Religious education to be taught in schools

By MICHAEL LAI
EDUCATION Secretary Dr Uke Kombra announced the inclusion of religious education in mainstream curriculum as one of the compulsory subjects from elementary to secondary schools.
He said this during a Church-State Partnership Development Forum in Port Moresby yesterday.
He said religious education would fall under the education mainstream curriculum as ‘Citizenship and Christian Values Education’.
He said, Education Minister Nick Kuman and Chief Secretary Isaac Lupari had been pushing for inclusion of religion as compulsory subject since last year.
“Under the direction of the minister, the subject will be made compulsory in the schools. The scoping and sequencing of the subject content was drafted.
“The reform committee included the civics or the citizenship component into what we have been calling Christian religions education.
The subject is intended to be taught in all schools about human ethics and Christian principles to students in schools. Kombra said the department had been working in many education reforms under the standard based education since 2013.
One of them was the reform of the curriculum itself, others were school structure, looking at the levels of schools, education system, and the professional development of teachers, staffing systems, and school governance system.
Kombra said the standard-based education had standard-based curriculum where teachers would have unified lesson plans teaching the same topic in all levels of schools across the country.