Ronald Thwaites | Freedom and the common good

The radio discussion last week centred on whether religious education should continue in public schools. That’s not really a shocking question in a mimic society which is drinking deep in the hedonistic wells of our northern idol where self-actualisation is the only God.

So now, on meeting someone for the first time or indeed any other time, because things can change, can’t they, I must enquire what pronoun I must use to correspond to their current gender identity. Freedom and autonomy allows anyone to identify as man, woman, neuter or anything else according to their preferences of the moment.

That is not freedom. That is slavery to the self. And you can’t build or sustain a coherent society on the basis of such anarchy. Freedom and exposure to ethical principles founded in religious belief are not antithetical.

Then there is the confusion about what religious education really encompasses. With the politically deliberate, well-funded and so far successful campaign to rob the Gospel of its radical social and economic imperatives, there are endless hundreds of churches, loud, quiescent and competitive, validating at worst, a predatory political economy where oppression and advantage-taking increase. So what religious message is to form the basis of education in schools out of this compromised melee?

The other panellist in the discussion agreed the need to inculcate civic and humanistic values in school but, fearing proselytising, would relegate religious instruction to a survey of world religions and ethical systems from which, presumably, students could pick and choose. Definitely no preference, no emphasis, no recommendation to be given to Christianity.

Well actually, that’s what the current syllabus looks like – and it shows. The ethical deconstruction, the selfishness and the anomie of Jamaican society is apparent for all, except the Government, to see. Without intentional indoctrination of the principle of the common good in every aspect of life, human interaction of necessity becomes predatory and hypocritical.

So the big woman who can influence how millions of public money is invested sees no problem in directing the dollars to the company in which she has a personal interest, all without full disclosure. And the minister has to defend that of course because without of a broad and fulsome commitment to the common good, what’s wrong with favouritism anyway.

HALF-HEARTED EFFORT

There is a desperately weak attempt to start summer school. So far less than 10 per cent of those students who urgently need remediation have “shown interest”. This is a half-hearted effort to be staffed, it is reported, by volunteers, retirees and yet-to-be-qualified students.

Why? Because teachers, despite being away from their usual effective access to pupils for more than a year at full pay, have chosen to equate the common good with their need for holidays even while acknowledging how desperate is the plight of their charges. What will we end up with when everybody elevates their individual ‘right’ over the common good? Praassperty?

Entitlement absent productivity is the epitome of selfishness. There are no rights without responsibilities. None of us are free to undermine the interests of others, especially the most vulnerable.

There was the 13-year-old boy, thin and looking more like a 10-year-old child, hugging the light post at Papine on a recent Friday evening, nervously waiting for the man who his mother has told him is his father.

“Whey yu a wait fi mi fah?” “Mi madda seh yu fi sen money fi mine mi”. “ Whey di b....c do dis woman eeh! A she come round mi mek mi breed har. Tell har she mus wuk whey she have between her leg and get money fi mine yu. Move, before mi lick yu!”

If our highest desire is to “get t’ings” or to be “rated”, the end soon justifies the means. Ask any scammer. And in a society where tribal and transactional arrangements are becoming the norm, doing whatever I can get away with becomes the acceptable standard of behaviour, private and public.

So I believe that intense, trans-denominational religious education in our schools is more important even than literacy and numeracy, especially after the emotional and spiritual atrophy of the pandemic. After all, those subjects can be picked up anytime while bad-bruk social habits are often uncorrectable.

For those who are not religious, please help in developing a robust suite of secular humanist curricula, emphasising the enlightened self-interest (very different from self-obsession) which lies at the heart of human rights (all of them) and the common good.That is worthy and will carry us much further than a flaccid course in comparative religions or the brief desiderata of the Vision 2030.

For others of us (a dwindling majority) who, despite terrible personal and institutional shortcomings, are trying to be Christians, please let us stop the competitiveness and separateness so as to witness by deed more than word, to the fascinating, life-changing true story of Jesus whose enfleshing of the common good shows the real beauty, power and joy of freedom.

There resides real hope!

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.