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Sabrina Jafralie says Quebec’s public schools have lost the quality that motivated her to become a teacher in the first place. She pins this change on Bill 21, a Quebec law that bans teachers and other government workers from wearing religious symbols at work.
As a Black student growing up in Montreal, Jafralie remembers teachers telling her she could be whatever she wanted to be in Canada.
“I took that to heart,” she told Canadian Affairs in a September interview. “I became a teacher to pass along the same message.
“Now, I have to look in my eyes of my students in high school and at university and say, ‘I’m really sorry this province says that you can’t be whatever you want.’”
In Jafralie’s view, Quebec’s emphasis on secularism is based on a misunderstanding and fear of religion. She expects this misunderstanding to only continue or even deepen. In 2024, Quebec replaced a mandatory ethics and religion course with one focused on citizenship — that makes no mention of religion at all.
“[Religion] is completely gone,” Jafralie said of the course’s content. Jafralie has taught in Quebec high schools for more than 20 years, where she often taught religion courses, and has also taught university education students about how to teach religion.
Quebec’s opposition to religion is well-known. In November, the government introduced legislation banning daycare workers from wearing religious symbols and banning public prayer. And this March, the Supreme Court of Canada will hear a case about the constitutionality of Bill 21’s religious symbols ban.
Education experts say Quebec is not alone in stripping religion from public education — and that the trend is concerning.
“That’s kind of the story everywhere in Canada,” said Margie Patrick, a professor at The King’s University in Edmonton who teaches courses about religious education.
“We talk about all kinds of diversity,” Patrick said. “What’s so scary about religious diversity?”
Repeated controversy
Most Canadian public schools no longer teach about religion. If they offer a world religions class, it is not mandatory.
Proposals to introduce religion into public school curriculum are often controversial.
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Religious education is typically a small part of teaching time, but it can cause large public debates, says Solange Lefebvre, a professor at the Université de Montréal who has written about the history of religious education in Ontario and Quebec.
In Quebec, discussions about religion education in public schools often relate to the province’s identity as a secular society, she says.
But the debates are larger than one province’s history or culture.
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“The controversies around religious education are never only about, ‘What should we teach?’ [and why],” Lefebvre said. “It’s always about a broader [social or political] narrative.”
In Alberta, tensions flared in 2021 over the province’s proposals to include more religion instruction in social studies curriculum. This included having Grade 2 students learn the basic tenets of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
These requirements were removed after public outcry. Patrick says some of the learning goals were not age appropriate. But the government “swung way too far” in the opposite direction with the new curriculum, which makes no mention of religion.
Private sphere?
In Patrick’s view, students should learn about religion, but that does not necessarily have to happen in a designated religion class.
“Religion isn’t this little piece of life that we can carve out and then privatize it, put it off to the centre,” she said.
“[Religion] forms and shapes how we see economics and how we perceive sociology and psychology [and] controversial issues and current events.”
Patrick teaches prospective teachers about how to discuss religion in various subjects. And some do. For example, some have brought religion into English literature classes, helping students understand the religious themes in Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi. Others have explained how religion influences various historical events.
When students do not learn about religion in school, this sends the message that religion is unimportant and irrelevant, says Patrick. And telling students that all religions are the same “cheapens” the differences in traditions, she says, and does not encourage students to be curious about others.
Laura McCarron, who formerly developed world religions classes when she was a teacher in New Brunswick, agrees.
“It’s ignorance on our part to think that there’s no need for [understanding different religions],” said McCarron, who today works at the New Brunswick Teachers’ Association. “There’s always a need for it.”
In McCarron’s world religion classes, students learned the tenets of main world religions and how religion impacts people’s perspectives on topics ranging from war and terrorism to medical assistance in dying and LGBTQ issues.
Secularism or pluralism
According to recent polling, religious “nones” — individuals who claim no religious affiliation — now constitute the second largest faith group in Canada after Christians.
Religious nones may not care about religion enough to form an opinion about it, sociologists recently told Canadian Affairs. But that does not mean schools should shy away from teaching about religion, says Alan Sears, a retired education professor at the University of New Brunswick who has studied religious education.
“A lot of people don’t care about math either,” he said, noting that decisions about what to include in curriculum are political.
“Whether you’re religious or not, you’re going to intersect with religious people, and you’re going to intersect with them in the civic space,” he said.
In Sears’ view, trying to create a secular society, like in Quebec, is the wrong approach to religious diversity.
“I would argue for a pluralist rather than a secular society, a society that allows for a number of ways of understanding the world and the universe,” he said.
McCarron, of the New Brunswick Teachers’ Association, says religious pluralism is especially important given Canada’s high number of immigrants.
Many immigrants to Canada are religious, and students need to understand religion to have good relationships with their neighbours, says McCarron.
Understanding is key to empathy, she says. “If we don’t have empathy, we’re not going to have citizenship.”
The role of a public school is to teach students about what different religions teach, not to encourage students to convert to a specific religion.
“The intention is to be curious [about what people believe],” she said.
Religious education gives students another skill to help them in the world: religious literacy, says Jafralie, in Montreal.
“We’re not talking about some mass religious conversion,” she said. “We’re talking about arming our students to be critical thinkers and decent human beings.”
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