Topics Children

Question In some schools where I live, children are made to sing the national anthem every morning at school. Children who do not wish to do so can opt-out, in which case they are made to take their chairs outside the classroom, sit, and wait until the singing is over. Those working for the education board claim that the possibility of opting out means that nobody is being forced to do anything. Yet if the de facto situation is that children are made to sing the anthem, and that they are visibly segregated from the other students for their or their parents' choice, can that really be true? Is there no form of coercion going on whatsoever here? It seems that this situation is more coercive than an alternative, in which nobody sings the anthem at all. Is this perception correct?

Accepted:
December 20, 2011

Comments

I wonder, because it might be argued that in general people would be expected to know the national anthem, and while provision should be made for those who do not wish to, it would be a shame if no-one could sing it at school. After all, it is not as though singing it is likely to coerce one into patriotic feelings that one would be better without, or even better with, since as we know however people are brought up often has very little to do with how they eventually behave or what they believe.

I used to teach in a school where a small group of students had to be removed from the classroom whenever Christmas was discussed, since it was held to be a largely secular holiday and they were the children of committed Christians who disapproved of this secularity. Should one have just not spoken about Christmas at all in order not to exclude them? How about if some parents object to music or sex education, should teachers not play music or provide sex education at all?

Exclusion is not desirable, but it preserves some balance between the wishes of individual parents and the desire of the education system to introduce children to central aspects of their culture, surely a worthwhile aim on the whole.