Ethics or SRE? A Balanced Guide to Help Parents Choose

Both SRE and Ethics classes are staffed by trained volunteers, happen in a supervised environment, and have age-appropriate, professionally developed curriculum. Both programs aim to help children think about meaning, values, and how to live well. Both are free.

…you want your child's school week to include explicit formation in the Christian faith. SRE is the right choice for families who want their child to hear the Bible taught clearly by someone who believes it, to learn to pray, and to have their faith affirmed in a peer context outside of church and home. SRE is particularly valuable if your family isn't well-connected to a local church — it provides formation that might otherwise not happen.

…you want your child to develop structured philosophical reasoning skills and explore moral questions across diverse frameworks without a particular religious perspective. Ethics is well-suited to families who are not religious but value moral education, or to families from non-Christian faith backgrounds who don't want Christian instruction but want something more substantive than supervised free time.

There is no universally correct answer. What matters most is that you make the decision actively rather than by default — that you read the forms, talk to the school, ask what each program covers, and choose deliberately. Children who attend either program thoughtfully enrolled by an engaged parent do better than children whose parents simply didn't return the form.