Ethics classes in schools

Polly Seidler gets a letter in the SMH:

I'm all for competition between SRE and a secularist alternative, but please let the competition be fair.

For each course, let there be the same level of advertising from the school, accurate labelling of the philosophical or religious framework (for example, humanist or secularist ethics), and penalties for misleading claims such as the St James Ethics Centre's (Simon Longstaff's) claim that the ethics pilot would be offered only to children who have opted out of SRE, when in fact it was offered to those on the SRE roll, which forms the crux of SRE providers' complaint.

Polly Seidler, Darlinghurst

(SRE = Special Religious Education, which by law needs to be allowed for in the timetables of public schools in NSW)

Harry Seidler

Polly in the SMH letters:

My father, Harry Seidler, was not a student at the Bauhaus – the institution closed when he was 10 (‘‘Distinguished already, as the last Seidler design’’, July 25-26). Nor was his architectural training in Europe, as Brian Zulaikha of the Australian Institute of Architects says. He studied with the emigre Bauhaus teachers Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer at Harvard and Josef Albers at Black Mountain College in the 1940s.

Polly Seidler, Darlinghurst