Push to end expulsion of gay students

This article from the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) published on the 28^th of August by Josephine Tovey discusses how private schools shouldn’t be able to expel their students based on their sexuality. It gives the audience insight to the issue that Anti-Discrimination laws don’t apply to some private schools. The issue raised was that in some instances, students from private schools were expelled or asked to leave due to their sexuality. The way education systems handle these kinds of students can impact its students and their attitude towards such cases.

The article conveys two sides of the argument:

In the article, MP Alex Greenwich argues that children, no matter in which environment, should be free of harassment and discrimination, that students should all be treated fairly with freedom of sexuality. Since private schools receive government funding as well, it was argued that the least they could do was “obey the common standards that apply to the rest of society.’’ It is also plausible that in a situation where a student was being bullied for being different, they would not be able to seek help from the school in fear of being expelled.

But Ian Baker, the executive director of the NSW Catholic Education Commission, argues that they expel students on the grounds that they are being sensitive to the situation, that by removing the student from a religious community, they are protecting the rights of the parents of the student. It was also argued that by abolishing such power they were losing their rights to decide who they enrolled.

Culture influences how we interpret and perceive certain situations. Society creates stereotypes and places meaning and attitudes towards them. The religious backgrounds that private schools come from generally don’t accept this type of difference, affecting the school’s response to such students. By stereotyping them from a religious perspective, they are persecuted and tagged as wrongful, when in fact the student’s sexuality would have very little or no impact on the academic achievements of the students and their classmates.

Personally I believe it is nonsense that students should be deprived of an education because of such petty differences. The “different” students can easily be just as social and achieve just as well academically as a “normal” student, which means it should not affect the school environment itself. I understand that some private schools are based on religious faith that do not accept those kind of people but nevertheless it doesn’t affect the student as a contributing addition to the classroom.

Reference

http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/push-to-end-expulsion-of-gay-students-20130827-2soet.html

Wadham, B. Pudsey, J. & Boyd, R. (2007). Culture and education. Sydney:

Pearson Education. Chapter 1: What is culture?