Chris Woodhead= Cnut

[Mr. Tea]

OK m_b, if you think it's going too far to ban faith schools outright, then you have to at least agree with bassnation about the requirement to teach sex ed and evolution, and strict regulation to ensure they're not being used as platforms to preach homophobia, hatred of other faiths or whatever.

Also, I'm not sure I like the idea that they're state-supported - using public money to propagate religion. Hmm. And it's funny that they're often touted as great examples of how multicultural Britain is; I mean, how 'multicultural' is a school where all the pupils are Catholic, or Muslim, or Jewish?

 

[mixed_biscuits]

OK m_b, if you think it's going too far to ban faith schools outright, then you have to at least agree with bassnation about the requirement to teach sex ed and evolution, and strict regulation to ensure they're not being used as platforms to preach homophobia, hatred of other faiths or whatever.

They should be subject to the current legal restrictions, yes.

Also, I'm not sure I like the idea that they're state-supported - using public money to propagate religion.

I've been talking about private faith schools, so this doesn't apply.

And it's funny that they're often touted as great examples of how multicultural Britain is; I mean, how 'multicultural' is a school where all the pupils are Catholic, or Muslim, or Jewish?

So you would ban them to ensure that Britain is living up to its self-ascribed multicultural melting-pot advertising slogan? This seems like an aesthetic goal rather than a moral one.

Once the faith schools are disbanded, rehousing or concerted school bussing efforts might also be needed to ensure that schools are not monopolised by mono-cultural catchment areas.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

the whole point of having a secular society is to permit worship and tolerance thereof, but also to garantee a framework of fairness for everyone. this means that bigotry, even if people claim it is integral to their faith is unacceptable. we don't allow kingdoms within kingdoms as we once did with the christian church, where clergymen were not subject to the laws of the land, but only to the laws of the church. we had to fight long and hard to achieve this and i will fight the creeping encroachment of religiosity in public life as long as i have breath in my body.

So, you would ban private churches, seeing as they serve the same purpose as private faith schools in preaching 'bigotry'?

 

[comelately]

Another thing worth mentioning, and this would go back to a less positive side of my high-school experience, is that I believe the average middle-class pupil will fit in better or feel more at home in the current education system than the average working-class one (again, assuming here comparable levels of native intelligence, and keeping our considerations purely to comprehensive schools). I don’t think this is primarily down to prejudice, certainly not some kind of conspiracy, it’s an unhappy accident of the whole school set-up. Middle-class pupils and their teachers are more likely to relate to each other through shared accents and vocabularly, shared cultural reference points, perhaps being in contact socially through parents, etc. At the time of our Highers espcially, it seemed like middle-class chappies such as myself ended up pretty much monopolising the teachers' time in terms of study help etc., without anyone involved really wanting or meaning for it to end up like this, and this is clearly a real shame if true But I'm aware from what some other people have posted that this view will be a bit controversial, so I'd like to say again that it's not at the core of my argument.

I would say this is particularly true where I've been working the last 10 months. I finish next Friday - if the thread endures I can say more in 7 days. I'm getting a golden handcuffs payment for seeing out the maternity cover so I'll keep my trap shut for now.

 

[scottdisco]

did anybody else see that Rod Liddle documentary where he looked at a few faith schools in northeast England that were being bankrolled by a local tycoon, and also a man of faith?

it was quite disturbing, in shining a light on these particular schools they were getting up to all sorts that was well out of order, and down entirely to their happy-clappy Christian bent. just one anecdote, of course.

when Craner and i saw Shalom Lappin talk at the Euston manifesto conference at SOAS a few summers ago, Lappin used the example of the Amish in the midwest/mid-Atlantic USA as a minority community group whose specific educational needs and contributions to their wider society were on the whole more benign than malign. (though we all know Amish kids go off the hook when they hit the big city, and the background to that blah blah.)
again just another anecdote.

i've got as much love for private churches as the next queasy agnostic but i don't think, with respect to m_b, you should make direct comparisons between them and faith schools; sure private churches are going to have a lot of kids dragged into it by parents, relatives or carers, i'm sure, but a faith school is something where a kid literally doesn't have a choice, it is their world whilst they are at school and quite consuming; they are, for the most part, getting shuttled in at the behest of a faithful adult. (i'm sure there's a few devout little ten year olds who can't wait to get to faith school and start learning those hadiths but i would bet such kids are a minority.)
all that said, a very good mate of mine was forced to go to Koranic school on Saturday mornings for a bit by his old man when younger, but he wriggled out of it after a spell as he couldn't stand it.
Saturday mornings are for cricket and football after all.

that said, i would like it if we didn't have faith schools in Britain, and i'm pretty sure i used to be in favour of just banning them, but i don't think that should happen now.

i think.
can you tell i'm a bit of a fence-sitter on most matters?


looking forward to what comelately has to say!

 

[crackerjack]

Subjective terms really:

'educate' = ppl teaching things that I believe are true
'indocrinate' = ppl teaching things that I believe are false

It's often difficult to gauge with you where argument ends and straight up trolling begins. Not this time.

 

[don_quixote]

were they the emmanuel schools?

 

[comelately]

looking forward to what comelately has to say!

Hmmm, I've built it up a bit now. No sure how specific I will get yet.

As vimothy said earlier, lots of interesting stories in education. Going further into my past, I received an Assisted Place (ie the government paid most of the fees) to go to the local Roman Catholic fee-paying school - noone had ever gone from my primary to that school. At the risk of sounding arrogant, my success in getting an Assisted Place pretty much guaranteed places for my two brothers at the school too (it would cost £250,000 for fees for 3 children at the school today). The truth is the school was mainly filled from the upper-middle classes - but it was still a world away from what I was used to and found the experience very difficult, although I got good examination passes and probably had more good teachers than bad ones. There was/is a 'home college' at Oxford for the school, but on visiting I was made to feel very unwelcome and so I applied for Cambridge but wasn't really helped much with the application - no member of my family had ever gone to university and the whole thing was fucking clueless.

The funny thing was that a lot of the other boys said that I sounded posh. And then later, there were other boys who said I sounded like Paul Merton. The whole thing was very confusing. I was definitely seen as an oddity by many of the teachers. This will sound like a bitter story and I suppose it is, but anyways - I did Economics as a GCSE option and had this bizarre Thatcher-worshipping old bag who actually point-blank refused to teach the union section of the GCSE syllabus, she knew I was a working class lefty and gently but not always too gently mocked me for it. She still gave my work good marks (describing me as 'an enigma' in school reports) but made me feel uncomfortable and like I should not consider the A-Level. In the end I did Mathematics, which I wasn't ideally suited for (although I had a A* at GCSE my other 2 A Levels were English and History and I'm not good at visualisation or spacial intelligence) and I ended up doing Pure Maths with a crap teacher with far too much of an eye for the sixth-form girls (a real "Dave from Election"). I ended up only getting a C in Maths, which definitely cost me opportunities after university - even though Maths is actually a much tougher A Level than most 'arts subjects' anyway

 

[mixed_biscuits]

[education, indoctrination]It's often difficult to gauge with you where argument ends and straight up trolling begins.

Tsk tsk - pointing out that different people would have different ideas about what constitutes the truth and what falsehood is hardly controversial. The fact is that many believers would consider a secular education that minimises God 'indoctrination' and their own, that tells the story of what they see as God's role in the world, an 'education' - and this view may indeed be shared by their students!

There is a 'harder' definition of indoctrination whose dangers I would more readily concede: that of being coerced to believe things that you cannot even begin to - the students thus not being truly willing participants in the process of education.

 

[crackerjack]

Tsk tsk - pointing out that different people would have different ideas about what constitutes the truth and what falsehood is hardly controversial. The fact is that many believers would consider a secular education that minimises God 'indoctrination' and their own, that tells the story of what they see as God's role in the world, an 'education' - and this view may indeed be shared by their students!
.

Extraordinary how critics of what they perceive as 'left-wing' education suddenly become relativists where religion is concerned.

 

[tox]

It’s also worth remembering that even if they wanted to, private schools can’t offer anything like all of their places in the form of scholarships; their survival clearly depends on taking in substantial fees from the families of paying students. (And if private schools paid for all of their tution fees through government-funded scholarships, then clearly they wouldn't be private any more!).

When it comes to grammar schools things are more complicated, as it is at least possible to have a system which is based on selection but not on ability to pay - that was more or less how it used to work after all. I am open to persuasion about some kind of reintroduction of the old 11-plus, tripartite system, although at heart I would prefer not to go in this direction, because of the potential for divison and tension within communities that it opens up and also because I believe that the only feasible times for the entry tests would still be too early in the child's intellectual development.

The above points are the crux of my position, and the ones I would most like to see addressed. Bearing that in mind, I have also have some more rambling, half-finished thoughts about the whole debate:

Some of the mostly highly ranked private schools in the country offer a large percentage of students scholarships or discounts on fees.

See, for example, Christ's Hospital School or the King Edward's Foundation. Both of these organisations are funded through land ownership in a system not dissimilar to many of the red-brick universities.

Such schools are academically successful and, due to their wealth, are able to accept pupils from a range of backgrounds.

As for grammar schools, such institutions are still alive and kicking in many parts of the country via various 11+ type exams in place. Many of my fellow pupils from (state) primary school went on to study at grammar schools across the West Midlands.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Extraordinary how critics of what they perceive as 'left-wing' education suddenly become relativists where religion is concerned.

Well, if you want to reduce things to that simple binary, or claim that leftists have a monopoly on relativism (which is funny, given their keenness to suppress alternative schooling methods...)

My apparent relativism issues out of a primary concern for individual or group liberties: I might believe that religion is utter hokum (in fact my personal beliefs are utterly moot!), but I don't see what right this gives me to impose myself over believers. Do you think that you have this right?

In fact, in this thread we find supposed left-wingers expounding rightist sentiments, wishing to create a British monoculture, deculturing the multiculturism that they so often champion.

 

[crackerjack]

My apparent relativism issues out of a primary concern for individual or group liberties: I might believe that religion is utter hokum, but I don't see what right this gives me to impose myself over believers. Do you think that you have this right?

I'm all in favour of teaching religion in schools - in religious education class, preferably ones that included comparative religious studies. Any encroachment into other subjects should be resisted, and certainly not supported by state funds. What people do in their private lives is none of our business, how they educate their children is.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

I'm all in favour of teaching religion in schools - in religious education class, preferably ones that included comparative religious studies. Any encroachment into other subjects should be resisted, and certainly not supported by state funds. What people do in their private lives is none of our business, how they educate their children is.

I think the key here is that they are their children - not our children, nor the state's children (beyond the duty of care decided by law). I would only call their children's education a 'public' matter if it occurs in a public, state school or is in some way illegal.

 

[crackerjack]

I think the key here is that they are their children - not our children, nor the state's children (beyond the duty of care decided by law). I would only call their children's education a 'public' matter if it occurs in a public, state school or is in some way illegal.

So if parents withdrew their kids from school and spent the day teaching them, say, mediaeval witchcraft, you'd be cool with that, so long as they didn't actually turn actually turn people into cats or chop up puppy dogs for the cauldron?

 

[mixed_biscuits]

So if parents withdrew their kids from school and spent the day teaching them, say, mediaeval witchcraft, you'd be cool with that, so long as they didn't actually turn actually turn people into cats or chop up puppy dogs for the cauldron?

If the parents or school were satisfying the law, then yes, this kind of course would be fine.

In fact, I can't see how the Harry Potter generation could fail to be enthused by the topic!

 

[crackerjack]

If the parents or school were satisfying the law, then yes, this kind of course would be fine.

And what else would they have to do to satisfy the law? Does it involve teaching them anything useful (maths, science, how to protect their genitals or avoid unwanted pregnancy), or can it all come from Harry Potter books?

 

[mixed_biscuits]

And what else would they have to do to satisfy the law? Does it involve teaching them anything useful (maths, science, how to protect their genitals or avoid unwanted pregnancy), or can it all come from Harry Potter books?

Tee-hee, yes, all from your one-day medieval witchcraft course I think that the law stipulates some sort of requirements for home education. There must be such a thing, as there are many who home-school. I suggest you look at guidelines for home-schoolers if you want to find out about this.

How to protect their genitals??

It's the three Rs: Reading, Writing, How to Protect Your Genitals. LOL

Sorry, I showed that to my brother and he came up with it.

 

[crackerjack]

Tee-hee, yes, all from your one-day medieval witchcraft course I think that the law stipulates some sort of requirements for home education. There must be such a thing, as there are many who home-school. I suggest you look at guidelines for home-schoolers if you want to find out about this.

How to protect their genitals??

It's the three Rs: Reading, Writing, How to Protect Your Genitals. LOL

Sorry, I showed that to my brother and he came up with it.

I wasn't asking about the law as it stands, but as you'd like it, and whether that includes provisions for sex education.

 

[Mr. Tea]

M_b, I think you're getting a bit mixed up here (lol) - I'm not talking about lecturing an assembly hall full of primary pupils with sermons like "There is no God, and Darwin* is His prophet". I'm talking about not mentioning religion at all in schools, beyond totally objective, non-partisan RE lessons about the major world faiths ("This is what Christians believe, and this is what Muslims believe...") and in history lessons where relevant (the adoption of Christianity by Constantine, the various Cath/Prot argy-bargies, the current War On Terror etc.).

And I think you are playing devil's advocate with this relativity thing a bit. I mean, a liberal agnostic/atheist's view of the truth will surely be a bit different from that of a Taliban militiaman, a member of Westboro Baptist Church or for that matter a neo-Nazi: that's not to say that we'd be much better off having our children taught by one of those four hypothetical 'indoctrinators' than any of the other three, right?

*or Dawkins!