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More religious schools will simply divide our children
Estelle Morris, the Education Secretary, and her masters are saying that there should be many more religious schools, as proposed in their Education White Paper and in the Dearing report. This is based on the assumption, apparently held by Tony Blair, that religious schools do better in exams and, in any case, that people like them. Actually, state religious schools are not as good as the Government thinks, according to a recent report by Civitas, but merely less inadequate than normal state schools. All the same, many parents will go to immense lengths to squeeze their children into the best Christian schools, as Tony and Cherie Blair have done themselves, sending their children several miles across London every day for the privilege of a very superior Catholic education at public expense.
However, it is not true that most people are keen on religious schools. At least, they are not keen on having any more. Labour got this wrong. A poll commissioned by the Observer this week found that 80 per cent of the sample did not support the extension of single-faith schools which would include religions such as Islam and Judaism. That's putting it delicately. People, starting with me, are positively against it.
Unaccustomed though I am to agreeing with trade unionists, Labour backbenchers, local education authorities and even Lord Ouseley, late of the Commission for Racial Equality, a very assorted multitude of us is extremely alarmed; it is blindingly obvious that single-faith schools will create ghettos, especially in inner cities. They will prevent integration and understanding.
Lord Ouseley has said that the emergence of "monocultural" state schools in Bradford was a key factor in last summer's riots. And these ghetto schools were not even intentionally single-faith religious schools: how much worse the tension might have been if they had been institutionally segregated. This policy of creating more faith schools is immensely dangerous, and it is quite rightly exploding in the Prime Minister's face.
However, it is Miss Morris who must take the flak for him, and in the face of it last week she announced that religious schools must be "inclusive". This is desperately silly. How does she propose to make them so? She must be thinking of compulsion: she cannot suppose that people will voluntarily send their children to a school of a very different faith, simply in the name of inclusiveness.
Besides, the whole point of religion is that it is not inclusive but exclusive (like the excellent Catholic state school down the road which won't accept my unchristened son): real conviction is in its nature exclusive; that is an uncomfortable truth that won't go away, no matter how often you repeat the weasel word "inclusive".
Would little Christians and agnostics have to be bussed in to Muslim schools, and little Hindus and Buddhists press-ganged into joining the little Blairs at the Oratory? And would the schools have to stop being quite so religious, in order not to offend pupils of other faiths, or of none? This may have happened in a lot of Anglican state schools, which (as their bishops lament) have lost the courage of their feeble convictions, but it won't be accepted without protest in religious schools where faith is still real. Besides, it is curious to insist that lack of conviction should be the price of survival for a religious school.
You might have thought that the current world crisis would have taught the Government to think more clearly about religion, and to take it seriously. Tony Blair may be going about with a copy of the Koran these days, but he is curiously obtuse about religious sentiment. There was something delightfully comic about him angrily denouncing Glen Hoddle not long ago for his wholly unacceptable views on reincarnation without apparently realising that exactly those views are held by hundreds of thousands of perfectly respectable British Hindus, many of them Labour voters. Other faiths and cultures believe things that Christians or agnostics or humanists or liberals do not approve of and do not accept, and vice versa. But in a religious school, such things will be taught and taught for truth.
The Government does not appear to have faced up to the question of what religious schools might actually have on their curricula. I was astonished to hear from friends who have taught in a 95 per cent Muslim state primary school in London where the parents almost all refused, for what they said were religious reasons, to let their children play musical instruments, sing, dance or make pictures. They would not allow their daughters to swim. This was not a religious school, so those activities were offered, but had it been, they would not have been on the syllabus.
Meanwhile, in after-school religious classes, children were made to do long hours of rote learning, and quite severely punished for inattention and mistakes. How inclusive could all this hope to be? Indeed, how acceptable is it? I can't help thinking that there must be, in contemporary cant, "issues around" human rights here.
While Britain was an almost exclusively Judaeo-Christian country, it was possible to have religious state schools, because there was little or no cultural conflict involved. That is no longer so. What we need, therefore, is not more religious state schools of any kind, but fewer, and preferably none at all. Religion must be kept out of state schools, in the interests of peace and community and, for those who care, in the interests of faith as well.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, November 17, 2001
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Posted by: anonymous | 7 May 2008 02:50:32
