Thundering about faith schools

Regular readers of About Whose News will be aware that I’m pretty content with our government. Its pragmatic centrist approach seems to me to be about the best we can hope for in a liberal democracy. And liberal democracy seems to be miles better than any other system of government that has ever been implemented in our world.

I’ve grown weary of the idealised theories put forward both by those on the left and right. They all fail the basic test; ‘if it’s so wonderful how come no country has successfully used it?’ Such theoretical forms of government come close to being religions – things that people follow through faith rather than evidence.

There are some things our government seems keen on however with concern me. The question of faith schools is one. As I said in my last but one letter in the Guardian "[it’s] curious ... that some state schools are allowed to discriminate not merely on pupils' religious beliefs but on those professed by their parents". Curious being the sort of understatement typical of the letter’s mild-mannered author.

I’ve discussed the issue with someone who is now a junior minister in the education department. He was quite keen on a proposal to turn a failing local secondary school over to the Church of England. I wasn’t. If I understood him correctly his enthusiasm was based at least in part on pragmatism – it would win the school some more cash and get some good people onto the board of governors.

My own children went to a C of E primary school because it’s our local school. Fortunately the C of E locally still maintains (or did when they were there) its fine old Edwardian traditions; so jam and cake making and the length of the grass on the rector’s lawn were far more important issues than fundamentalism. My favourite joke about the C of E goes something like: ‘its great strength is that it allows its followers to believe in almost anything but of course hardly any of them do’.

But fundamentalism is on the rise especially as the established church’s role as the centre of English lives has vanished. The cosy old image of English church-based schools to which parents of all faiths and none can happily send their children isn’t sustainable in multi-faith Britain.

Sean O'Neill writes in today’s Thunderer column in the Times about his childhood education in Northern Ireland. "Northern Ireland should stand as a stark lesson that segregating children breeds distrust, hatred and violence. ... there should be no truck with those who want to isolate five-year-olds in opposing religious camps."