LETTER: Secularism in Surrey schools means neutrality, not dogma<\/p>\n
Published 6:00 pm Thursday, April 2, 2026<\/p>\n
Editor,<\/p>\n
Re: Secularism is the de facto \u2018religion\u2019 in schools (Letter to the editor, March 21 online)<\/p>\n
The writer is mixing up neutrality with ideology. Secularism in schools isn\u2019t a competing belief system; it\u2019s meant to make sure no single belief system dominates.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s happening here is a misunderstanding about the topic: treating the absence of religion as if it were a religion itself. That\u2019s not really how secularism works, especially in public schools.<\/p>\n
In this context, secularism doesn\u2019t mean ignoring religion altogether. It means schools don\u2019t teach from the perspective of any one religion. Students can still learn about different beliefs, but the school itself stays neutral.<\/p>\n
At its core, secularism is about keeping religious authority separate from public institutions so that people of all backgrounds can feel included.<\/p>\n
Kyle Martin <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LETTER: Secularism in Surrey schools means neutrality, not dogma Published 6:00 pm Thursday, April 2, 2026 Editor, Re:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":578683,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194299],"tags":[49,48,87674],"class_list":["post-579236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-surrey","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-surrey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/578683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}