Faith Schools in the UK

I agree. I got no problem with churches. My problem is with the armies of narrow-minded numbskulls who come marching out of ’em every Sunday afternoon.

Americans are often shocked when they learn that not only does ‘public school’ mean ‘private school’ in the UK, but also in the UK the state not only funds, but collaborates with religious organisations in running, religious schools.

Actually, not shocked so much as mildly confused that an ostensibly literate people would use words in such a backasswards fashion.

I’m not sure what’s left of, say, a Catholic school once its decided that the student body won’t be predominantly Catholic. What is distinctive about the mode of education is not just the faculty and their views, but the views of the students and their parents. Which isn’t to say that such schools are or need to be entirely homogenous, but instead that what makes them distinct likely would be lost in a system such as you propose, where all the schools are the same.

Should we treat religious students as a means to the education of their secular classmates, and vice versa?

If one believes that parents have an interest in educating their children in the religion of the parents, and that children have a superior interest in autonomy, what does that imply for our choice of system? The current system limits the parents’ interest without any gain on the side of autonomy for children. A voucherized system may not offer great gains in autonomy, but it would offer gains over the present system, since the parents’ interest would be recognized. There’s the danger in ever conceding any fault in the current system.

One issue that’s slightly tangential to the religious issues: grant-maintained religious schools tend to have far larger catchment areas than the typical local comprehensive, and thus ensure a greater diversity in the student base. My own school also had a small, but not insignificant, group of non-Catholic pupils, who were blissfully unindoctrinated.

I’m with Zaoem and Chris on this. The new theocracy is a post-Civil War phenomenon in the US. The American Revolution did not so much establish a revolutionary separation of church and state as codify an existing tolerance that was largely present not only in the colonies but in England. France, however, was a basically theocratic state where the church was as much the target of the revolution as the king. French secularism was about keeping the Pope out, not protecting minority religions. Anglo-American secularism was far more about religious compromise and establishing a permanent sectarian peace.

The rise of public schools and other parts of the Prussian model of the state along with the fall of the South are at the root of what is going on in the US. Right-wing political Christianity in the US draws on what was as little as 20 years ago still an explicit rejection of the Northern victory in the Civil War. It also draws heavily on a very old opposition to secular public education and sort of distorted American nationalism that prefers local institutions to more distant ones, even when local institutions are demonstrably more corrupt and more arbitrary.

I think state-supported religious schools are not a bad thing, although in the US in 2004 proposing them would be like tossing a can of gasoline on a bonfire. In most places, religious schools have grown more and more secular, not in response to governments so much as to a public that didn’t want to put up with second rate education. Teaching things like evolution or other secular ideas didn’t threaten the churches so much because as long as they had schools, they would always have a next generation at least willing to pay the church lip service. In America though, the public schools don’t teach you that you ought to stick with your sect, even if you don’t believe anything it tells you. There is no prospect of protecting children from the influences of larger secular society. There is always the temptation to just stop going to church, and sects without schools have no other institutions to rely on.

Sorry, I meant Harry, not Chris.

I spent my entire school career at High Church CofE schools in the north of England: both RC and CofE schools were state funded. (This is due to the historical situation one your earlier posters pointed out: however I woul add that is also a division within Protestant schools between ‘ordinary’ Anglicans, and the Evangelicals – this rift dates back to the 19th century.) I had minimal contact with Catholics from the age of 6 to 16, and although there was no overt sectarianism on the schools’ behalf, the students were about as sectarian as you could possibly be. There were continuous running battles and the Catholics were thought of by the Protestant children as somehow less than human. The two Catholic pupils who did attend our school (which was a Grammar school, where the Catholic school was Secondary Modern – something like the difference between an academy and vocational school) were completely ostracised for their entire school career. The school administration never acknowledged any of this, and by pretending it didn’t happen tacitly encouraged it.

Religion of whatever variety has no place in state education. Tax money shouldn’t ever be used to teach children to believe that they are somehow better than others, and no-one should be able to impose their religious views on anyone else. If they want to do that, let them pay premium rates for it, but no tax breaks.

Oooops. I’m so sorry for the multiple posts. Mem to self- ”Don’t keep punching post when Opera hangs….”

I think the faith school question in the UK is about more than just religion. Anglican (Church of England) schools in many areas are widely recognised as representing middle class ghettoization – where a self-reinforcing process of hypocritical church going by middle class parents gets their children into better performing church schools, which then do better because of all the middle class children, encouraging more middle class parents to make the pretence of religious belief to get their kids into a good school. Church of England schools serve very little purpose in the religious life of the country and are an anachronism – their primary role is to provide education for the middle classes away from the hoi polloi. It should also be noted that very many of these Anglican schools, particularly at the primary level, are only marginally Christian in their ethos. And this is for one of the main reasons why faith schools are not a good idea – there are often not enough places in an area for a child to go to a school consistent with their or their parent’s religious beliefs – if faith schools were to become truly faith based rather than nominally so the result would be to exclude students, not to teach them about the wonderful breadth of human belief – it is not the job of the state to fund a school system that is deliberately divisive and exclusive!

British non-religious state schools are typically much more tolerant of religious groups than would be the place in say France, and there are even many ostensibly Catholic state schools with Muslim majorities in some areas – I believe this more flexible approach obviates the need to accomodate religious groups by providing them with their own schools, and the broadly secular nature of the British people is such that I don’t see the risk of a religious backlash at the secularisation of the school system.

Muslim schools in areas of ethnic tensions (e.g. northern cities) will not resolve those tensions but merely serve to reinforce the separation of the two communities. This can already be seen in those few areas of the UK with longer running religious conflicts, most obviously Northern Ireland but also in Scotland – religious schools in those areas which -need- to address issues of religious strife only contribute to it.

I spent the mid-80s passing through both Catholic AND CofE UK education. As a Catholic in the CofE I totally wasn’t aware of any sectarian tension, and the little I remember of Catholic school was a hell of a lot of hymns. One strike against them was the lower preponderance of minorities – there was only one Jewish kid in my second school, and this was a remarkable phenomena. Contrast with secondary school which was 30-40% Jewish, together with maybe 20% Asian. Then again, this was CofE too; the difference being that it was a successful independent school, stacked with the north london middle class, along with the odd deviant like me. All my schools were religious, and I practised religious aspects up to the point (around 13) when I felt it wasn’t for me. I guess my 2ndary school was fairly commendable in that Thursdays were religious assembly, which meant a choice of 5 different assemblies (including a basically secular one).

I think the presence of faith schools has very little effect on religious tensions in areas where they do not already exist – partly because Catholic-Anglican conflict is almost unheard of, and partly because the Catholic and Anglican faith schools (particularly the latter) are not -very- overt in their religious indoctrination. More likely the kid at the Catholic school would be picked on for going to a different school, rather than being Catholic, since most children in Britain, and more particulalrly England, do not identify very strongly with religion.

On the other hand, in areas where there is existing religious tension, say in Scotland between the Presbyterian majority and the Catholic descendants of Irish immigrants, and most obviously in Northern Ireland, religious schools have been seen to increase the segregation and sense of difference. Although in both cases the separate Catholic schools are thought to have contributed to providing an education to a previiusly disadvantaged minority – although I’m not sure if that point of view can be taken to hold in the present.

_A Muslim friend of mine would not stone his wife to death if she was unfaithful (I don’t think – I’ll ask him). He is a bad Muslim._

I asked him. He said he didn’t think he’d want to stone her to death. Lucky her!

Ginger Yellow writes:

I don’t often say this, but I’m with Richard Dawkins all the way on this. The idea of a religious school has no place in a modern state…. Unless you have an explicit theocracy … then you cannot have a system that indoctrinates children into a particular belief system.

The best solution that I can see is to ban faith-based schools

Are you the Ginger (no colour specified at that time, I believe) with whom I had an exchange about the French hijab ban on afoe? If so, then I suspect we’ve done this dance before. But still:

The state acts properly, in my view, to set a curriculum and demand that all schools, state or private, teach it adequately. It may not, though, legitimately ban a school because it has a religious character. (I should note that I have no desire to place my own children in such a school.) To ban religious schools would be a grave infringement of religious liberty and freedom of association. It would also be a matter of the state trying to eliminate views it doesn’t like. That’s not the business states should be in.

You think that we cannot have a system that indoctrinates children into a particular belief system unless we have an explicit theocracy. But of course we do have such systems (more than one of them). Are we then living in a theocracy? The fact that we have religious schools (tied to any number of religions) existing in parallel with secular state schools argues strongly, I should think, that we are not. And that’s how it should be. Religion has no place in the running of a pluralist liberal democracy. It should be essentially invisible to the state.

As for Dawkins, he is within his rights to indoctrinate his own child any way he and his wife see fit. His opinions on how other parents should be permitted to indoctrinate their children are interesting, perhaps, but irrelevant. (I should add that I have no opinion as to how Dawkins should indoctrinate his child, beyond perhaps a vague hope that she not be brought up an axe-murderer; but if I did entertain such opinions, they would of course be equally irrelevant to Dawkins.)

“His opinions on how other parents should be permitted to indoctrinate their children are interesting, perhaps, but irrelevant.”

But why are they irrelevant? And irrelevant to what? Or in what sense?

Doesn’t that amount to saying that all opinions are irrelevant? That it’s only force that counts? If Dawkins’ opinions are irrlevant, why are we discussing things here? Why did Harry write his essay? Why doesn’t everyone everywhere just shut up and get on with doing whatever the law says they can do?

Hmm… that last paragraph was meant to be normally indented and preceded by an asterisk, not a bullet point. It seems that Movable Type’s autoformatting capabilities are too clever by half.

Just to clarify. I don’t mean to nag or over-interpret. I’m wondering if there isn’t some sort of special case thing going on here, whether consciously or not – whether because it’s about religion or children or both. If this isn’t, in other words, another example of the Special Rules for Religion that I’ve noticed in the past.

Hi Harry —

There are a couple of things I noticed that might weaken your argument a bit.

First, I think you could have made your point about ‘religious secession’ stronger had you mentioned the fairly drastic upswing in homeschooling over the past few years. This also fits in with the argument that the state’s ability to monitor educational standards is hindered by this secession.

Second, There are more choices available in the US than you allow for, and I think that might invalidate parts of your either/or argument. You mentioned a basic choice between public secular educaton and private religious education, but there are also private secular schools, homeschooling that may be either for religious or other reasons, magnet school programs, and charter schools. Plus, there is the “pick a school” option — in Seattle, for example, parents sign up to get their kids into a school of choice, no matter the catchment area. I think that this may have a much worse affect than even the public/private question, because it erodes the idea of a neighborhood comunity.

Other than that, I found the article pretty solid. Of course, you should know that I hate vouchers, like the idea of banning homeschooling but think the idea of allowing some state regulation in private religious schools would be a good trade-off for funding them, and generally think that there should be national educational standards. I’m also a member of the AFT — not the NEA, which means I have slightly less interest in preserving the educational establishment’s status quo — and as a person in higher ed with discipline degrees, I think we should get rid of education departments and degrees and merely provide certification for people with discipline degrees who want to teach K-12. There’s your grain of salt ;-)

To clarify – what I meant by “education is not an exclusive choice of parents that no one else has a say on” is with emphasis on “not exclusive” – of course parents choose how to bring up their kids, for better or worse, but when it comes to schools, aside from the fact there’s school systems and laws and curricula defined by public institutions, the idea is that’s an area of interaction between family and society at large. So no matter how many choices of different schools there are, the principle is that they exist to serve both the individual and society at large; and the individual in question is not the parent but the kid. Upbringing and education are not about moulding to one’s desires, but providing options.

And just in case I came across as too anti-religion, I don’t necessarily equate it with brainwashing or oppression, I do think some notion of religion can also be very beneficial to kids, but it’s all about how it’s done. I don’t see plunging them all day in a completely religious environment filtering everything else they learn as the best method to inspire in them a religious spirit, let alone a proper all-round education.

Whatever the case, realistically speaking religious schools are here to stay, so what I really have a problem is is the idea of public funding. I don’t see how equating that with separatism does any justice to the real issues behind that.

Wow, most of the thoughts that struck me while reading the piece have been spoken already. I’ll start my two cents’ worth by thanking Harry for an excellent article.

ADM raises an important point. Private schooling gets split into multiple categories, while homeschooling (at least for everyone I’ve known, and I was homeschooled K-12) is seen as a counterpoint to both public and private schooling. How else are you to ensure that your children recieve a good education if you cannot afford a private/parochial school and the public schools are horrid in your city? As a caveat though, homeschooling is largely irrelevant to this paper because the homeschooling population in the US is heavily made up of families who feel that the autonomy developed in an education should not include religious choice for the children, e.g. evangelical parents want their kids to grow up and be good evangelicals who never considered any other religion as a possibility. Recalling Mike Huben’s comment, these are people who disagree with the axioms presented and thus will not agree with your conclusions; how do you handle people with whom you cannot even have a good discussion about this?

Switching gears, an interesting comparison is the separationism/secularism dichotomy presented. In the US, this dichotomy does not seem to exist. American-style secularism precludes the possibility of state-funding of a religious private school because we consider that to be establishment of religion, and similarly regulation of private schools beyond the injunction to teach a certain amount of standard topics will be seen as interfering with “the free practice thereof”. Both are violations of the First Amendment, hence not allowable even in principle, so perhaps the US would be less useful as a control for study. This is especially harry to ponder since the US Supreme Court decided in the last couple of years that a dogged dedication to secularism was in itself tantamount to a religion, so we’re in a pickle.

As a side note, perhaps following parochial school students would provide a good way to study the development of autonomy. The environment is overtly Catholic but not necessarily domineering, the students come from a variety of backgrounds (although this varies by population served and amount of tuition), and anecdotally they get picked for quality of education as much as for being run by the Church. Even more detailed, perhaps compare autonomy developed in Catholic students who attend parochial school vs. Catholic students attending public schools? (I’m using the US definitions here and assuming that diagnostic criteria on autonomy have been created.)

Ophelia,

Obviously Dawkins’ opinions on how children should be raised have no actual force…. But I still think his opinion is ‘relevant’ in some sense.

Well, yes; in some sense. For example, they’d be relevant to a general discussion of how children should be raised. But they’re not relevant to the actual choices actual parents make (even where those parents share his opinions; it is their own opinions on the matter, not his, that are relevant to their choices).

And do you take Dawkins to be suggesting anything else? [I.e., presumably, that the state ought to use the force of law to put his opinions in practice.] I don’t. I think he’s just expressing a strong normative opinion, which is not an unusual thing to do, surely.

Surely not. I suspect that, if Dawkins had his druthers, religious schools would be banned. But I also think he’s enough of a liberal not to want his druthers here.

It was in fact Ginger who advocated an actual ban. I should have been more careful not to impute his/her views to Dawkins.

I’m wondering if … this isn’t… another example of the Special Rules for Religion that I’ve noticed in the past.

It’s not, though. For ‘raising children in a particular religion’, you may substitute ‘inculcating children with the values of [the Republican party] [vegetarianism] [Manchester United fandom] [etc.]’. My answer would not change.

My curiosity is whetted, for some reason. I suppose because I think there are some basic assumptions here that are not as self-evident as they may appear.

“Society should step in to prevent actual abuse. Short of that, it is up to parents to raise their children as they think best.”

But is that true? What if parents raise their children to be murderers or rapists or sadists? Are children really purely the business of their parents or owners? If so, why? Wasn’t that idea given up quite a long time ago when universal education was made mandatory?

“Surely not. I suspect that, if Dawkins had his druthers, religious schools would be banned. But I also think he’s enough of a liberal not to want his druthers here.”

I’m not so sure (not that you claimed to be sure either!). Maybe this is a UK-US difference? It’s not considered a completely loony idea in the UK to get rid of private education altogether. That being the case, it would seem equally reasonable to get rid of religious education on the same sort of grounds. So it’s not necessarily as clear in the UK that that is an illiberal idea as you may take it to be.

Harry, your friend Adam Swift must have some thoughts on all this, right?

Yeah, that’s what I meant to do, highlight some tensions. I just think it’s too easy to say that liberalism and liberals can have only one straighforward view on the subject.

And there’s another point which I hadn’t quite thought about before –

“For ‘raising children in a particular religion’, you may substitute ‘inculcating children with the values of [the Republican party] [vegetarianism] [Manchester United fandom] [etc.]’. My answer would not change.”

But the comparison isn’t entirely right – it’s only partly right. Because religion is not just a system of ideas or attitudes, it is also a system of truth claims. The truth claims generally lack evidence. Education is not supposed to be in the business of teaching factual untruths – although of course there are notoriously a lot of tensions here too. But that’s just it – that’s one reason religious schools could be considered a problem, and why it’s too simple to say the [only] liberal thing to do is to give them ‘freedom.’

To put it another way, I’m not sure the issue can be discussed clearly if the fact that religions are based on a lot of unfounded truth claims is just ignored.

Maybe someone who understands US secularism could explain if and how you justify honesty, goodness, and morality to children without reference to any religion.
Is it acceptable in the US for one child to claim that they are superior to other students on the basis of their race or culture? If not, on what basis.
Is Christmas Day a national holiday in the US?

Is the US just too diverse to allow any concept of the common good?
Swearing to the US flag and constitution would appear to be a rival for the affections for either the Pope or Makkah.

For ‘raising children in a particular religion’, you may substitute ‘inculcating children with the values of [the Republican party] [vegetarianism] [Manchester United fandom] [etc.]’.

That’s an absurd comparison, Mrs Tilton. Not just for the reason Ophelia says, about religion being a life-defining system of thought and behaviour that is quite different from vegetarianism or football fandom or even political ideologies.

The comparison is also impossible because there’s no “vegetarian schools”. There’s no “Republican party schools”. There’s no “Manchester Utd fandom schools”, as entertaining for the kids as that would be, there just isn’t.

And even if there were, in some strange universe, that kind of schools, it’d still be very hard to imagine how they could bend the teaching of other topics like history and science to suit their agendas the same way religions do. It’s hard to imagine Manchester United fundamentalists teaching kids that the world has been created by their goalkeeper. Or that the human species was made out of the turf from the football stadium, and therefore, all other explanations of how species evolved are invalid. Or that the Englightenemnt was a bad thing because it was anti-Man Utd. And if there were such nutters, and if there were parents who wanted their kids instructed like that, would that be allowed at all? I think not!

(Hey, you started the comparison, you might as well pursue it further, even if it becomes even more apparent that it’s ridiculous – and a mockery of religion as well).

Pepi- The idea that there’s any infringement of freedoms in controlling what gets taught and how in any school is very much a misconception and a rhetorical tool, especially when it comes to religion.

Think about what the First Amendment says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment or religion nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” It is satisfies a state’s interest in having an educated populace to stipulate and enforce a requirement for a certain level of education; for example, Texas requires that all students get 4 years of math, English, science, and 3 years government/civics; if this does not sufficiently develop autonomy, the requirements can be altered.

The rub is that education is so deeply formative in a person’s life. If you feel that part of your religion is to make sure that your children are brought up in your faith, then a requirement that education be provided by a secular school can be seen as prohibiting free exercise. In this case, if you send your kids to a public school, you commit a sin of omission by way of what’s not in the curriculum because your children are not being inculcated with that which your religion says it is your duty to impress upon them. Thus while you see it as a misconception to think that religious freedom is infringed by regulation of education, the other side of the debate sees it as infringement specifically because they are not deciding what does or does not get taught to their children beyond the basic academic courses or how the material is taught.

squiddy – “No vegetarian schools? Been to Islington or Totnes recently?”

Oh come on. Not schools in which the pupils can get served vegetarian menus in the canteen. Schools where vegetarianism would be a religion determining the whole teaching. That’s the comparison Mrs Tilton was making, that any other choice of behaviour/philosophy of life that the parents make for their kids is similar to religion. It’s not.

If you were only making a joke, then nevermind my reply :)

—-

agm: you forget that religion can be exercised and taught and passed on to your kids _anyway_, in all degrees from strict to open-minded, even if you send them to a secular school.

What religious schools (and parents who choose them – it’s never the young kids choosing, obviously) claim as a right is not “free exercise of religion”. It’s the right to infuse ALL of the education programme – which is determined at state level in its essentials (curricula, rules, exams, etc). – within a religious framework, that can be strict or less strict, but the point is, even in the cases where it doesn’t get to creationism or historical revisionism or ideological alteration of certain matters and topics of study, it affects the entire school environment.

That’s quite different from just practising religion.

All schools do have a lot of freedom to choose how they want to teach things, what methods they want to use, and of course each teacher brings his or her own view of the world, which can include ideologies. There’s even flexibility on the choices of subjects and so on. But it should all still be within as neutral and diversified as possible. When you bring religion into the picture, and let it determine everything inside the school, the very nature of the school itself, that whole idea is turned upside down. I can’t think of anything other than religion that can affect the whole way things are taught and received by kids in such fundamental ways.

If you feel that part of your religion is to make sure that your children are brought up in your faith, then a requirement that education be provided by a secular school can be seen as prohibiting free exercise.

Nope! Just like existing laws (classic obvious example, abortion, divorce, etc.) that do not comply with one particular religious view are not an “infringement” on your rights – they’re just there for everyone, you included, and you have to respect them even if you religion disagrees. You can still follow your religion anyway, no one will force you to choose other paths, but you’re not free to demand the state abolishes laws just because they’re not ok for your beliefs. Or that it changes the legal framework from secular to religious just because you think religion comes first. Or that there should be a sort of free area for you to impose your own religious view above the legal one.

It’s not exactly the same situation, but the underlying principle is the same.

Religious schools are sort of mini-theocracies within a non-theocratic state. Even when they’re not strictly religious and open enough, they’re still claiming for themselves a space where their ideology can supersede the _common_ secular framework for education that all other schools share.

In this case, if you send your kids to a public school, you commit a sin of omission by way of what’s not in the curriculum because your children are not being inculcated with that which your religion says it is your duty to impress upon them.

Nonsense. No one prevents you from sending your kids to church and to religious classes after school. In fact, I believe, if done in a non-compulsory way, and by taking into consideration the kids and their own choices and preferences, that’s the best way to encourage a healthier approach to religion, as opposed to indoctrination. Well, second best to letting them choose when they’re grown up enough to do it themselves. But that’s another matter.

What if you’re Muslim and believe in polygamy. Are current marriage laws prohibiting bigamy and polygamy an infringement on your rights? a sin of omission? You may well believe it’s like that, if you’re a strict Muslim. Doesn’t make it true, though! It’s not religions dictating laws.

I believe parents have no right to demand that _non-religious_ matters of study in schools be dominated by a religious approach, that the whole school environment that their kids are compelled to attend is entirely dominated by a religious approach.

And I would argue it’s not just my belief. If “the other side” of the debate includes people who think it’s ok to teach creationism instead of evolutionary theories, then they’re the ones _refusing_ a whole framework on which not just the school system and education but all laws are based on, outside of theocracies.

So the “two sides” of the story are not exactly equivalent, because one is at the basis of secular democracies, the other doesn’t.

I can understand the reasons for compromise that allows religious schools to operate. I can accept that. But in principle, it is a contradiction and it is a special exemption granted to religious groups. It is not justified by abusing the concept of “freedom of practice” to extend beyond its scope. And at the expense of children. Where is *their* freedom to choose?

Dawkins does indeed suggest an outright ban. Moreover, he says that religious schools (as political schools would be) are institutionalised child abuse, something I would not say.

The point is that if parents want to bring up their child in a particular religion, then the state shouldn’t stop them (although I have a feeling Dawkins would disagree). But the state recognises that formal education is too important to be entirely left to the personal preferences of parents. Between the ages of 0 and 16 a child’s main formative influences are family, friends and school. If all three of those are proselytising a particular religion or belief system, what possible choice does the child have to form its own beliefs independently? Even if he/she doesn’t adopt the belief system pushed by parents, school and friends, the one they do adopt will be a reaction against it. Believe it or not, secular schools with comprehensive religious education increase diversity of religion. Religious schools close minds.

Just saying that I hope I odn’t seem rude not responding to anything — I’ve been unavoidably without access for 24 hours and now feel a bit overwhelmed by everything on here. Keep going — I’m learning, if not responding.

But yes, Ophelia, Swift has lots of opinions on all that stuff, me too — we’ll be presenting our line on it all when its ready, I promise…

agm: are you only playing devil’s advocate? it doesn’t sound so. In any case I was addressing the point, not taking up an argument with you personally. Sorry if I came across so arrogant and patronising. I do feel strongly on this, and I’m insisting on the principle, even if in reality I accept the compromises.

But I’m not saying ‘it’s like that only because I say so’.

All I’m saying is, we should not just consider the complaints of religious groups – or anybody really! – about being infringed upon every time someone reminds them there’s common rules to be respected. Those rules and the framework in which they are devised come first. The whole of society comes first.

In other words, just because someone complains, doesn’t mean they’re actually being infringed upon. Or should we just say oh ok then, we’ll have it your way? That demand that the perceptions from religious groups who want religious schooling should be the only factor worth considering is basically what I described as nonsense, as I can’t find another term for it. It simply makes no sense. It is not applied to anybody else, only to religion.

But religious groups are not parallel institutions with _equal_ power to that of lawmakers. They shouldn’t be given special exemptions no one else is granted. Ideally speaking.

Whether the state is justified in regulating religious practice is a different issue than whether a particular regulation infringes upon religious practice

No state regulates “religious practice”. No state tells churches and religious leaders what to preach or not. No state orders parents to have their kids practice any religion, or prevents them from doing that. The target of regulation and standards setting that we’re discussing here is not religion, but only education and the school system.

Religious schools are *not* equal to religious practice. Education is about everything else that is not religion – that can still have all the place it desires outside of, and parallel to, schooling. It’s not like without religious schools, there’s no chance to practice religion. Schooling is a public matter, not just a private one. Especially if those schools get public funding.

The question is not one of infringement

No, indeed, but those claiming the right to religious schooling, or even to public funding of it, put it in terms of infringement, like you said yourself. And get away with it!

but whether the state’s interest (public order, educated populace, etc.) outweighs a given exercise of religion (cannabalism, peyote use, homeschooling, etc.)

Yes. And the state’s interest always outweighs the demands of a religion _when those demands exceed the religious sphere_ – and the _totality_ of education does exceed that. I guess that’s where the disagreement really is. The concept of education.

Compulsory attendance at a public school would be an infringement of their religious freedom, period.

That’s a perception, but _it doesn’t mean it’s true_ or valid. Legally speaking it’s certainly not. Everyone has to respect a legal authority as separate from religion. They can’t start crying “infringement” just because that legal system – and the education system – doesn’t suit their religious beliefs, _when it was never meant to_ in the first place. That’s all I really meant with that “nonsense” comment which you may have found too arrogant.

What Ginger Yellow said, basically.

Ginger Yellow: I completely agree there. I’m also biased, as someone who attended first non-religious state schools, then a few years at a religious private school. The way the rights of children are so often completely ignored in this respect bothers me a lot.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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?