Religious community has varying views over Education Ministry’s instruction to omit assembly

The local religious community is divided on a new directive that there be no general assembly of students, whole-school prayers, year group prayers or house prayers when face-to-face teaching resumes on Monday.

The new rule, which is contained in a February 15 circular sent by the Ministry of Education to school principals, states that instead of the assemblies and prayers, where possible, students should be allowed to engage in “mindfulness sessions” in their classrooms while observing COVID-19 protocols.

But a group calling itself The Spiritually Aware Group has described the move by the Ministry as an onslaught on the next generation of Barbadian children to strip them of the only aspect of their culture that can really save this country. It is also accusing the Ministry of seeking to remove prayers from schools.

“The Government of Barbados, at a time of an unknown and shaky future, where at every turn there are problems internally and internationally, [is] proposing to stop a faith-based activity…prayer in our schools. Instead, the Government is now saying to us, the electorate, that this is now a time, of all times, to turn to an evidence-based, secular mode for our children.

“They want the children to be able to meet for mindfulness activities but not to meet for prayer! How many Bajans before now even knew what mindfulness was beside being an adjective or descriptive word? Now, it is a noun? Why can’t we believe in ourselves and stop depending on importation…even of concepts? When we’re not importing LGBTQ+, we’re importing humanism. Now we’re importing ‘mindfulness’, a statement from the Spiritually Aware Group said.

It further questioned whether the Government was continuing with “the disrespectful actions against the people of Barbados” which began with the replacement of the word ‘God’ in the Charter of Barbados with ‘creator’.

“Is it that they are continuing to ignore or rather trample on the culture of over 75 per cent of Barbadians? In our culture, we believe in a supreme, divine and sovereign being. Is this Government asking us to throw out, deny or ignore these beliefs as being no longer relevant?”

However, Chief Education Officer Dr Ramona Archer-Bradshaw rejected any notion that either God or prayers was being removed from schools.

“The Ministry of Education is not taking God out of schools…. If you look at the circular that I saw circulating as well in the public forum, that circular was addressed to principals. It was intended for principals because we had a number of meetings prior to the distribution of the circular which outlined how the sessions would go during the morning periods,” she said.

“Instead of having general prayers, general assembly, we said that we would have the students come into the classrooms, we will find out how they are doing, we will interact with them because many of them have suffered loss, [and] we understand that. We want to hear from them, we want to be able to guide them accordingly to talk about love, compassion, and having understanding for the situation.”

Archer-Bradshaw stressed that the temporary change was planned out thoroughly for the benefit of the island’s children.

“I received some messages as well, talking about this new age movement. The Ministry of Education is not going in that direction at all. It was about being mindful of the situation that we are in, in this COVID-19 pandemic, and having conversations with our students to ready them for learning within the classroom,” she insisted.

According to experts, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) offers secular, intensive mindfulness training to assist people with stress, anxiety, depression and pain.

One of the island’s umbrella religious organisations – the Barbados Evangelical Association (BEA) – while appreciating the reasoning behind the Ministry’s directive, took issue with the language used in the circular.

“The use of mindfulness sessions will involve verbal engagement at the general or class levels and while the Ministry may be trying to prevent mass assembling, there can be no logical reason why morning prayers cannot be accommodated at the class level,” the Vice President of the BEA Dr Winston Clarke told Barbados TODAY on Thursday.

“These are times when every aspect of governance is being carefully scrutinised and it would do well for those in whom the confidence of governance is reposed to be more meticulous in the utterances they make.”

Secretary of the Muslim Association of Barbados Sulieman Bulbulia also said while his community did not believe the Ministry’s intention was to remove God or prayers from schools, it had reservations about the term “mindfulness” and what it meant.

“We found it a little surprising that they went that route. We understand the point of not having general assembly to minimise any possibility of spread of the virus [but] one would have to explain what mindfulness means. I am not sure what the term refers to,” Bulbulia told Barbados TODAY.

“I have already spoken to several of my colleagues in the various religious groupings and it is worth having a dialogue with the Ministry of Education. Perhaps the whole question of what they are trying to achieve needs to be explained,” he added.

Head of the Pentecostal Assemblies of the West Indies (PAWI) in Barbados Bishop Selwyn Brathwaite said he was willing to accept the Ministry’s expressed rational of merely seeking to protect the children from possible exposure to COVID-19 and not removing prayer or God from learning institutions.

“She [Chief Education Officer] said there was no mal-intent to take God out of schools, so until I can prove different, I would have to go with what she is saying,” Bishop Brathwaite told Barbados TODAY.

However, chair of the Barbados Christian Council (BXC) Reverend Dr Cicely Athill-Horsford is adamant that the controversy is much ado about nothing.

“To my mind, hearing the explanation, hearing it [the circular] was sent to principals and not to the general public and it came out of their meetings that they had, then I think it is a storm in a tea cup…especially if the tea cup doesn’t have a saucer,” Dr Athill-Horsford told Barbados TODAY.

In fact, she pointed out that her church, which conducts online services with the students of Mount Tabor School, will continue to do so on Monday, following discussions several weeks ago with the principal there.
emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb