In NSW public primary schools, ethics classes (Special Education in Ethics – SEE) run in the same weekly time slot as Special Religious Education (SRE). Families choose which option their child attends, and schools provide supervised meaningful activities for children who attend neither. It’s an arrangement that can sound like a culture-war compromise – religion or ethics – yet it may actually be a small civic achievement: a public school making room for difference, without pretending difference doesn’t exist.
SEE is coordinated by Primary Ethics, currently the approved provider for ethics classes in NSW public schools. Lessons use stories and structured discussion to teach children how to listen, take turns, give reasons, notice assumptions and disagree respectfully. The aim is not to recruit students to a worldview, but to strengthen skills of ethical reasoning – fairness, truthfulness, empathy – so children can navigate the real dilemmas of playgrounds, families and friendships.
This is where the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas becomes an unexpectedly helpful dialogue partner. Levinas famously argued that ethics is “first philosophy”: our first responsibility is not to win an argument, but to respond to the person in front of us. The other is not an object for my certainty; the other is a claim upon me. In a primary classroom, that can look wonderfully ordinary: a child learning to say, “I still disagree, but I can see why you think that” or “I didn’t realise how that would feel”.
Of course, comparing SEE with religious education is contentious. Religions aren’t simply “ethics with prayers”; they are thick cultures of story, practice and identity – often sources of profound moral formation, and sometimes of moral failure. Meanwhile, “universal” ethics can become a mask for whatever the dominant culture already assumes. The point, then, is not to crown one as superior, but to ask what kind of people we are forming.
Perhaps SEE and SRE, at their best, share a quiet hope: that children might grow into adults who can reason clearly, speak truthfully and treat others as more than an obstacle. In a fractured public life, that kind of formation is not optional. It’s basic.
