Is someone out there having Charlie Brooker’s babies? If not, we should get right on that. Here he is after watching Newsnight’s report on the Brain Gym, which is…I’ll let him explain:

Brain Gym, y’see, is an “educational kinesiology” programme designed to improve kiddywink performance. It’s essentially a series of simple exercises lumbered with names that make you want to steer a barbed wire bus into its creator’s face. One manoeuvre, in which you massage the muscles round the jaw, is called the “energy yawn”. Another involves activating your “brain buttons” by forming a “C” shape with one hand and pressing it either side of the collarbone while simultaneously touching your stomach with the other hand.

Throughout the report I was grinding my teeth and shaking my head - a movement I call a “dismay churn”. Not because of the sickening cutesy-poo language, nor because I’m opposed to the nation’s kids being forced to exercise (make them box at gunpoint if you want) but because I care about the difference between fantasy and reality, both of which are great in isolation, but, like chalk and cheese or church and state, are best kept separate.

Confuse fantasy with reality and you might find yourself doing crazy things, like trying to wave hello to Ian Beale each time you see him on the telly, or buying homeopathic remedies - both of which are equally boneheaded pursuits. (Incidentally, if anyone disagrees with this assessment and wants to write in defending homeopathy, please address your letters to myself c/o the Kingdom of Narnia.)

Brain Gym is a government-endorsed program. Doesn’t it break your heart?

My university’s library has a huge photography section, and I’m allowed to keep books indefinitely providing nobody else requests them. I checked out Martin Evening’s guide to Adobe Lightroom in late November, and quickly glanced at some issues that were confusing me at the time. The book has been in the ‘I should really read that properly’ pile ever since, until yesterday when guilt got the better of me. I moved it to the ‘take back to uni’ pile, then just before midnight started flicking through it. I was still going at 0200.

Adobe Lightroom is my favourite image processing program, and I thought I had a pretty good grasp of how to use it. I really didn’t. The Lightroom manual detailed a huge variety of tips and tricks, as well as a few features I’d somehow missed. It also took me step by step through a digital workflow, explaining when it’s best to make each adjustment, giving basic primers in tonal range and broadly indicating what I should be trying to achieve. For example, I now understand how Lightroom tells me about overblown highlights, know a quick way to temporarily view only these pure-white areas of an image, and can judge which to leave intact. I also now see that Lightroom’s tone curves are much more powerful than I realised, and are in fact superior to Photoshop’s. I’d only scraped the surface of their functionality before.

I wish I’d read this book months ago! I re-edited a batch of photos using the book’s workflow suggestions this morning, and they all looked much better. Embarrassingly so - I replaced their Flickr versions immediately. 

I should have known better. I’m reasonably proficient in Dreamweaver, and that’s entirely down to working through a huge manual when I bought the full version. Such complex software is fun to play around with, but playing can’t pick up design rationales and subtleties. Lesson re-learned.

The government is considering dropping oral tests from language GCSEs as they are ‘too stressful’, according to the BBC. The idea has been slammed by Ex-Ofsted-chief Chris Woodhead, but then Chris Woodhead’s disdain is traditionally a litmus test for good ideas, so that counts as a plus.

Is it a good idea? I don’t know enough about child psychology and the goals of the education system to make an informed decision, but I will say this: my German GCSE oral was by far the most terrifying experience in my school career. I was in the top set for German, with a great, non-scary teacher who prepared us for literally months before the exam, and I worked hard to get ready, yet I still remember the abject terror of waiting for that half-hour session. It’s on a par with my driving test as the most nervous I’ve been, and its memory affected my A-level exam: I wasn’t going to put myself through all that again, and I forced myself not to care. It was one of the few times I ever completely flunked an exam¹.

For this reason I certainly don’t think the idea is ’stupid’, as Chris Woodhead says. Other reactions on the page include ‘life is stressful’, which is pathetic: in my experience life is very rarely that stressful, and when it is we hate it. Or someone else claims the point of learning a language is to speak it, so what use is a GCSE without a spoken test? In reply I’d question whether such a stressful situation can possibly give an accurate account of a student’s ability - wouldn’t it be testing their ability to deal with (unrealistic) pressure as much as their language skills? Plus, they only want to scrap the exam itself - teachers would still assess oral language skills in other ways. The reactions overall suggest a fair amount of ‘I went through it, why shouldn’t they?’, which I despise.

The report suggests that teacher assessments could adequately replace the oral exam. Sounds reasonable to me. The more I think about it, the more I’m in favour.

1. past tense as there are no exams in my degree - ra! [↩]

Stephen Law is having an interesting discussion with the head of a UK Islamic school. Prof. Law quoted the head as saying “[t]he essential purpose of the Islamia school as with all Islamic schools is to inculcate profound religious belief in the children.” and suggested this was an intolerable system of education. The head’s response includes:

It is slightly absurd to imagine what approach we should have taken to teaching about Islam to these Muslim children if the objection is to us telling them that Islam is true. The reason we offer to Muslim children for accepting the truth of Islam is that this is what Allah wants us to believe, what he has written in the Qur’an, and also what the prophet Muhammad wants us to believe – him being the messenger of Allah. Are we really supposed to then say, “But you shouldn’t believe that just because we say so; you should make your own minds up”? That is not what Islam teaches. In Islam, there is no question about the existence of god, the validity of the Qur’an or the veracity of the prophet. Nor, given that, is there a sensible choice about being Muslim. It would be self-contradictory to teach Islam to children as a matter of choice based on personal opinion.

Isn’t that interesting? None of the slippery avoidances you find in Christian responses, it’s just straight out: our Holy Whatever says we are not to question it, so we won’t. Aside from the obvious objections, I wonder if he finds it coincidental that what he’d consider the most important concept in history just so happens to demand unquestioning acceptance. Why would the most important concept in history need to declare itself above the marketplace of ideas? It’s a ridiculous, desperate strategy, but one that unfortunately seems to be psychologically effective. The objections to The Golden Compass show the same lack of perspective, and I like the way this columnist puts it (via Pharyngula):

If your ancient, authoritarian, immutable belief system is threatened by a handful of popular novels, if your ostensibly all-powerful, unyielding creed is rendered meek and defenseless when faced with the story of a fiery, rebellious young girl who effortlessly rejects your stiff misogynistic religiosity in favor of adventure, love, sex, the ability to discover and define her soul on her own terms, well, it might be time for you to roll it all up and shut it all down and crawl back home, and let the divine breathe and move and dance as she sees fit.

Exactly. I’ve said it before, but it’s always worth repeating: The War for Children’s Minds is a bloody brilliant book. It doesn’t bash religion, it bashes teaching what to think instead of how to think. This problem seems to go hand-in-hand with religious education, but needn’t.

I’m increasingly of the opinion that Critical Thinking classes for secondary (junior?) school students would be the best education initiative in decades.

A Tyneside headmaster’s attempts to reduce the role of religion in his school have turned up some interesting insights into the process of educational lawmaking:

‘We wanted a fundamental change in the relationship with the school and the established religion of the country,’ said Kelley, talking about the proposals he put forward towards the end of Tony Blair’s premiership. ‘They accepted it would be popular but said it was politically impossible.’

Why impossible?

One senior figure at the then Department for Education and Skills, told Kelley that bishops in the House of Lords and ministers would block the plans.

Easy solution to that.

Religion, they added, was ‘technically embedded’ in many aspects of education.

Not sure what that means. Which areas? I don’t personally remember religion (read: Christianity) turning up much in my education, other than assemblies and incredibly-biased RE and PSE (’personal social education’) lessons.

‘I feel that children have a right to not having a particular point of view,’ said Kelley. ‘They should not be promoted to a political party, nor should they to a religion. The daily act of worship is, I think, inappropriate at school.’ [...] The schools, says Kelley, ‘directly or indirectly influence children into a belief that a particular faith is preferable either to other faiths or to a lack of faith’. He adds: ‘That is not, in my view, fair to a child and it is not offering them the opportunity to choose freely. The problem we are left with is a 19th-century architecture of education in a 21st-century environment.

Quite. I don’t understand why the comparison with hypothetical political schools isn’t a killer argument.

The CoE aren’t happy with the suggestion of reducing religion’s role in education. However, their argument doesn’t prove the point they think it does:

A spokesman for the Church of England said: ‘If he is arguing for a way for individual schools to opt out of those bits of the act he does not like that is not something we would support. Either overtly or by default, this country is still a Christian one.’

This has always been, and remains, a mind-bogglingly stupid argument. The possibility that religious education produces better behaviour, although probably not true and morally eviscerated by Stephen Law in The War for Children’s Minds, is at least mildly grown-up, but “things shouldn’t change because they just shouldn’t” is begging the question and doesn’t count as arguing at all.

This attitude, combined with the continued expansion of faith schools, is disappointing, but I’m optimistic in the long-term because the historical, moral and political arguments against them are so strong. An atheist and a Christian should come to exactly the same conclusion when it comes to teaching children: teach them how to think, and let them make up their own minds¹. An education system weighed in any particular direction is clearly, unambiguously, wrong.

I have suspicions about the motives of informed people who suggest anything but a secular framework. It’s a plausible hypothesis that teaching kids to think critically leads to more atheist/agnostic/freethinkers than if you surround them with religious teachers and symbols. Hence the Pope and his laughable rejections of logic and reason as just other forms of indoctrination - clearly desperate and clutching at straws, but this sounds less mental than ”do what I say or you’ll go to hell”.

There are, of course, plenty of very nice people, both religious and not, who will disagree. I may think they’re wrong, but convincing them often isn’t the real problem - it’s a common issue in arguments involving religion that you come across very pleasant people who get genuinely upset when their beliefs are criticised. But, to be unashamedly melodramatic, education is too important to the future of humanity for people’s feelings to get in the way of progress. I’m optimistic, but I don’t think it’ll be easy.

Link originally via B&W.

1. sounds like an intelligent design argument. Isn’t. [↩]

Philosopher Stephen Law is generating plenty of discussion with his suggestion that private schools be banned. He says the current system is inherently unfair, and reasons as follows: there is a clear bias towards the privately educated in high-status jobs. This is because the wealthy advantage their children by paying for a ‘better’ education. Whether the education is ‘better’ in terms of educational merit or simply the doors it opens is moot - the end result shows a significant advantage to the privately educated, who aren’t actually any different from the non-privately educated in terms of intelligence or potential¹, but who happen to have wealthy parents. This is clearly unfair to those who happen to be born into poorer families, who don’t get the same chances.

Anyway, an obvious solution is to ensure everybody is educated to the same standard. The idea of banning private schools immediately sets right off against left, but needn’t. The same result could be achieved with only private schools, if top-ups weren’t allowed - every child would have exactly the same amount of money spent on them. The usual Libertarian the-state-is-rubbish-at-everything argument doesn’t apply. Here’s Prof. Law’s actual suggestion, posted this morning:

Let’s a have a voucher system with no top ups. A voucher is the only way you can purchase your child an education.

Let both the state and private firms compete for these vouchers by providing schools.

Schools can select by ability if they wish.

Let’s add a further feature to this system - the value of the voucher is not fixed, but is dependent on the socio-economic intake of the school. The more middle class and well-off the parents are, on average, the less the voucher is worth. The more impoverished they are, the more [it's] worth.

Why the variable-value voucher?

This last feature deals with the effect of people moving to the vicinity of highly middle class schools to get their kids in. That school would now receive less funding than the school with working class kids down the road. Take your voucher to that other school, and it’s worth more. And so are the vouchers of the other kids at that school.

The precise difference in voucher value can be fine-tuned over time, to cancel out the effect of the middle-classes gaining an advantage by moving nearer to middle-class dominated schools. (In fact, by increasing the difference, we could ensure that they actually tend to flee from them.)

Incentive to run a good school? Private companies will extract their profit from the vouchers, competing with each other by two means - providing better schools so as to attract more pupils (so they grow) and by efficiency - the more efficient they are at providing quality education, the more of the voucher they can take in profit. But take too much in profit and standards will drop and parents will chose to send their kids elsewhere.

I’m trying to think this through. You’d obviously need a strong regulatory body to ensure private companies weren’t being too ‘efficient’, and there’d still be the usual problems with how to judge school standards. But these issues are hardly unique.

I’m sure there’ll be some comments about parents’ ‘rights’ to pay for their children’s education. But children aren’t property, and should get an equal opportunity regardless of where and to whom they happen to be born. But then I’m a lefty and would think that.

The only real problem I can think of is that wealthy parents might simply pay for private tutors, which would break the system if it happened in high enough numbers. Not sure what you do about that. Would it be practically possible to regulate private tuition, and bring it into the voucher scheme? Hmmm.

Selecting on ability is gnawing at me a little. Wouldn’t the best teachers still head for the schools with the most intelligent children? But then I suppose that’s the point: it’s far fairer for educational standards to be weighted towards intelligence than wealth. And it’s possible separation by intelligence within an individual school, by sets etc., is the only way to ensure everybody reaches their potential (in theory, anyway), so what’s the difference? I don’t like that less-able kids would probably get a lower standard of teacher, but at least it would be as a result of something inherent to the child, rather than his/her parents.

I don’t know whether it’s practical, but it’s an interesting idea and I’m sure Prof. Law’s comment box will soon be overflowing.

His posts all have the same title and it’ll be confusing once they drop off the front page. The Private Education label is currently showing them all.

1. he assumes an average distribution of talent and native intelligence across the social classes [↩]

Spotted by a commenter at Bad Science, this from today’s Daily Mail:

Despite homeopathy’s popularity, there is little evidence that it works, other than as a panacea, making people feel better simply because they are receiving care and attention.

Admittedly there are a few problems with that sentence, but I think the word the author was looking for is ‘placebo’. It’d be great if homeopathy only worked as a panacea. The article’s on the right track otherwise, though. Offering BScs in homeopathy etc. is just appalling.

‘Intelligent design’ is to be taught in RE classes:

In a move that is likely to spark controversy, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has for the first time recommended that pupils be taught about atheism and creationism in RE classes.

Sounds like a reasonable idea. RE lessons are where you’re supposed to discuss this kind of thing, after all. Having said that, the only two RE teachers I ever had were both devout Christians, and it was far from an unbiased education. I don’t think either was deliberately trying to evangelise, but (with one particularly) there was little doubt that Christianity was the ‘proper’ religion. I remember being told that I should wake up on Christmas morning and shout ‘Happy Birthday Jesus’. Didn’t do it. I don’t remember any mention of non-belief other than the time we were split into believers, agnostics and atheists. I got away lightly after putting myself into the agnostics (I remember telling my friend Ben that “a god wouldn’t have to experience time in the same way as us” - *cringes*) but I’d like to know what memories the atheists have of the experience.

Some guy has managed to get onto BBC News with the standard evangelical gambit of ‘teach the controversy‘:

He says the GCSE syllabus requires children to appreciate how science works and understand the nature of scientific controversy.

“The government wants children to be exposed to scientific debate at the age of 14 or 15.

“All the Truth in Science stuff does is put forward stuff that says here’s a controversy. This is exactly the kind of thing that young people should be exposed to,” Mr Cowan added.

You can’t just make up scientific controversy. If I flooded schools with leaflets saying the Earth was flat, and as evidence quoted misunderstandings of round-earth-theory, this wouldn’t constitute a scientific controversy. What would? Hard to say, but if scientific literature was full of discussion of the topic that’d be a start. But, it’s not. Global warming is a good example of scientific controversy, but Intelligent Design is as scientifically controversial as Bigfoot. The article sums it up with:

Advocates of intelligent design say there are things that cannot be explained by evolution and so argue for the existence of a supernatural intelligence behind the creation of the universe.

Which is accurate, but not very informative. Intelligent Design does do this, but doesn’t actually provide any reason to go from one to the other. The approach is “evolution is wrong, therefore god”, which doesn’t follow logically. And, of course, the arguments against evolution don’t hold water.

He told the BBC: “Darwin has for many people become a sacred cow.

“There’s a sense that if you criticise Darwin you must be some kind of religious nut case.

“We might has well have said Einstein shouldn’t have said what he did because it criticised Newton.”

Talk about missing the point. Einstein didn’t criticise Newton, he put forward a theory that refined Newton’s work and, crucially, made predictions that could be used to test the veracity of the claims. The predictions were tested, and found to be true. Intelligent Design makes no predictions and provides no evidence for an alternative to evolution. It’s completely useless.

Mr Cowan is identified in the article as an ex chemistry teacher. There’s no mention of his being a young-earth creationist who thinks the reason there’s no evidence of dinosaurs and humans living simultaneously is that “they didn’t live near each other”.

Happily, it looks like the government isn’t paying any attention to this kind of nonsense, at least for the general curriculum. It’s possible they’re turning a blind eye elsewhere, as evidenced by Tony Blair’s odd recent comments (via TLH).

This style is familiar:

Snakes on a Plane comments on western society’s hypocritical view of sexuality, and its repression of said sexuality through the symbolic use of snakes representing western society.

The most obvious example of sexuality in SoaP is the actual sex scene. This is an important facet of the movie, because the people having sex become the first victim of the snakes. This simple first act already lays out the snake’s hatred for sex. Western society’s (the snake’s) disdain for sexuality becomes more and more obvious as the specific targets of the snakes takes focus during the movie. While the background attacks are given no great importance, the targets that deal with sexuality are. The breast, the genitals, the tongue, the buttocks, and even the eye are all popular signs of sexuality in today’s society. While the eye, at first glance, may seem a-sexual, in fact the eye can be used as a primary tool of sexuality. When one person sees another of the opposite sex, they subconsciously (and sometimes very consciously) observe their figure to determine their potential virility. Even this kind of unconscious sexuality can get you killed in today’s society. Snakebites on the neck also appear as a motif repeated throughout Snakes on a Plane. While this might seem normal, in fact, it is a subtle nod towards a lover gently kissing his companion’s neck. In all these attacks, the bites kill or injure. This shows western society’s hatred for any open sign of sexuality.

I’ve no idea whether this is serious, but it feels like a school essay and is a great example of how to get good grades in the humanities I used to produce this kind of thing all the time in my English Lit. classes, which seem stranger the older I get. As I remember it, there was a sure-fire way to succeed in English Lit.:

1. Read something ‘meaningful’. Let’s say it’s ‘The Life and Loves of a She-Devil’ by Fay Weldon.
2. Find vaguely related concept in other literature, preferably classic. Fay Weldon’s main character has similarities to Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid, for example.
3. Extrapolate wildly. The author’s clever use of water in this scene symbolises the cleaning of sin…The tragic ending is an ironic juxtaposition…etc.

It doesn’t mean anything, but examiners love that stuff. What you must never do is criticise the text. I found the feminist theme in She-Devil to be muddled and nonsensical: irony heaped upon ambiguous metaphor leading to nothing much. I had problems with the classics, too: Hamlet’s age changes from late-teens to early-thirties as the play, which takes place over a few months, progresses. Clever metaphor for maturing, blah blah, but this is a stage production, not a novel, and I never understood how this could work in the theatre with a real actor. My teacher wasn’t too bad and I could get away with asking this kind of question in class (although I never did about Hamlet - it’s entirely possible there’s a valid answer there), but it was always clear that in coursework or exams I was to stick to doctrine and gush over the language, draw inferences, make up analogies, etc.

Fair enough, but as a result I lost interest in the subject. I came out with a good grade but no desire to study it further. I guess I was starting to realise that literary criticism is entirely subjective, which wasn’t ever suggested by the A-Level. There really were right and wrong answers, which is just silly. The subject put me off reading anything ‘high-brow’ for years, as if the snobby attitudes were somehow the fault of the texts.

It’s possible that hindsight is cruel. There may well have been teachers with a genuine love of literature who simply wanted to share this with their students. Maybe the examiners would have reacted favourably to questions - maybe I just gamed the system. But it’s hard to see the concept of examining people on the meaning of literature as anything but bizarre. Really, you need only make any vaguely cogent statement in grammatically correct fashion to get full marks - how can two viewpoints be compared objectively? I sometimes wonder whether the subject makes more sense at university-level, but not for long.

This isn’t meant to criticise the SoaP essay, which I admire greatly. I don’t think I’d ever have come up with that analogy.

Just to make it easier for Googlers, and me
#1 - Introduction
#2 - The main argument against
#3 - Why are they unsuitable for religious education?
#4 - Other problems
#5 - An alternative approach
#6 - Conclusion

Having examined the case for faith schools, I’ve come to the conclusion that they are very likely to be counter to individual rights, and very possibly harmful to both the individual and greater society:

• The autonomy of the child is of primary importance. The Humanist Philosophers’ Group sums it up with: “in a free and open society, beliefs about fundamental religious and value commitments should be adopted autonomously and voluntarily.”
• It is highly unlikely that faith schools would be capable of providing a balanced environment in which children of all faiths, or none, can make their own decisions based on full information.
• Segregation of children based upon religious belief is extremely undesirable.
• There are alternative methods of education, which should be acceptable to people both religious and non-religious, that protect the autonomy of the child and do not involve segregation of religious groups.

I have tried to read widely on the different viewpoints regarding faith schools, but admit that many of my arguments are pretty much directly those of the British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society. This is because I actually agree with them, and I have tried to question assumptions and to check sources. Obviously I have pre-existing biases - I’m a paid-up member of both organisations - but I have tried to understand all the viewpoints. In fact, when I first read the BHA’s proposals for an alternative education system I was quite taken aback, and it took me a while to understand why it was reasonable.

The BHA website, and their A Better Way Forward in particular, has far more detailed analysis of other issues and objections, including the ‘rights of the community’, the selection bias of current Church schools, the current state of religious education policy and the role of the state in religious activity. I also recommend the Education Bill itself and the unfortunately not-available-online Humanist Philosopher’s Group pamphlet on religious schools in general.

#6 of 6

The British Humanist Association has put forward an alternative to the Government’s current policy on trust schools. I’m not claiming that it is perfect, and I’ve heard objections to a couple of points that I think are worthy of discussion, but overall I think it makes a great deal of sense. It’s certainly a practical and implement-able response that I feel deal with most of the inherent problems of segregated faith schools.

The basic premise is that all state schools should be ‘community schools’, with religious beliefs catered for on an optional basis. The National Curriculum would provide religious education of a greater standard than is currently available - the current system is unfairly biased in favour of six major religions and declines to mention non-religious ideas such as atheism or humanism - and optional, extra-curricular religious instruction would be available for those that want it. Religious instruction is here defined as the teaching of religious beliefs as true, with the intention that children come to believe them as true. Religious beliefs are catered for whenever and wherever possible.

Full details and discussion of each point are available in the full document. The main recommendations are:

• Inclusive school assemblies suitable for all, thus ending the need for any child to be withdrawn or feel excluded from ‘collective worship’, plus time and designated places for optional worship, prayers, or reflection.
• Reformed religious education with impartial, fair and balanced teaching about all major worldviews, including non-religious ones, to give all children an understanding of the range of beliefs found in a pluralist society. Provision for additional optional faith-based classes on school premises.
• More public holidays, recognising a wider range of religious festivals, in workplaces as well as schools. Public examinations should be timetabled to avoid religious holidays.
• More respect for and flexibility on other cultural and religious requirements, for example in matters such as uniform, food, and Sex and Relationships Education.
• Better training for teachers on dealing with diversity.
• Better complaints procedures to deal with unfair discrimination.
• Better sharing of good practice.
• The involvement of local people in consultations about accommodations.
• Reform of the law, where needed, and improved guidance for schools.
• The phasing out of religious schools, unless they too can be persuaded to become inclusive and accommodating institutions.

When I read over the proposals I had concerns over some of the single-sex education suggestions, but my loudest objection was to the allowing of religious dress such as hijabs. The document makes no statement as to the far more restrictive, and arguably unsafe, jilbab, or the frankly repulsive burqa. It is difficult to see how a place of education could permit what amounts to misogyny. However, I can see that accommodations must be made in order to satisfy (at least the vast majority of) different faiths, and keeping schools a place for free and open discussion of religion is of paramount importance. A well-crafted religious education framework should allow no reason for pupils to be excluded, and I consider it of great importance that women in Muslim communities are at least exposed to the viewpoint that they are being treated badly. I can see how this policy is reasonable, given the world we live in, even if it does stick in the throat.

I worry about the definition of faith, and how it is decided which demands should be met. Scientology has very, very few adherents in the UK, but there will undoubtedly be parents who would wish for such beliefs to be taught in religious education classes. What of Christian Science, which rejects the germ theory of disease? What if I declare my children wongaBlogists, and they can only eat if there’s a monkey in the same room? I suppose this is a problem for another level of government, but I wouldn’t like to be on that committee.

There will undoubtedly be some religious demands that are unacceptable in a common environment. I imagine there are also those which directly conflict. The BHA admit this in their conclusion:

There will always remain a few minority groups whose requirements cannot be satisfied within the mainstream without detriment to the educational entitlements of the majority. Schools cannot be required to give up IT or dance or to accommodate ‘creationist science’. Objections to some aspects of the National Curriculum may have to continue to be satisfied through case by case negotiation and withdrawal from classes. This is not ideal for the pupil, but more accommodating schools would make it far less frequently necessary.

There is, I admit, a part of me that says this whole thing is ridiculous, and that education should be kept completely secular and be done with it. I don’t really see how the impartial teaching of opposing views of religious faith is different from teaching impartially about UFOs or ghosts. But, I guess that’s exactly the point, and balancing what I see as obviously true with as-strongly-held alternative viewpoints is the problem the BHA (and, to be fair, the government) are trying to solve. I recognise that rational people do disagree, and the BHA’s solution is practical and reasonable in today’s world. The proposals are by no means perfect, and are still vulnerable to parental manipulation of children, but I think that they make far more sense than current education policy. This is a solution that should satisfy all reasonable people of religious or non-religious beliefs, and I’d be interested to hear objections to it. The final post is a quick conclusion.

#5 of 6

Even if faith schools profess to be inclusive, there will still be large numbers of religious parents who choose a school that reflects their own religious beliefs. Faith schools are allowed to reserve a certain number of places for children of a particular faith (as much as children are capable of being of a particular faith - this is really the important question). It seems inevitable that faith schools will result in segregation of children (possibly just with parents of) different faiths. This already happens in Northern Ireland, where there are schoolchildren who have literally never spoken to children of ‘the other religion’, and that’s just between competing branches of Christianity. Is this really a situation we want to encourage?

I find it hard to think of any possible positive outcomes of religious segregation, unless you look from the perspective of the specific Church which ‘loses’ fewer children to other religions. Less disruption for pupils? Less bullying of outsiders? Maybe, but these are hardly justification for the kind of separation that would ensue. Bullying is a problem at any school, and something that can be decreased with effective policies. Disruption seems to imply that the role of education is simply to teach the National Curriculum, ignoring the role of schools in providing an environment in which pupils experience viewpoints different from their own. It’s obvious, I think, that growing up surrounded by people different from yourself results in more fully-rounded adults who are more tolerant of alternative ideas and world-views.

It’s been known for decades that applying even completely arbitrary labels to groups of people will foster hostility between the two. It is not at all unreasonable to say that Muslim-only schools would be easy targets for fundamentalists - you need just convince somebody that other people are the enemy, and in this case the separation from any other viewpoint has made this far easier.

Some claim that this kind of religious segregation happens anyway, and I’m sure there are places in which it does, but the role of education should not be to add to the problem. Quite the opposite, surely. The BHA has a large collection of quotes from people across the political and religious spectra who are concerned about the problems of segregating children in this way, including priests, ministers, MPs and people involved in race relations.

What of the argument that Church schools produce better results? Even if true, I don’t think this comes close to outweighing the other objections, but the evidence doesn’t support the claim. In A Better Way Forward, the BHA says [the full article contains the sources, which I've removed here for the sake of clarity]:

In every example of “better Church schools” that we have been confronted with (for example the London Oratory School, Catholic schools in Newham, St Christopher’s high school, Accrington), the schools turn out to have a better than average intake. Any selective school can achieve better than average results, and Church schools are often selective. On average, they take less than their share of deprived children and more than their share of the children of ambitious and choosy parents. This covert selection goes a long way towards explaining their apparent academic success. “Selection, even on religious grounds, is likely to attract well-behaved children from stable backgrounds,” said a spokesperson for Ofsted.

A study by think tank Iris (November 2005) found that many primary schools in England take in pupils whose family circumstances are very different from the neighbourhoods they serve. One school with only 10% of pupils on free meals was in a postcode with over 45%. Overall, non-religious community schools tended to have slightly more poorer pupils than expected. Church schools had fewer. Catholic schools, in particular, had almost 9% fewer poor pupils than in their neighbourhoods. Non-religious maintained primary schools have 20.1% of their pupils eligible for free school meals; Church of England schools have 11.3%, Roman Catholic have 15.6%, other Christian schools have 13.95%, and other religious schools 13.5% There is a similar pattern in maintained secondary schools, where nonreligious schools have 15.4% of pupils eligible for free school meals, while Church of England schools have 11.6%, Roman Catholic schools have 14.6%, other Christian schools have 6.8%, and other religious schools 18.5%

The Statistical Directorate of the National Assembly for Wales, faced with similar figures in 2001, concluded: “Analysis of levels of examination performance in comparison with levels of free school meal entitlement shows that once the different levels of free school meal entitlement are taken into account, the differences in GCSE/GNVQ examination performance and absenteeism [between Church and other schools] were not statistically significant.”

Simply put, if you control for free school meal entitlement, the difference goes away.

The current proliferation of Church of England schools is without doubt unfair to other religions. Even if you invoke the dubious ‘national religion’ argument, the statistics are still way out of proportion to actual churchgoers. Minority groups are currently justified in demanding they get publicly-funded schools, but the Church of England’s approach to education is positively benign compared to the idea of schools run by the more fundamentalist or evangelical religions such as Scientology, Seventh-Day Adventists, the Salvation Army or even the Roman Catholic Church. Faith schools would provide an easy opportunity for these religions to preach their message to far more (much more impressionable) people than would otherwise hear it - it would be very difficult to keep school numbers in proportion to believers, if that’s even something that makes sense. There is also reason to believe that some religions would actively discriminate by race as well as religion. This is not an argument for the expansion of faith schools - it simply shows the problems that will be faced if the current policies continue.

My intention over the last three posts has been to argue that faith schools are contrary to the rights of the individual, as well as impractical and potentially the source of many future problems. It seems very negative to argue without providing any alternative. I’ll try to provide one in the next post.

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There are good reasons to think that any faith school, be it Christian, Muslim or even humanist (if such a thing existed), would fail to provide a suitable environment for children to make informed and fair decisions about religious belief. Some existing Foundation schools make no pretense at impartial religious education. The Emmanuel Schools Foundation, set up by millionaire evangelist Peter Vardy, goes so far as to teach creationism. I think everybody reasonable can agree this is clearly wrong. The objections must be aimed at the concept of a faith school which claims to be impartial and open to the idea of other faiths.

Faith schools would only employ teachers of the school’s particular faith. It is not disputed that teachers are powerful role-models, and children surrounded by teachers with identical beliefs would undoubtedly be influenced in that direction. While it is unreasonable to expect teachers to have no beliefs, a non-specific-faith school would offer teachers with differing viewpoints, so the influence would clearly be much reduced. As much as we may wish otherwise, there will also be strong influence from parents who have sent their children to a particular faith school because of their own convictions, and this would create a massive peer-pressure amongst the children hardly conducive to informed thought.

Some claim that it is healthy to teach children a viewpoint and then allow them to become critical of it. This seems to be very much counter to child psychology. Evolution has resulted in children believing and trusting what they are told, at least to a certain extent. Such information was and is necessary for survival - it’s not evolutionarily sound for a child to test for him/herself whether the cliff-edge is a dangerous place to walk. The ideas we pick up in childhood are powerful and difficult to reject. A common argument I’ve read is that that people can and have changed faiths after leaving faith schools, so what’s the problem with faith schools? But leaving a religion in such circumstances is hardly an easy process. Deciding to disagree with everybody around you is not something done lightly, and in many cases results in strong feelings of guilt and self-loathing. There are atheists who, despite having rejected the notions of any religion, still shudder at the concept of hell, so great is the influence of childhood indoctrination. It is also argued that many children will be subject to religious instruction at home, and this is undoubtedly true, but the purpose of state-funded education is not to simply obey parental wishes. The Humanist Philosophers again: “it should not be the task of educational institutions to make it more difficult for people to make up their own minds about the truth or falsity of religious beliefs.”

Even though the concept of an inclusive faith school has its problems, there are serious reasons to be concerned as to whether such inclusive schools would ever practically exist.

The 2001 Archbishops’ Council report remit was “to review the achievements of Church of England schools and to make proposals for their future development”.

The Church today still wishes to offer education for its own sake as a reflection of God’s love for humanity. But the justification for retaining and aspiring to extend its provision, as recommended in this report, cannot be simply this, when the state is willing to provide as never before and when there are so many calls on the Church’s limited resources. It is, and must be, because that engagement with children and young people in schools will, in the words of the late Lord Runcie when he was Archbishop of Canterbury, enable the Church to:

Nourish those of the faith;

Encourage those of other faiths;

Challenge those who have no faith.

As well as being ambiguous - ‘nourish’, ‘encourage’ and ‘challenge’ are all extremely broad terms - there is a clear imbalance in the list. If the Church wishes to provide for the autonomy of children it cannot be so skewed toward faith. The report also recommends, as a minimum ethos, that schools should:

• ensure that the school is led by a headteacher who is committed, with the help of staff, to establish and maintain the Christian character of the school in its day to day activities and in the curriculum;
• engage meaningfully in a real act of Christian worship every day;
• offer a school life that incorporates the values of the Christian faith…[this refers to:
  

  In particular, it will be reflected in the everyday life of the school, quietly respectful of the beliefs of others and of other faiths, but confident in its own faith. Church schools will not actively seek to convert children from the faith of their parents, but pupils will experience what it is to live in a community that celebrates the Christian faith; to work within a framework of discipline and yet to be confident of forgiveness; to begin to share the Christian’s hope and the Christian experience that the greatest power in life and beyond it is selfless love.

• ensure that religious education is given at least 5 per cent of school time and that the character and quality of religious education are a particular concern of the headteacher and the governing body;
• observe the major Christian festivals and in schools in which other faiths are present ensure that those faiths are able and encouraged to mark their major festivals with integrity;
• maintain and develop an active and affirming relationship with a parish church;
• proclaim that it is a Church of England school on its external signboard and on its stationery and make appropriate use of Christian symbols
  inside and outside the school.

Even though it is claimed there will be no direct attempt to convert, the 'values of the Christian faith' statement suggests that pupils will come to Christianity as a result of being in a Christian environment. While not overtly evangelical, expressing it as an aim in this way suggests that open and informed education is not the primary goal of the school.

Church of England Bishops recently tabled an amendment to the Education Bill asking for the removal of the ban on discrimination in employment of non-teaching staff by reason of the staff’s “religious opinions or of [their] attending or omitting to attend religious worship”. If the school will not even hire non-Christians as staff, is it reasonable to expect fair treatment to non-Christian students? The General Secretary of the Church of England Board of Education said: “the Church intends that its schools offer distinctively Christian education and are open and inclusive of all who seek such education”. That’s very different from being inclusive of all.

While a benign interpretation of all these statements is possible, it’s something of a stretch. It’s easy to see why a Christian school would want to specify the above, but it would take heroic effort for it not to turn into indoctrination, especially if all of the staff genuinely believe that all the children should be Christian. There is no suggestion that non-Christians would have the option to abstain from prayer, for example. The report even suggests that Church schools be ‘quietly respectful of the beliefs of others and of other faiths, but confident in its own faith’. It is far from clear what form this would take. It is easy to get the impression that the Church is eager to take a privileged position when it comes to influencing the beliefs of students. While not necessarily typical, there have been examples of Church schools overtly discriminating against non-Christian pupils, one justifying its stance with the above report’s recommendation that “all Church schools must be distinctively and recognizably Christian
institutions”.

I’m not suggesting any insidious plot amongst the religious to indoctrinate children; the vast majority of the time, the intentions are honourable. But is it reasonable to expect people utterly convinced of one viewpoint to provide a truly balanced environment in which children can be autonomous? The Christian report provides a good insight into the ‘ethos’ behind church schools, and there is no reason to suspect that other religions would be any more likely to provide an impartial, fair environment.

Furthermore, there are strong arguments against the very concept of separating people of different faiths or non-faiths: next post.

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