Comments on: Faith Schools in the UK

By: h. e. baber

h. e. baber — Sun, 06 Jun 2004 06:28:57 +0000

Likewise, Andrew! The assumption in much of this discussion is that exposing children to “indoctrination” at religious schools is likely to imprint them indelibly. I’m not so sure. Against the backdrop of a secular culture it’s fundamentalist parents who have the heavy lifting to do—sending their kids to religious schools, indoctrinating and enculturating them at home, pushing Christian literature and Christian music, taking them to church, sending them to “Bible camp,” getting them into Christian youth groups and Christian colleges—creating a cohesive alternative world for them and and shielding them from secular culture. Quite often even all that doesn’t work. It seems pretty unlikely that kids from secular, homes without parents systematically reinforcing the indoctrination, are going to be imprinted. I’d like to see data on the percentage of kids raised in fundamentalist homes and sent to fundamentalist schools who drop out vs. the percentage of kids raised in secular home who go to religious schools and are converted. Besides, parents can “just say no” to the claptrap kids get at school, tell them some people believe this others, like us, don’t and then, when they’re old enough explain why we don’t. People, including kids, are essentially rational—you can’t tattoo them with beliefs. Even if it’s an uphill battle, argument works.

By: Andrew Brown

Andrew Brown — Sat, 05 Jun 2004 09:01:44 +0000

Harriet! What a place to find you! “Just empirically I’d guess that maintaining the system of funding religious schools in the UK is a good idea for the reasons suggested but I don’t think offering funding tied to regulation would tempt many seriously fundamentalist parents who are already so alienated from the mainstream that they’re prepared to pay a premium to opt out of any form of state regulation.” I’ve just had a genuinely tragic letter from a science/biology teacher in Doncaster, whose school is about to be taken over by creationist fundies. These people are an entirely new element in British educational life. I can’t imagine an ordinary Anglican school teaching creationism for a moment. But the new lot of “Academies” are much more American. They raise a very sharp problem about religios schools,which is this: are parents rational to choose to have their children taught untruths in an atmosphere conducive to learning, rather than taught truths, ineffectively, in schools without discipline?

By: q

Fri, 04 Jun 2004 21:44:27 +0000

Harry- Aside from your excellent article on the anti-liberal dangers of promoting secularised education, it seems that you have struck on an issue that resonates strongly on this blog. Maybe your article can be the first of a series. It would make a good conference thread.

By: Ophelia Benson

Ophelia Benson — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 18:10:37 +0000

“Gee — I’m sorry everyone — I thought Harry wanted to know what we thought of the article in an editorial way, not a “let’s all argue about the issue but ignore how Harry argues it” way” Gee – well, I’m not particularly sorry, because after all this is a blog comments thread, and I daresay Harry is not altogether astonished to find that commenters tend to comment how they please, and that threads tend to follow the direction of the discussion as opposed to the initial direction.

By: pepi

pepi — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 11:22:29 +0000

“But why wouldn’t it be feasible to regulate religious schools without funding them?” That’s my question too. I don’t see the point of funding really. I don’t think that’s the reason of the difference between the US and UK. The difference is much deeper than whether faith schools are funded or not. It’s different histories and different societies as a whole. I think the paper ignores that too much, it just starts from the assumption that funding of faith schools is the main determining factor in how religion is seen in a society and in the spread of fundamentalism and sectarianism. But fundamentalism itself doesn’t really originate in schools. Sectarianism is also tied to other social and political and economic factors. What about other European countries? As far as I know, all private schools are regulated anywhere, same as state ones, whether they get funding or not. I totally agree with the paper and h.e.baber that ‘secular’ should not mean useless superficial actions like abolishing religious programming or symbols and names of holidays and the like. Those are part of a culture. You can different religious manifestations mix and blend at that level. The real issues are more complex than that. So the question of funding religious schools or not should be simply about whether that can be consistent with the whole education system and its principles, and whether it’s fair on all taxpayers. You can argue it’s not always about indoctrination, and those schools can also provide useful services, ok – but so do lots of other private businesses and yes, indeed, they don’t need public funding to have to respect standards. You can’t predict the outcome of a religious vs. state schooling in every single case. You can’t eliminate all the possibilities of indoctrination in a religious school environment, unless you eliminate faith schools altogether, which is just not feasible, whatever we think about them. You can’t eliminate the fact strict or fundamentalist religious parents will indoctrinate their kids, faith schools or not. That’s no reason to give money to those schools. It’s as simple as that, in my view. Funding doesn’t alter the possibilities at all. It doesn’t make them automatically more compliant to whatever it is you want them to comply with.

By: h. e. baber

h. e. baber — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 06:56:29 +0000

Ok—comments on the paper. One of the arguments, is that it’s better to fund religious schools so that they can be regulated then to allow them to operate with no funding and no regulation. I think this is probably reasonable—comparable to the argument that it’s vital to keep abortion legal so that women don’t resort to coat hangers and back alley abortionists. We don’t want unregulated back alley fundamentalist schools—like the “Christian academies” established 40 years ago to circumvent racial integration. But why wouldn’t it be feasible to regulate religious schools without funding them? The state regulates a variety of businesses without funding them—stores aren’t allowed to sell contaminated food or illegal drugs, used car dealers aren’t allowed to turn back odometers, banks aren’t allowed to refuse to lend money to people on the basis of race, etc. Enforcement may be less than perfect, but it’s the law. To make the argument for funding go through it would have to be shown that regulation without funding wouldn’t be feasible or that enforcement would be less effective and that the availability of funded, regulated religious schools would effectively stop parents from sending their kids to unfunded, unregulated ones. In addition the argument depends on the assumption that religious indoctrination isn’t all that bad and can in any case be made less harmful by state regulation and supervision. If you think abortion is really, really bad you aren’t going to buy going to buy the “keep abortion safe and legal argument.” You’ll argue that the costs of prohibiting it, a relatively small number of women maimed or killed and a few fetuses aborted are lower than the the costs of legalization, viz. fewer women damaged but many more fetuses aborted. By the same reasoning if you think religious indoctrination is really, really bad you’ll argue that it’s better to have a relatively small number of kids indoctrinated at unfunded, unregulated religious schools than a much larger number indoctrinated at regulated religious schools which, because they were funded, would be economically within the reach of many more parents. Just empirically I’d guess that maintaining the system of funding religious schools in the UK is a good idea for the reasons suggested but I don’t think offering funding tied to regulation would tempt many seriously fundamentalist parents who are already so alienated from the mainstream that they’re prepared to pay a premium to opt out of any form of state regulation.

By: Another Damned Medievalist

Another Damned Medievalist — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 03:44:28 +0000

Gee—I’m sorry everyone—I thought Harry wanted to know what we thought of the article in an editorial way, not a “let’s all argue about the issue but ignore how Harry argues it” way …

By: Ginger Yellow

Ginger Yellow — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 02:47:01 +0000

Addendum: the genius of this proposal is that you can tie it in to Blunkett’s citizenship classes idea. He may be an authoritarian nutter, but he’s right about one thing. British people by and large no almost nothing about how the British political system works and how it came to be. What its strengths are and what its weaknesses are. This is not a good thing. I’m certainly not suggesting we worship at the feet of Cromwell the way Americans are supposed to with the Founding Fathers, and I certainly don’t think we should have a pledge. But the fact that most Britons couldn’t tell you how a law gets passed in this country, or what it means to have an unwritten constitution, is not healthy for our democracy.

By: Ginger Yellow

Ginger Yellow — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 02:38:39 +0000

As I say, I don’t go along with the whole Dawkins agenda. I’m not talking about banning religion from schools in the US sense. That’s the point. Expose children to all religions, and to atheism. Expose them to Aristotle, to Rousseau, to Locke, to Kant, to Marx, to Smith. Teach children to think for themselves. That’s what education is supposed to be for. Knowlege is useless compared to an ability and a desire to think and to learn.

By: Kimmitt

Kimmitt — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 02:30:22 +0000

Er, there’s a very simple reason why religion is not as divisive in Europe as it is in the US; Europe has fewer fundamentalists. If Europe were to admit a number of fundamentalist Christians or Muslims (or Hindus, I suppose), then it would start having the same problems we are having very quickly. Exactly the same way they started having the same welfare problems we have when they combined unemployment and a racial underclass. Homogeneity is bad for innovation, but it’s awesome for preventing unrest.

By: Ophelia Benson

Ophelia Benson — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 00:36:16 +0000

I hope you beat them good and hard, H.E.! They only do it to annoy, because they know it teases. You have a point, and maybe we were talking about different things to begin with. I think I’m actually talking more about the abstractions; or at least about some of the reasons given for the “it’s entirely the parents’ business” view.

By: h. e. baber

h. e. baber — Thu, 03 Jun 2004 22:32:37 +0000

O.B., I know you know that religion isn’t just truth claims and maybe you know that I know you know. The point is that in our zeal to avoid the “establishment of religion” we’ve purged the innocuous accoutrements of religion—and to make matters worse we actively promote what is in fact a conservative religious moral agenda under the rubric of “values.” There’s no reason to believe that this harmless religious stuff is a Trojan horse or that exposure to it will magically effect religious indoctrination. There’s much more religious stuff out in public in the UK than in the US from market crosses in the public square to Songs of Praise on public TV but by anyone’s standards Brits are a whole lot less religious than Americans. By contrast some of the “values” promoted in American schools, as detoxified ecumenical religion, are genuinely harmful. When you pay cops to visit schools preaching the D.A.R.E. program, suggesting to kids that drinking a glass of wine with dinner is all of a piece with shooting heroin (“don’t start”) you’re paving the way for the next generation of alcoholics. Mercifully most kids are cynical about this program but as you know there have been well-publicized cases of kids turning in their parents for smoking dope, in the spirit of Young Pioneers reporting their parents for thought-crime. I’m fed up with Dawkins’ and the Brights’ attacks on straw men, with local village atheists’ legal battles to have hilltop crosses dismantled and with the program at my (Catholic) college to remove crucifixes from the classrooms in the interests of “pluralism.” Big f-ing deal. I’m more worried about the DARE program, and even more worried about the fashionable nonsense kids are getting in the public schools that I have to beat out of them as freshmen.

By: Ophelia Benson

Ophelia Benson — Thu, 03 Jun 2004 18:35:36 +0000

H.E., “Excuse me, O.B., a religion isn’t only a system of truth claims—it’s a package of practices, symbols, stories, art and music, a calendar of feast days, and a history.” No, I know. I didn’t say religion is only a system of truth claims – I just said that it is that, meaning it is also that. That that is one of the things it is. I think people have a bad tendency to deny or overlook or try to conceal that aspect of it when defending or advocating special protection for it – for religion. I maintain that some of those special protections might be all right if it were not for the truth claims, but since it is for the truth claims, then the protections become quite dubious. In education for one example – depending on the extent to which the religion influences the curriculum. Having said that – I went to an Episcopalian (or more like pseudo-Anglican) school myself, and I recognize it from your account. The curriculum had nothing to do with Episcopalianism, it was just that we had these silly little assemblies every morning in which we sang a hymn and I think there was a bit of the Bible read (!) along with mundane school announcements.

By: Ophelia Benson

Ophelia Benson — Thu, 03 Jun 2004 18:26:47 +0000

That’s interesting, Harry – that you don’t know what he thinks and are amazed that you don’t know, both. I suppose it’s interesting because it points up how some aspects of a given issue or question always (or anyway often) remain buried, overlooked, not fully recognized, etc. This discussion has suggested some new ideas or perhaps new questions about oldish ideas for me, certainly.

By: h. e. baber

h. e. baber — Thu, 03 Jun 2004 17:54:57 +0000

Reading all this makes me curious about what kind of indoctrination students are getting at these CofE schools over in the UK. Do they have to memorize the Catechism? Are they drilled daily with lists of sins and how to avoid them? Are they taught “intelligent design”? Do they learn that pi is exactly 3 because it says so in the Bible? Our kids went to an Episcopal elementary school where as far as I could tell the only religion around was a chapel service every Wednesday, crucifixes in the classrooms and the annual Nativity play with kindergarteners dressed as sheep. I didn’t notice any indoctrination or, for that matter, any attempt to teach “values” beyond not chewing gum in class. Now my daughter in at a public high school and is getting more religion from her fundamentalist classmates than she ever got at the church school—though, of course, no Christmas decorations. Reflecting, it strikes me that in the US the religion taboo in the schools and in the public sphere generally only concerns the outward and visible forms—Nativity scenes on public property, Christmas carols at school assemblies, invocations by clergy at graduation ceremonies and the like. When it comes to “values” most Amricans are dead keen on the puritanical code of conduct that comes from conservative Christianity. It never seems to occur to anyone, for example, that teaching abstinence in sex education classes or that the infamous D.A.R.E. program in the schools that lumps alcohol with illegal drugs and warns children “not to start” is a violation of seperation of church and state.