Abstract:
This paper draws on the research experience of a narrative inquiry into issues surrounding religion and religious education in Victorian public schools. The study specifically asked why it is so difficult to talk about religion in public classrooms. It was a small scale study that focused on the experiences of two primary school leaders to explore the challenges teachers face when dealing with increased diversity and conflicts related to competing ‘truth claims’ in and out of the classroom. The study was conducted amidst a controversial change of status of the Victorian Special Religious Education (SRI) program and questioned the relevance of SRI compared to a broad spectrum General Religious Education program. The study took a thematic interpretive approach to analyzing the narrated experiences of the study participants through a critical lens influenced by the work of Paulo Freire.The findings of this study were broad and complex, and while the study found that issues related to religion and Victorian public education are tied up in much bigger questions of social literacy and the role and responsibility of public education in the socialization of children; it also observed that in Victoria a pedagogy of compliance rather than a platform for a humanising education became apparent.This paper, however is interested in exploring the tension that sits between the notion of secularism and notions of the sacred and how these interact in public education and public discourse. Through the course of this study questions emerged about the ways in which ‘secular’ is defined and how the reference point for the Australian public education system is understood. This triggered consideration of learner profiles and the ways we disengage with religion and the sacred despite an apparent whole student approach to education. The polarization of secular politics against religious beliefs has triggered an inability to traverse between the two gracefully and openly, and as a result Australian education appears to have taken a vow of silence on matters of the sacred. This paper will problematize the secular reference point of Australian pubic education to consider the ways individual and social narratives of religion are dichotomised in education, and to what end.