What’s Next?

‘The government is lining up with religious groups to assert that faith schools make a positive contribution to community cohesion in England.’

Wow, that’s a scary sentence.

I’ve sat here and thought really hard about this and I’m confused, how can this possibly be true? I went to a mild faith school that certainly had a community, but was this because of its faith? The issue here isn’t that faith schools aren’t capable of brining community cohesion; they’re saying that they’re actually better at it than a secular ‘community’ school would be. I’m stumped; do communities bond more watching the nativity than any other kind of play? Does collectively closing our eyes and mumbling to a deity (especially bearing in mind how unlikely it is everyone present agrees which one) bring us closer together than actually talking to each other?

As always there’s an appeal to multiculturalism here but this is missing the point of being multicultural, surely true multiculturalism would involve making culture and religion an increasingly private affair and not an issue for the state? We’re obviously stepping away from the idea that schools should teach truth here by allowing multiple faiths in on the act; by definition a maximum of one can be right. If pressed on this, they’d probably respond that this gives everyone the opportunity to ‘find their own path to truth’, but then why I am funding someone to inflict their point of view on a child? If the religion is true surely these children would find their own way to it, is God’s message really so pitiful these days it needs the state to provide a captive audience?

There are of course practical issues, some faith schools require proofs of the child and their parents’ faith to let them in, how can that possibly be positive to community cohesion? Why should local parents have to prove to their tax funded school that they attend church x times in order to secure a good education for their child? Whilst Nick Gibb says faith schools promote ‘choice’, do they really? If there’s a choice of a few schools in an area and one requires your 11 year old child to prove they’re a practicing Christian, is that more or less choice? Faiths schools have also been known to use their ability to select on religious grounds to practice social selection by looking at parents’ marriage certificates and occupations. Some ask kids to write accounts of themselves and their home lives under the guise of examining their commitment to their faith but really this allows the schools to skim off the more articulate ones, giving the impression that faith schools have a special knack for education, when really it’s good ol’ fashioned selection.

Perhaps as worrying is what this suggests about the thinking behind it. This is the government saying that religion is essential for young people in education, an assertion I’d flat out deny. Which is more beneficial: religious teachings or being taught how to think? Which is more effective for teaching morality to a child; someone telling you one of the Ten Commandments is not to steal, or a discussion where it’s discussed exactly why stealing is wrong? Far better than imposing an authoritative morality is building up a moral framework inside the child to allow them to evaluate new situations and understand what’s right and wrong in any given circumstance. What’s more, there’s evidence for this. In schools where philosophy is taught at a young age, there are less playground fights, better behaved kids with greater confidence and self-esteem and believe it or not, children become measurably smarter than those control groups that are not taught it. This really is a no-brainer.

Nothing stops faith schools benefiting from these secular methods and I know from personal experience that not all faith schools are like Vardy’s, but I’ve still yet to find an benefit to faith in school. Religious Education may give benefits in understanding, but teaching religious morality does not when teaching philosophy does. Ignoring the actively anti-community selection methods of some schools I still can’t see how faith schools (which while being perhaps being accepting of other faiths cannot help but promote a singular faith)can be better for multi-faith communities that schools that don’t take sides and teach what can actually be known.

So the question remains: What can faith schools do better?