As a student attending an all-boys high school in Kingston, Joseph Buckland looked forward to Bible Knowledge, and the enthusiasm for these lessons continued when he became the head of the Religious Education department at a prominent corporate area secondary school.
Gradually, he witnessed Bible Knowledge being removed from the school system to be replaced by religious education, a syllabus that promises to be more inclusive. Teachers were advised they had to teach about all religions and were prohibited from promoting Christianity as the one true religion.
“In the latter part of 2014, different schools were told by the principals that the government wanted them to leave the classroom and go to a hotel for a few days…about three days, to be introduced by persons from the Ministry of Education to what they called the new standards curriculum. Now, two things were being introduced, the Health and Family Life Education curriculum and Religious Education, and we were being trained as to how we should teach them,” he recounted.
“In the case of religious education, we were told to approach it in a way that all religions are valid. We were not to make Christianity the one true religion in our classroom. But we were to present all different faiths as being acceptable, equally acceptable,” he told Freedom Come Rain.
He explained that, “When I interrupted the presenters and asked them, why is it that we cannot show that Christianity is the one true religion, even if we point out different religions in our teaching? Why is it that we cannot present Christianity as the one true religion among different religions? And I was told definitively that we are not supposed to teach Religious Education in that way.”
Some of the teachers expressed unease with the new curriculum; nonetheless, they obliged. As a teacher in a Catholic school, Buckland also taught Christian Life Education as well, but between 2015 and 2016 that too was shelved.
“I was asked by the principal then to write a letter justifying why the Christian Life Education that was taught alongside Religious Education was to remain in the curriculum because they said that the Ministry of Education was requiring that they remove Christian Life Education and replace it with Health and Family Life Education,” he said.
The senior educator wrote the letter, but it could not stop the mandate given by the government. For the educator, it was yet another not-so-subtle effort to push Jamaica towards a more secular and humanistic society. He refused to help push this agenda, and so he resigned from his post in 2016.
The National Standards Curriculum was officially introduced in 2016. Among the aims at the time were prioritising the development of higher-order thinking skills and making the learning environment more inclusive.
“This new curriculum will operate…based on the significant body of work that has taught us that in order for our education system to be effective, we have to cater to the multiple intelligences of our children and their diverse needs to fully maximise their capabilities,” state minister in the Ministry of Education, Youth & Information Floyd Green said at the time.
In the case of Religious Education, students were to be introduced to a variety of faiths and spiritual traditions, including Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Rastafarianism, and Revivalism, with the aim of building moral values, ethics, and spiritual principles so that they could become more community-orientated and respectful citizens.
But Buckland believes the government was simply following the advice of donors in getting Jamaica to move away from being a Christian country to becoming more humanistic in nature. Several of the Ministry of Education projects are sponsored by international organisations.
“If you remove the environment of prayer to God, reading the Bible as the Word of God, and applying the teachings of the word of God in a practical way in the lives of the students, then the students would be more open to being influenced by the LGBT agenda being promoted by these donor countries. For example, you have the European Union. They are the biggest promoters of so-called human rights in the world, and they are the biggest funders of the Jamaican government. The majority of the money that comes to the government as a donation comes from the European Union. The Samoa Agreement came from the European Union,” Buckland noted.
The EU is in fact Jamaica’s largest provider of grant resources, and so its contributions do not add to the country’s debt burden. By 2018, the EU had provided over €1.5 billion ($170 billion JMD) to the country. A significant portion of this money has been given towards infrastructural work at schools. There has been increasing focus on Jamaican youths in recent times.
“The European Union remains committed to working alongside communities and young people to help create a future where education, opportunity, and safety are accessible to all,” Head of Cooperation for the EU Delegation to Jamaica, Aniceto Rodriguez, stated last year during a graduation and closing-out ceremony for those who had benefited under the BRIDGE (Building through Reintegration, Intervention, Development, Growth, and Education) project.
“This project has been about creating opportunities and supporting young people, many from challenging backgrounds, to take steps towards a better future,” he said.
But instead of getting better for youths, the nations’ education system has gotten progressively worse, with evidence of school violence creating shock and pain on a regular basis. Buckland believes any initiative to improve Jamaica’s school system should include putting back Bible Knowledge into the schools.
“We find that these donors don’t want religious education to remain in schools. They want the society to be socially engineered away from accepting the existence of God and the Bible, which is the Word of God, so that we would be open to accepting this so-called alternative lifestyle of same-sex relationships and transgender relationships,” Buckland said.
“Let’s go back to the Bible Knowledge that we used to have. It’s far more effective in helping people practise self-control, patience, kindness, and goodness. These are values that we all appreciate. It would be far more helpful in getting students not to engage in violence and not to be disrespectful of those in authority. It could solve a lot of problems that we’re having in our schools and in the society,” insisted Buckland.
With Jamaica being a predominantly Christian country, Buckland is urging Christians to advocate that the reverence for God and the Bible be encouraged among students.
“We’re too quiet. What I’ve noticed over the years of my life is that those people who support Satan are very confident and bold, and those that love God and fear God and want to do what is right in his sight are often timid and shy and afraid of people criticising them and showing why what they say is wrong. A lot of us who follow Christ are not confident and bold in the face of opposition, and we need to work on that area. It’s not good, because Jesus Christ teaches us that we are to confess Him before men,” the educator stated.
