Faith in schools

EDUCATION Minister Aseri Radrodro has assured parents and guardians that the law will always be followed.

He made the comment while addressing concerns by Fijians on social media about Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka’s announcement last week that schools run by religious organisations were free to have faith-based teachers in their institutions.

Mr Radrodro said forcing a particular faith on people or students was against the law and the ministry would follow the law.

Responding to queries from this newspaper, he said on bringing back school chaplains, it was related to schools which had predominantly Christian students.

“Even then, students always have a choice should they not want to study religion if it’s taught as a subject or they can go to another class during that period of study,” Mr Radrodro said.

“It must be made clear that chaplains are placed in schools to mostly provide spiritual guidance or counselling. Most chaplains are spiritual counsellors and they can complement the work of professionally trained counsellors if those are available in schools.”

Mr Radrodro said there were some teachers who were also counsellors.

Spiritual guidance, he said was a tool which would allow a student to have access to holistic upbringing and help them cope with studies and life in general.

Mr Radrodro said schools run by faithbased organisations also had the right to teach their religious beliefs or to provide spiritual counselling.

“MOE will support all these multi-religious programs and counsellors. The bottom line is to provide spiritual guidance to our children as a way to assist the escalating level of disobedience prevalent today amongst our young people.”

At the end of the day, Mr Radrodro said, the intention was help students. And since faith-based organisations were a big stakeholder in education, any support from them would only help our children, especially when corporal punishment was not entertained by law.