Indoctrination is real danger of Education for Citizenship, says bishop

Madrid, Spain, Jun 11, 2008 / 13:21 pm

Bishop Jose Sanchez Gonzalez of Siguenza-Guadalajara in Spain said this week the greatest danger and most important reason for rejecting the controversial school course Education for Citizenship is the Socialist government’s intention to use the course for indoctrinating children and young people.

 

The experience of the State as the “educator of the people,” with popular titles such as “big brother” and the “Führer” “couldn’t be more ominous.”  This has always been the temptation of every totalitarian or one-party state.  The result tends to be indoctrination, the bishops said.

 

He explained that the contents of the course promote a “perspective that is closed to the transcendent, [one that contains] relativism and gender ideology,” conveying to students “a concept of the world, of history and of the human person and certain aspects of human relations, such as marriage, that explicitly contradicts Christian anthropology, our concept of the world, of history, of life and of human and religious relationships.”

 

Bishop Sanchez went on to point out that allowing schools to adapt the course to their own philosophies was not sufficient.  “The problem continues, especially in public schools, for believing and practicing students, who choose Christian education based on their faith and convictions, and who are obliged to assimilate issues, principles and behaviors that could be in contradiction with their convictions and principles, and to respond to matters with which they are in disagreement.”

 

Because parents are the first educators of their children, he said, “they have the right and the obligation to defend them, using all legitimate means, from intrusion into an area as sensitive as their faith, their principles and their convictions.”