comprise the values of the constitution. However, in this instance, “the values of the constitution”, as one can glean from the curriculum, comprise a very specific ideological set of values, only some of which coincide with constitutional values. ( The selective use of the Bill of Rights in the draft curriculum amounts to deception and social engineering.)

In effect, this will impose on children a government religion that is likely to influence religious education provided by children in their own faith communities. Indeed, it is impossible to avoid the impression that the curriculum views the education department as a kind of “church” confessing its own creed ( by means of the official documents of the department ) and appointing its own priests to have “a pastoral role” in the school and in society.

The thread of demonisation runs deep and swift through the curriculum.

(And) legitimate constitutional rights are demonised. Some “demons” are labelled by name – colonialism, Nazism, slavery, racism, apartheid, sexism, capitalism, industrialism and others. (But let me add Minister Asmal’s latest demon – fundamentalist right wing Christians; and let me express the sincere hope that the Minister does not even remotely refer to us in this conference today.)

In conclusion, we must learn the lessons today that the presence of the Bill of Rights in a country’s constitution is no guarantee that those very rights will not be violated by governments. We need to be vigilant, to ensure that human rights in the Bill of Rights are not selectively used to further entrench the state’s power over the individual and that our children’s rights are not undermined by the state in the quest for more power.


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[1] National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality and another v Minister of Justice and others Constitutional Court - CCT11/98 at N25


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For more information please call Louis Green MP at 083 4419295 or ACDP Media Liaison Liza Bloemetje at 082 4781037