Religion in schools is back on the national agenda, as the Federal Government announces plans to review what students learn in the classroom.

Federal Education Minister Christopher Pyne announced a review of the national school curriculum last Friday, appointing Dr Kevin Donnelly and Professor Ken Wiltshire to lead the review panel.

The announcement has sparked criticism, with predictions of renewed ‘culture wars’ after comments from Mr Pyne and Dr Donnelly on the need to emphasise the Western tradition.

“I also want the curriculum to celebrate Australia, and for students, when they have finished school, to know where we’ve come from as a nation,” Mr Pyne said in a press conference last week.

Dr Donnelly used some of his first comments on the review on ABC to make a case for more religion in public schools, calling the existing framework a “very secular curriculum”.

“I’m not saying we should preach to everyone, but I would argue that the great religions of the world – whether it’s Islam, whether it’s Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism – they should be taught over the compulsory years of school,” he said.

“When you look at Parliaments around Australia – they all begin with the Lord’s prayer. If you look at our constitution, the preamble is about God.

“You can’t airbrush that from history – it has to be recognised.”

Dr Donnelly has previously argued the benefits of greater understanding in Australian schools of the “significant cultural importance” of the Bible and Christianity.

Dr Greg Clarke, CEO of Bible Society Australia and author of ‘The Great Bible Swindle’ says he too has a particular interest in the importance of Bible literacy for “really getting to grips with many aspects of Western culture.”

“We certainly need religion to be a significant part of the curriculum. It should be considered not merely on its own, but also in all the ways it has affected other areas of study such as literature, art, history, social studies, and to some extent economics and the sciences.”

Dr Clarke says he finds it scandalous that children can emerge from Australian schools with such a “weak grasp on the central text of Western culture” – the Bible.

“This isn’t a religious issue, it’s an educational one. If we want Aussie graduates to gird their loins, find the root of the matter, and practise what they preach, we’d better at least teach them where those phrases come from.”

Christian Schools Australia told ABC that Christians have played a role in the story of Australia, and it would be “anathema to the whole idea of history that you don’t tell part of the story in favour of another – that would be indoctrination.”

David Hastie, education commentator and PhD candidate in Education at Macquarie University has also written previously on the benefits of studying the Bible in school.

“When studying literature, children now in Australian faith-based schools … enjoy a significant advantage over their state-school peers. Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Dickens, Bronte (both), George Eliot, Hopkins, Hardy, T.S. Eliot, Steinbeck, Beckett, Yeats, Plath, Golding, Atwood and many, many others, require more than a passing knowledge of the Abrahamic Old and New Testaments,” he wrote in an article for The Australian in 2010, arguing that Bible knowledge sets students up to flourish in their studies of literature.

Dr Clarke, a long-time advocate for Bible literacy in Australia, would agree.

“I’m hoping that the Bible can be given its appropriate place in the curriculum; it’s up to the experts to determine what that place is. But if it isn’t at least part of learning literature, history, art, music, and pockets of economics and the sciences, well I’ll be pretty suspicious that there’s some blinkered thinking involved,” said Dr Clarke.