In August of 1983, a 29-year-old pastor from New Zealand named Brian Houston and his 26-year-old wife Bobby founded Hills Christian Life Centre in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia. The young couple and their young church targeted young congregants, most notably with their music, breaking away from traditional hymns to instead reflect trends in contemporary pop music. Hillsong Music came up with its own versions of 80s power ballads, 90s acoustic guitar aesthetics, and 2000s soft rock, bringing along with it a new generation of new, “cool” Evangelical Christians.
Haven of Peace Academy was founded in 1994 in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania by Christian missionaries from the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia. The plan was to set up a K-6 school for their expatriate children that would provide them with an affordable, high-quality education that they could use to re-enter their native school systems, whilst also instilling in them the Christian values central to their faith. HOPAC, as it is still known, was created for missionary children but did not exclusively serve them, and it was where in September 2000, I started kindergarten.
Once a week, every week, for the next seven years, my classmates and I would sing Hillsong classics like Shout to the Lord and My Redeemer Lives in morning assemblies. Our teachers would play the music, with many of them direct reflections of that early Hillsong legacy — couples in their 20s and 30s, spreading the gospel in Africa, and still being cool enough to play the guitar and coach soccer. Those songs, those teachers, those moments, exemplified the religious overtones underscoring my early education, shaping my views, beliefs, and academics to come.
Education has always been established as a means of spreading religion. In Tanzania, the Arab Slave Trade brought the spread of Islam supported through madrasas teaching and converting indigenous Tanzanians. The arrival of the colonial powers at the end of the 19th century saw schools promoting Christianity by European-run schools, primarily German and British but other settlers too. The same can be seen around the world and throughout different times in history and up until today from Catholic schools to Yeshivas, where education continues to be utilized as a means to promote and maintain religious institutions.
Although not all schools are built with religious intent, secular schools still profess their responsibility to the social-emotional growth of their students to prepare them to be ethical human beings and participants in society. Education serves many purposes, and many educators see their duties as also including teaching values like respect, empathy, and kindness. But teaching without a sacred text or quotable religious dogma means that what values to teach, how to teach them, and how to prioritize them becomes complicated in its own way.
What is the role of education in the development of students’ moral character? Which principles do we deem as essential to include as part of an education? And how do disagreements around the credos we profess and how to teach them end up pulling us further apart and away from the societies we wish to create?
Simply put, how do we teach what it means to be a good person?
I don’t know if I would have admitted it then, but I loved school. Being a good student helped, as I generally did pretty well in all of my subjects and whenever I didn’t, my parents were always quick in pushing me to do better. One year, I always fell asleep during math class and thus did terribly in all my tests, and the next year, I was meeting with a tutor after school to go over fractions. To this day I don’t fully understand them, but I did slightly better in math after that.
What also helped me love school was just how great the quality of education was that I was getting at HOPAC. We studied Medieval times and made our own castles. We learned about the Roman Empire and came to school dressed from that era. We read The Giver, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I did German for one year and then French another. And every week, we would go to the computer lab and learn how to type with Mavis Beacon. Only years later did I appreciate the invaluable foundation that my elementary education provided.
With pretty much every class came lessons about God and the Bible. Not to mention our actual Bible class where we read and discussed scriptures. We learned about how Jesus Christ was the one true Lord and Saviour, and although he loved us all, for the third of us who were Muslim or Hindu, our families would be going to hell. And this notion of good and bad, underlined by the promise of hell, was an effective one in teaching us everything from everyday morals to the dangers of smoking. Religion wasn’t merely a part of the education, it was in fact the water we were all swimming in.
No school is exempt from professing their values to the students in their care. Not only is it impossible, but in many ways it is antithetical to what it means to be an educator concerned with the whole child development of students. In schools, students are taught how to share, how to speak to their peers, how to look out for others, and how to look out for themselves, through the guidance of everyone from kindergarten teachers to college deans.
But every school and every teacher approaches a moral education a little differently as a direct reflection of their own views and priorities, revealing how difficult it can be to teach students the difference between good and bad. How should students address conflict, between walking away or standing up for themselves? Where should the lines be drawn between being kind to others and being kind to themselves? What responsibilities do students have to their communities, inside and outside of school, and what does showing up look like?
The problem with a moral education is that unlike a religious education, it can never be black and white. We teach students one thing today, another one tomorrow, and they get a different lesson when they go home. What it means to be a good person, and the principles and values that will come along with that, will always change and be in flux. The problem is when schools profess a vision of morality that undermines and rejects the cultures and contexts their students are in. The best educators will be able to communicate their beliefs, their guidance, and an affirmation of how their students are moving in the world. The best educators will teach what it means to be a good person by modeling the empathy and compassion that is most necessary for our world, instead of a heavy handed, zero-sum game of right and wrong with the most extreme of consequences.
In March of 2022, Brian Houston stepped away from Hillsong Church after being criminally charged with concealing multiple alleged allegations of child abuse levelled against his father. Though Hillsong continues to be a cornerstone of the modern Christianity movement, like many other religious institutions, it took a hit due to its hypocrisy, publicly professing certain values whilst actually engaging in others.
I learned how not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Lessons on eternal damnation I spaced out on, whilst focusing more on those on doing to others as I would do myself and treating everyone with love and respect. I also learned non-Biblical lessons around hard work, discipline, and the power of community. Those stuck with me too.
An education is a way to prepare young people for the future, and we cannot ignore the moral and ethical lessons taught explicitly and implicitly within the context of an education. How to be good, whatever that means, not only prepares children for the future, but it shapes it too. What do we want good to mean? What do we want it to do? Where do we want to start?