Faith schools: suffer the little children — and they do

The BBC Radio 4 programme Beyond Belief is a mixed bag. Each week Ernie Rae speaks with studio guests and includes a pre-recorded report or interview. I've mentioned a few previously on this blog. Often the subject matter is of only marginal interest to me but this afternoon's edition was about faith schools, featuring the Rev Janina Ainsworth — Church of England Chief Education Officer, Ibrahim Hewitt — former head of Al-Aqsa Primary School in Leicester and now an inspector of faith schools, and Andrew Copson — Chief Executive of the British Humanist Association.

The programme is available as a podcast, and this week's edition is downloadable as mp3 audio here:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/belief/belief_20110214-1700a.mp3

Janina Ainsworth seemed convinced that faith schools were inherently a "good thing", while Ibrahim Hewitt's views were all over the place. I particularly liked Ernie Rae's question to him towards the end of the broadcast, as to how probability is taught during maths lessons in a Muslim school. Apparently the children are told that there's no such thing as chance: if you throw dice, the results are not random but willed by God.

During the entire discussion Andrew Copson had the firmest grasp on the issues, seeing through the equivocation and appeals to emotion of the other two guests. I suspect that even Ernie Rae has serious doubts about the validity of faith schools. Given his introduction at the start of the broadcast, I don't think he was merely playing devil's advocate here.

But the most telling point in the programme was a recorded interview with Peter Flack, assistant secretary of the Leicester National Union of Teachers, who believes faith schools are a danger to society. He asked:

"What is so different about children who come from families with religious beliefs, that they need to be educated separately, that they need to be segregated from everybody else?"

Later in the day we had a perfect illustration of the danger Peter Flack warns about. Channel Four's Dispatches: Lessons in Hate and Violence, presented by Tazeen Ahmad and broadcast at 8 pm (with a repeat at 2:40 am), showed precisely what can happen to children if they are left in the clutches of faith-based education. We're not talking only of incitement to violence — these children (some as young as six) were being repeatedly hit. The violence was recorded as part of Dispatches' trademark "secret filming". What's worse, the featured establishments had been inspected and passed as fit places for young children to be "instructed".

A trailer clip of the programme is available here:
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/dispatches/video/series-80/episode-1/lessons-in-hate-and-violence

Those in favour of faith-based education often speak of it enabling children to become part of the community. The evidence suggests, however, that the "community" of which they speak is a narrow one, deliberately segregated from the wider society into which it ought to be integrated.

A creationist bleats about Dawkins (again)

In the light of Richard Dawkins' latest TV programme on More4, Faith Schools Menace? the Creation Science Movement has posted an article about Dawkins and the British Humanist Association on its website: "Richard Dawkins, the BHA and a New Inquisition".

Dawkins in fact wishes to abolish faith schools, but he acknowledges that their teaching standards are often better than secular schools. So good in fact that he would be willing to lie to get his children into one. He comments that he does not blame those atheists who pretend to be religious in order to get their children into the best faith schools, and comments that as he has 'absolutely no belief at all, I wouldn't be betraying anything' by lying and pretending to be religious.

Dawkins' point was that he would be prepared to lie about his lack of religious belief in order to counteract the inequitable availability of state schools. Faith schools discriminate against children whose parents have contributed to the funding of these schools. It's wrong that such children should be arbitrarily excluded.

What Dawkins fails to understand is that the quality of the education in faith schools is to do with their ethos.

What the (anonymous) author of this article fails to mention is that the "ethos" of the school is only part of the story. Faith schools practice selection on the basis of parents' religion. As was made clear in the programme, such selection tends to filter out less able children due to their background (their parents' willingness to do what it takes to gain admission for their offspring is a major part of that background).

Dawkins own words reveal that he is willing to destroy the very thing, the inherent values, that make faith schools so good.

As outlined above, it's not the inherent values that are the cause of good league-table performance.

The BHA has lobbied the Education Secretary Michael Gove and reports suggest that the policy developed will seek to exclude 'extremist groups' from taking over schools, and furthermore there would be no creationism taught in science classes.

Quite right too.

Andrew Copson of the BHA is concerned about the 'dangers of the influences of fundamentalist groups in our school system.' Presumably he doesn't mean to imply that the BHA owns the school system by use of the word 'our', but the faux pas is evident nonetheless.

This is a telling criticism that exposes CSM's misunderstanding (or deliberate misrepresentation) of the state school system. Voluntary aided faith schools are state schools. Over 90% of funding for these schools comes from the taxpayer — they are indeed our schools.

He is perhaps too blinkered to know that true pluralism must respect those who have different religious beliefs to his own and allow them to have an equal voice in education.

Andrew Copson is not the one who is blinkered. In the matter of education funded by the taxpayer, "those who have different religious beliefs" are not entitled to "an equal voice". In the case of voluntary aided faith schools, they are entitled to — at most — 10% of a voice.

The BHA wants us to believe that secular humanism is religiously neutral, but it is not. It is instead biased in favour of atheism.

First, atheism is not a religion. Second, the author of this article clearly doesn't know the definition of "secular" (1. not religious, sacred or spiritual; 2. not subject to or bound by religious rule; Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th ed).

So the BHA's claim that it seeks to develop 'totally inclusive schools for children of all faiths and none' is entirely bogus. The BHA wants atheistic humanism to have a dominant position in schools and by its actions wishes to treat those who have religious and scientific convictions about creation as second-class citizens.

Not "atheistic humanism", secular humanism; there's a difference — see the definition above. It's entirely right that state-funded education should be secular in nature, without giving preference to any religious belief over another. As for scientific "convictions" — these need to be ratified by the scientific community before they are included in the school curriculum.

We wonder why the BHA should have such influence in society that greatly exceeds its popular mandate, especially when advocating such extreme views. Christians and other religious groups greatly outweigh the membership of the BHA.

Popular mandate? BHA members are not elected by the British public, but neither are Christians and other religious groups. The BHA, however, recognises that Christians and other religious groups have disproportionate influence in society, and therefore seeks to bring that influence down to more equitable levels.

Children must be given the opportunity to learn skills in the critical analysis of complex arguments and data; skills that are the hallmarks of true education.

This is precisely what the BHA is campaigning for.

We would ask that children and students be allowed to learn skills in critical thinking within the science class and be allowed to question the problems with evolution while respecting their faith. Anything less is not science, but humanistic, religious dogma of a fundamentalist nature.

Children and students should indeed be encouraged to learn critical thinking skills, but primary and secondary education science classes are not the places to discuss theories that have no evidential base. Creationism is not science, it is religious dogma of a fundamentalist nature.

If you're opposed to faith schools, should you work for them?

(I've been meaning to write this post for a while. It concerns a matter of integrity and could possibly brand me a hypocrite.)

I'm not in favour of faith schools. I think they are ideologically divisive and work against integrating different cultures into society at large. Isolating children in a learning culture that explicitly excludes those of different ethnic, cultural or religious origins may reinforce a specific social heritage, but it also encourages an undesirable "them and us" attitude. A particularly illustrative example is that of Northern Ireland where sectarian strife has been inculcated into generations of schoolchildren, leading to inter-faith violence that remains difficult to eradicate.

At the same time I understand why caring parents tend to favour faith schools: the standards of behaviour and academic achievement in those schools appear in general to be higher than in non-faith schools. The perceived differential, however, is less to do with the disputable benefits of faith-based education than with faith schools' use of a form of selection; faith schools, on the pretext of a religious test of applicants (actually of their parents), are able to screen out pupils who would tend to lower their averages.

So I think there's a good case for saying that faith schools are unfairly catering for a privileged elite, and the extra feature — religious indoctrination — is just an additional undesirable add-on.

I don't believe faith schools are in general a good idea. But in my day job I deal with faith schools — specifically, voluntary aided Catholic primary (and a few secondary) schools — providing services that are paid for 90% by the state and 10% by the church. I could therefore say that if 85% of my living comes from work in faith schools, 8.5% of that living is funded by the church.

Doesn't this run counter to my ethical principles? Am I not supporting the idea of faith schools by not quitting my job and finding something else to do?

Not necessarily.

The people who benefit from my work are the pupils, and to some extent the teachers. Improving conditions and facilities for children aged 4 to 11 (or 15 in the case of secondary schools), who are unlikely to have had any say in where they go to school, is a matter of making a difference where one can. The pupils and teachers are not responsible for the system, and meanwhile children need to be educated.

The indoctrination aspect is of course a concern to me. The schools I visit display religious imagery — and there's plenty of stuff about Jesus, as one would expect from Catholic schools, but I'm pleased to report that I've never seen any creationist nonsense. I'd heard that the Catholics don't like Harry Potter, but my observations indicate otherwise. The preponderance of religious ritual in these schools, however, is worrying — in the case of primary schools this is definitely indoctrination of children too young to know what's being done to them. Visiting a Catholic primary school on the day of First Communion is a disturbing experience (and goes some way to explaining the incidence of paedophilia in the Catholic priesthood — but that's probably best left to another blog-post).

If these schools didn't exist I would hope to be providing the same services to secular state schools — it's an accident of my employment that the firm I work for has connections with the Catholic Church, whose local administrators turn to us for professional services.

Ultimately it comes down to this: I'm against faith schools because although they may be giving children a good academic education, they do a disservice by indoctrinating them with religious dogma that's incapable of objective substantiation, and they are socially divisive. If I can improve their conditions to the extent that their environment is more conducive to learning in general, I hope the children will get an even better academic education, as a result of which they'll have a better chance, as they grow older, of seeing through the religious nonsense.

Being as it were on the inside, I also get to see how one particular denomination of faith-based education operates. It's far from ideal, but I believe I can live (and work) with it.

The Atheist and the Bishop - BBC Radio 4

The atheist is A. C. Grayling; the bishop is Richard Harries. This is the second of three 45-minute radio programmes "in which an atheist and a bishop come together to apply their own philosophies to the experiences of people they meet, with Jane Little chairing the discussion."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00m1nm2

The highlight is a visit to a London Academy faith school to talk with three of the students - a Muslim, an atheist and a Roman Catholic - and A. C. Grayling asks the Muslim what will happen to the atheist when she dies. They also speak to Samantha Stein, director of Camp Quest UK.

For UK listeners the audio can be streamed for a few days from the BBC iPlayer:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00m6ggf

For those beyond the reach of iPlayer (or after the stream expires) a 40 Mb mp3 of the programme is available from RapidShare:
http://rapidshare.com/files/272317918/The_Atheist_and_the_Bishop_-_Episode_2.mp3

The Camp Quest segment is also featured at their website:
http://www.camp-quest.org.uk/news/cq-atheist-and-the-bishop/

UPDATE: As is my wont with such stuff, a couple of days before posting I emailed this to RD.net, and it's now in their newsfeed:
http://richarddawkins.net/article,4237,n,n