Executive Summary
This paper represents an initial exploration of the way in which religion and belief are addressed in primary- and secondary-school curricula in four Canadian provinces: British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and Nova Scotia. These provinces represent a diversity of size, geography, and religious and ethnic makeup and are indicative of the growing pluralism of twenty-first-century Canada. In undertaking this study, we were particularly concerned to find out how Canadian students in public schools are informed about religion, religious beliefs, and practices—key components of this deepening pluralism. Are students in public schools receiving the necessary formation that will support their participation in a society that is becoming increasingly diverse in religious expression? Instructing the next generations not in a religion but about religion should be a key element of Canadian education.
The public schools in these four provinces take varied approaches to engaging religious topics. We find Ontario to be the stand-out example of a more expansive engagement with religion, both in terms of exploring the various religious traditions’ history as well as how they are lived out in the lives of Canadians today. The curricula of the other three provinces tend to present religion primarily from a distanced, historical, or sociological perspective. In some instances, we find that these curricula present some religions or spiritualities in consistently favourable or unfavourable ways, despite the officially secular, non-sectarian nature of public education. Other religions appear absent from the curricula, despite the particular province, and Canada as a whole, having significant communities that represent these faiths. We argue that these deficiencies do not serve Canadian pluralism well.
The paper concludes with recommendations for provincial ministries of education, teachers, faith leaders, and faculties of education at Canadian universities. We urge the provincial ministries of education to undertake their own formal research in order to review and revise the curricula where necessary.
Introduction
One of the principal goals of education is to equip each new generation with the skills needed to engage the world, especially the public life of the country they live in. Canada is a pluralistic society, shaped by a myriad of ethnicities, regional cultures, histories, and faith communities. Legal scholars Rosalie Jukier and José Woehrling describe Canada as “a bilingual, multicultural federation operating within a pluralistic society.”1In 2011, 20.9 percent of Canada’s population was foreign-born, significantly higher than both the United States, at 13 percent, and the United Kingdom, at 11.7 percent. This level is expected to increase to between 24.5 and 30 percent by 2036. The countries of origin of new Canadians is also shifting. Within fifteen years approximately 57 percent of immigrants will come from Asia, principally China, India, and the Philippines, and 15 to 18 percent from Europe—a reversal of immigrant origins in the space of fifty years.2Canadians’ ability to navigate and thrive within this pluralism requires attitudes of openness and respect. This posture does not come naturally; it is a process that is fostered through education.
An important component of Canadian pluralism is religion, and the religious face of Canada has grown increasingly diverse over the past quarter century. The older, more established faith communities in Canada have either remained stable or grown slightly in the cases of the Catholic and Jewish communities, or declined in the case of the mainline Protestant denominations. Other Protestant groups have experienced positive growth. In the midst of these experiences of both growth and decline, Christians, at least nominally, still remain collectively the largest faith group in the country. Yet the landscape of religion in Canada is steadily changing. Between 1991 and 2011, the Canadian Muslim population more than quadrupled, the Sikh and Hindu population both more than tripled, and the Buddhist population more than doubled. Indeed, the Muslim population in 2011 (1,053,945 adherents) was marginally larger than the combined population of Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Reformed Protestants (1,053,400 adherents combined).3Given population projections that take into account the continuing growth in immigration from Asia, Statistics Canada forecasts that in fifteen years Catholics will remain the largest religious group, with between 29 and 33 percent of the population, but that the non-Christian population, dominated by Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus, will constitute between 13 and 16 percent of Canada’s population by 2036 (compared with 9 percent in 2011).4
Religious faith shapes how we see the world and our community; it influences our political, social, and economic behaviour; and it guides how we relate to one another. The Religion in Canada 150 poll conducted by the Angus Reid Institute in 2017 in partnership with Cardus’s Faith in Canada 150 revealed that roughly 21 percent of those surveyed were “religiously committed.” Among various attributes, those in that category all believed in God or a higher power, and a significant majority prayed to God, attended religious services, and talked about God with others once per month or more.5Another 30 percent surveyed were “privately faithful.”6Together that 51 percent represents 17.9 million Canadians.7The Pew Forum’s Global Attitudes Survey of 2018 similarly found that 29 percent of Canadians said that religion was “very important in their lives”—a higher percentage than people living in the UK (21 percent) or France (12 percent).8
The growth of new immigrant communities is also challenging one of the prevailing assumptions of Canadians who have lived in this country for longer: the view that religion is a private matter. A significant proportion of immigrants come from countries such as India and the Philippines, in which religion and expressions of religious faith are part of the public sphere of life. And at the same time that religious diversity is increasing, Canada is experiencing a secularizing of the formerly dominant Christian populations. A growing number of Canadians claim no religion: 12.5 percent of the population in 1991, increasing to approximately 24 percent in 2011.
Will the increasing number of non-religious Canadians respect those who are religious, particularly if religion is expressed in a public manner? Will Canadians who adhere to one particular faith respect those who adhere to another? How are we ensuring that the deepening religious diversity leads not to division but toward greater social cohesion within our communities? Do we know one another, and are we able to appreciate and live alongside those who are different from us? What role does public education play in facilitating these goals?
Methodology
The degree to which students encounter and engage a diversity of ideas, cultures, and beliefs will help to determine how able they are to participate in and contribute to our common life in Canada. What are Canadian children learning about religion in our public schools and about their fellow students who manifest the richness of Canadian religious pluralism through their beliefs and practices?
To answer this question, we analyzed primary and secondary curricula of the public school systems in British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and Nova Scotia. We selected these four provinces because they vary in population size, region, and degree of religious diversity. In the 2019–2020 academic year, these four provinces together had 2.94 million students enrolled in primary and secondary education, representing 59 percent of the total national enrollment of 4.92 million.9
We reviewed curricula from a variety of subjects, at both primary and secondary levels, in which one would expect to find references to religion. This included courses in social studies, history, geography, health and physical education, languages, law, science, and world issues. Keyword searches yielded data on the frequency and extent to which certain topics were addressed in the curricula. The keywords were grouped into three categories. The first category included high-level terms such as “religion,” “belief,” “faith,” and “spirituality.” The second category included keywords related to specific religious traditions such as “Christian(-ity),” “Judaism (Jewish),” “Islam (-ic, Muslim),” “Indigenous (Indigenous Spirituality, First Nations, Métis, Inuit),” “secular(-ism),” “atheist (Atheism),” and other (such as “Hinduism,” “Jainism,” “Buddhism,” “Latter-Day Saints”). The final category included key words linked to legal protections such as “freedom of religion,” “freedom of conscience,” and “Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” If a curricular document contained any of these terms, we recorded the document name and examined how the term was used, and we created a database of selected passages from these documents. In many cases, the same word or phrase appeared multiple times, often reflecting a general curricular goal being reaffirmed in each instance. For this reason, the number of times that a keyword appeared was not recorded, as it would not necessarily reflect unique or new curricular content. Instead, we examined the treatment of religion in these curricula from a qualitative rather than quantitative perspective.10Our intent for this paper is not to employ a formal research protocol but to reflect on this material through a religious-freedom lens.
It is also important to note that it was beyond the scope of this study to assess how these curricula are interpreted and applied at the individual board, school, or classroom level. In many cases teachers are presented with a variety of topics through which they can explore a particular curricular goal. Subsequent research could shed light on how curricula are applied.
Brief History of Public Education in Canada
Education is a provincial responsibility in Canada, and each province or territory has its own history of education that reflects the unique events, local circumstances, and other particularities of each jurisdiction. Accordingly, no two education systems are the same. Yet there are some overarching themes, particularly in relation to the origin and telos of public schools.
The earliest schools in what is now Canada were established and run by Christian denominations and religious orders. In distinction to these efforts, the “common school” movement arose in the nineteenth century: a uniform and universal system of compulsory, taxpayer-funded schools run and regulated by the government. While the common school was intentionally non-sectarian (not sponsored by or promoting one particular religious group), it still sought to inculcate Christian values and knowledge as part of its effort to form a socially cohesive citizenry. As the scholar Charles L. Glenn Jr. writes, “The primary goal of the common school crusade was to form the hearts of the next generation, [and] this goal was implicitly religious.”11Egerton Ryerson’s influential Report on a System of Public Elementary Instruction for Upper Canada spoke of the need for these schools to teach “the Holy Scriptures” and the “pervading principle” of “Christian Religion.”12 In Nova Scotia, Premier Charles Tupper’s Free School Act introduced compulsory, common schools to the province in 1864,13with non-sectarian “moral instruction on broadly but specifically Christian lines as the central aim of public education.”14In 1870, Manitoba entered Confederation with dual Catholic and Protestant denominational systems, but its Public School Act of 1890 replaced denominational school funding with an Anglo-Protestant common school system.15In British Columbia, the first superintendent of education was the Ryersonian-trained John Jessop, whose influence in the province’s Public School Act of 1872 helped ensure a Ryerson-style system there.16
This history provides important context for understanding references made to “religion” in the education legislation that is in force in each province today. Some provincial education statutes make no mention of religion. Others prohibit religious instruction, or state that religious instruction may be provided “should parents request it.” It is important therefore to distinguish instruction in a religion (the type of instruction that continues today in independent religious schools—that is, instruction from a believing perspective, for the purpose of raising children up in the faith), from instruction about religion. There remains in public schools today the possibility of learning about religion just as students learn about and reflect on other aspects of our natural and social worlds.17
Findings
Navigating the Nomenclature
Our first observation concerns how particular terms tend to be used. When the terms “religion” or “religious” appear in the curricula, we found that they typically refer to one of the “world religions,” such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. In the Ontario curriculum, “religion” in this sense is generally presented in a favourable light. For example, the grades 1–8 Health and Physical Education curriculum explicitly recognizes the role of parents and guardians as the primary educators of their children, including in the religious upbringing of their children, and the important role that religion plays in the family.18By contrast, “religion” is typically presented in a neutral or unfavourable light in the curricula of BC and Manitoba, as for example in Manitoba’s grade 12 course Current Topics in First Nations, Métis and Inuit Studies, which will be described later in this paper. And in Nova Scotia, religion is largely treated in a neutral fashion in the provincial elementary and secondary curricula, reflected in such ways as “It is important that students discuss [and] understand the social and political structures such as family, church, education, as well as, the role of community/political leaders and their impact on change in community.”19
The negative association with the word “religion” matches the findings of an April 2017 poll conducted by Cardus and the Angus Reid Institute. Just 25 percent of Canadians indicate that “religion” had a positive meaning for them. Among those characterized as “religiously committed,” only 66 percent felt positive about the word “religion.”20
We also note that the terms “spirituality” or “spiritual” appear to be more privileged terms, in that they are found almost always in favourable contexts in the curricula and almost exclusively in reference to traditional Indigenous beliefs. We found that the term “religion” is almost never used in relation to Indigenous Canadians.
Where the term “belief” is found in these curricula, it is typically used in an unspecified or ambiguous way, referring to spiritual beliefs, opinions, or attitudes, depending on the particular context. For example, in British Columbia’s Graphic Production 11 or Media Design 12 courses include the following goal: “Examine how cultural beliefs, values, and ethical positions affect the development and use of technologies.” Likewise, most language courses in BC at the secondary level, such as Core French 12, Korean 12, or Punjabi 12, affirm that “sharing our feelings, opinions, and beliefs in a new language contributes to our identity.”21In these courses, “beliefs,” which could conceivably include religious beliefs, are grouped with feelings and opinions.