A government education adviser says any prayer groups or religious instruction in school could be a “doorway to extremism’’.

Cathy Byrne, a member of the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority advisory group on intercultural understanding, says prayer groups in government schools should be banned.

“The system as it stands today is potentially a doorway to extremism,” said Dr Byrne, a Southern Cross University sociologist specialising in religion.

“Prayer groups have no place in government schools.

“Primarily it’s been evangelical Christians who have been allowed in but they’ve opened the door for other faith-based groups to do the same and potentially radicalise youth into violent extremism.”

WARNING: Editorial opinion below;

Potential extremism aside – there are many reasons that religion should not be facilitated in public schools.

It is used as a divisive and exclusionary cultural practice, and the sacred tenets of virtually any major faith tend to clash with contemporary information – the things that schools should teach.

Luckily, Australia has not fallen into the excessively inclusionary trap of some schools in the US, where Christian fundamentalists have forced ‘creationism’ to be taught alongside (or instead of) evolutionary science.

It appears that science education policy-makers in Australia realise there is no point treating an nonsensical system of thought as equal to a rational one, even if large parts of the population believe it.

However, many schools still have provisions (and sometimes can exempt a student from class time) for religious practices.

It can be argued that if religion is reasonably left out of science classrooms due to it being non-scientific, limited in scope and largely incorrect – it should be left out of school entirely, to preserve the valuable products of reason that deserve to be taught.

But Ms Byrne’s call comes in the same week as the media pulls apart the shooting of a police staffer and 15-year-old mosque-attending boy in Parramatta, and the NSW government completes an audit of school prayer groups seemingly aimed at spotting the seeds of radical Islam – so it has been reported as a way of responding to the dangerous parts of that specific school of thought, not the risks of religion more broadly. 

However, it is more useful to look at that bigger problem – any religious ideology can be given undue value in society (or education, or politics) to advance the cause of the people who count themselves as members of that religion.

The fact that ancient cultural mythologies are given any kind of airtime in schools - outside of the objective lens of history or social science studies – can only be seen as a way of perpetuating the division and confusion that any religion can create.

Quite simply, religion is not educational, and so should not be in schools.

The Federal Government should abolish its $250 million school chaplaincy program, and the funds redirected to hiring qualified counsellors or psychologists to help troubled students of any cultural background.

Additionally, faith-based private schools should be able to teach the omnipotence of any deity they choose – however factually incorrect that teaching may be – but these schools should not be funded by the state.