Sign of healthy diversity

Ailsa Watkinson’s opinion piece, It’s time to merge public, separate schools (Aug. 22) asks the right question: “What if the (government’s) transformational change undermines public services rather than sustains them?”

However, her proposed solution — merging public and separate school systems — diverts our attention from this real issue and effectively lets the government off the hook on its spending priorities.

Watkinson led me to reflect on why I value separate schools even in this time of fiscal restraint. First, they provide a place where faith can come to the table in our educational pursuits. In a world where the West is critiqued for being unabashedly secularist, separate schools are a sign that we, as a society, value religious world views.

Second, the separate school system models what healthy diversity can look like in a pluralist society. Rather than reduce faith traditions to their lowest common denominator — effectively erasing their distinct contributions to human wisdom — separate schools allow religious communities to fully explore their spiritual heritages to better engage in respectful dialogue across differences.

Finally, these publicly funded schools are examples of religious education that seeks to build a better world. At a time when extremists distort religious language to justify their destructive ends, healthy expressions of reasonable and caring, faithinspired education need to be fostered, not dismantled.

Amalgamating public and separate school systems may seem like a quick fix to Saskatchewan’s fiscal woes. However, doing so would send precisely the wrong message. To build a society that is truly tolerant and inclusive, religious education needs to be affirmed and publicly valued rather than marginalized. Gertrude M. Rompré, Saskatoon