Prayer has no place in school. We will not have made 60 years of laborious but constant progress to get religion out of our educational establishments to see secularism cut into the corners within our public institutions. Reaffirming the secularism of the state, particularly at school, is of paramount importance.
If it is still necessary today to underline this evidence in broad strokes, it is that the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, had to publish a directive last week aimed at prohibiting prayer rooms in schools. His public release followed events in two public secondary schools in Laval which had set up places of “resourcing” to allow prayer to students of the Muslim faith, then in the middle of Ramadan. School principals explained that they consented to these accommodations after seeing that students were praying in unsafe spaces, such as the parking lot. Voluntary adaptation started with a good intention.
Since the acclaimed publication of the Parent Report in the 1960s—one of the flagship proposals of which was to replace Catholic and Protestant school boards with non-denominational school boards—Quebec has taken several important steps to anchor secularism within of its schools. The last of these steps was the advent of the Law on State secularism, which has mainly caused ink to flow for the prohibition of the wearing of religious symbols which it enshrines, but which, in fact, derives its greatest nobility from an unequivocal reaffirmation by the Quebec state of the primacy of secularism in public institutions, including schools.
Schools are not places of worship and should not be required to establish permanent prayer spaces within their walls. This seemingly clear assertion was written in black and white in the report. Build the future. The time of reconciliation, produced at the end of the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences, better known as the Bouchard-Taylor Report. Let us remember: it was in 2008, at the end of a tumultuous period in Quebec where perceptions, alas, had prevailed over reality. Amplified by the mouthpiece of the media, socio-cultural accommodations that were not socio-cultural had given the impression that the education and health sectors were selling off their secular values according to denominational whims and stubbornness. That was not really the case, but the publication of this always instructive report had made it possible to set the record straight, especially on prayer at school.
Please note: Minister Bernard Drainville has not banned prayer, a very personal practice that belongs to the students, who will not be prevented from moments of meditation. But he reaffirmed loud and clear that the school does not have to organize its spaces according to these private spheres. This is exactly what we need and where we are, 60 years after the Parent report: to express firmness on the fundamental values and norms that revolve around the secularism of the state.