Congratulations to Fort Assiniboine staff and students for putting on its latest Christmas production.
Any type of school performance is a huge undertaking, but this one was especially ambitious.
The play was called Santa’s Online Adventure, and with a name like that you might have thought it took a secular approach — it was actually the opposite.
Through the story’s two main protagonists and a school project, students transported the audience through space and time to watch how other cultures celebrate a wide variety of faith and non-faith winter celebrations from various countries around the world.
Yes, Christmas and Christianity played a dominant role. And yet if they had taken a more secular and safe program, we certainly wouldn’t have blamed them.
Actually, we would have agreed with them.
Schools and education, with the exception of Catholic, private, and on rare occasion, faith based public schools, such as Neerlandia Public Christian School have to be secular. Just for the very fact in any given school there is a multiple of faiths, and within those faiths there are areas, that not everyone agrees.
However, a large part of education is exposing students to a wide variety of views, whether they are in the world of art, politics, literature or religion.
And that is exactly what the staff attempted to do here, for not only their students, but the audience as well.
Unfortunately, it is a fact of life, especially living in a rural area, as we do, students do not have the same opportunities as those living in larger centres.
Not to say their education is necessarily lacking, but rural and urban communities, are not interchangeable. Just like schools in Stony Plain plan tours of farms and agriculture tours through its City Slickers program (Barrhead has something similar), rural schools try to compensate by either going to the City on various field trips or by bringing in experts.
Admittedly this becomes a little difficult when a certain faith might have minimal or no representation in a community, but it is important to make the effort.
Something one of our reporters witnessed Fort Assiniboine administration staff do when they asked an audience member to consider coming in to answer questions about their particular faith.
It is only through these type of interactions that we will realize our differences are not as they really seem and that we are just a small part of the larger human family.
So congratulations to all the students and staff at Fort Assiniboine School who endeavored to broaden all of our horizons.
