Civitas Blog

However, there is no real reason or basis for thinking that sectarianism is either created, exacerbated, or even simply perpetuated by faith schools. It can flourish in their absence, and can be absent from a religiously plural society, even when faith schools form the predominant institutional medium there by which education is provided.

Everything depends on which are the faiths in question and on the specific social conditions and inter-communal relations between the various groups that adhere to them.

To suppose that faith schools must foster sectarianism unless they teach about other religions besides whichever faith is that with which they are affiliated is actually an insult to whichever that faith is. For faith schools themselves to suppose this, or else for the religious communities to suppose so for which they cater, indicates a worrying lack of self-belief on their part -- at least in the case of such faiths as epouse the moral equality of humankind and the love of neighbour as an ideal.

‘Still’ it might be said ‘what possible harm can there be, in a society as pluralistic as ours, all schools teaching about all the major faiths practiced within it? Won’t that better foster inter-communal relations than any other approach towards religious education.’

Just such an argument, indeed, has been the way in which the National Framework was originally sold to community schools, and is the rhetoric used by the faith communities themselves in their joint declaration by which they all voluntarily signed up their own denominational schools to the National Framework.

It remains, however, merely a matter of faith -- in the sense of something for which there is no empirical evidence – to suppose that teaching about other religions will foster respect and sensitivity towards those of these other faiths. It very much depends on how this is done.

It might well be that, in community schools containing, as so many metropolitan schools do today, children from many different faith backgrounds, there is need to teach something about the faiths of all children attending them to ensure none feels demeaned through their own faith not being taught about while something about the faith of all the other children is. However, the need for this pluralistic approach does not obtain in a faith school where all the children do, or at least ideally should, belong to only one and the same faith.

‘Still’ I can hear the argument coming back ‘what possible harm can come of children learning about all other faiths besides their own as well as about their own? Surely, it can only be a good thing that they should have their minds opened up by learning about all faiths, not just one.’

I am not so sure. There seem to me two good reason why those attending a faith school might do well to postpone learning about other faiths besides their own until very late in their schooling, rather than right from the very beginning and all the way through it -- the approach adopted by the National Framework.

First, each major world religion offers a world view and has associated with it a demanding code of practice that are difficult enough to master and understand the rationale for, even when that is the only religion children are taught about. Teaching about other religions takes time which must come either by reducing the time spent teaching about the pupil’s own religion, or else by reducing the time they spend on secular subjects or on other form of educational activity. Why should learning abut other religions to one’s own be privileged over studying history or English or maths or science, or playing sport?

Second, until a child has become fully immersed and at home in whcihever is the religion of their parents and practiced at home, it is likely their learning about other religions will only tend to confuse and confound their ability to absorb and become at home in the religion of their parents and the one their parents winto which their parents wish to initiate them. The end-product of demanding children learn about all religions will be a tendency towards their deracination and secularisation by reducing the chances they will come to be adhere to any.

The faith of children who attend faith schools which take that faith very seriously might well escape being undermined by their having to learn about other faiths. But that of those attending faith schools which teach that faith less intensively might well be found to have weakened through their being required to learn about a confusing variety of other faiths before their own has firmly had chance to take shape in them.

Finally, if, as a nation we should be, we are really concerned with promoting among each new generation respect for others and mutual tolerance, we need to take account of the spirit (!) in which faith schools are established in our society, especially when funded by the state.

Once, in these isles, there was no schooling but faith-schooling, parish churches being the institution through which schooling was provided. The first minority faith schools were Jewish schools. The main such one, the Jews Free School, was created and wholly funded by the then established Sephardic Jewish community in England for children of the Ashenazi Jewish immigrants who fled Russia at the end of the nineteenth century to escape the pogroms there.The school was created so these children could be given a trade and taught to become good and true Englishmen and women.

That school, which stood in Bell Lane in London’s East –End, did not survive the Blitz. It was, however, reopened in the 1950’s in Camden Town as a voluntary aided school and led the way in the great mushrooming that has taken place in the last twenty or so years of non-Christian state-funded faith schools. When it reopened after the War, the motive behind its reopening it was not concern among the communal leaders of the Anglo Jewish community by means of it to turn Jewish boys and girls whose home country had now become England into Englishmen and women, since now there was universal free state schooling available for that purpose. It was, rather, the opposite: to stem the rate of attrition among British Jews through inter-marriage, not least in part by encouraging their greater understanding of and identification with their own religious rituals and heritage.

But the point was that the faith comunity whose distinctiveness reopening that faith-school was intended to help preserve was one that, by then, had become highly integrated and the ethos of the reopened faith school in no way militated against its pupils full identification and integration with the host nation. They no more needed to learn about Christianity to be able to get on with Christians than ethnically English children did who were not practising Christians.

However, since the great wave of post-war immigration, many new faith groups have settled in this country who have not yet have had time to put down roots and integrate, before their communal leaders have called for state-funded faith schools of their own. Although the numbers of such schools are very small at the moment, they are set to grow very rapidly in the near future, especially given the sheer numbers of some of the minorities involved, their comparative low family incomes ensuring their greater reliance oin the state, and their greater comparative fecundity.

There is a danger that, unless monitored and regulated by the state very closely, such faith schools might well impede the integration of their pupils into the wider society and their acquisition of due levels of respect and sensitivity to others. It is noteworthy that a recent Populus poll of young British Muslims found disturbingly high levels among them who considered British Jews a fair target. ‘More than half think that it is right to boycott Holocaust Memorial Day… Nearly two fifths ( 37%) believe that the Jewish community in Britain is a legitimate target “as part of the ongoing struggle for justice in the Middle East”’.

It is all very well and commendable that faith schools should endeavour to promote tolerance and respect for others in their pupils. But we should not let ourselves be fooled that merely for their pupils to learn about other religions will accomplish this goal, or even be the best way to achieve it. You don’t need to know much, if anything about the faith of someone else, to treat them with respect and tolerance. And it is possible for chikldren to be taught all manner of falsehoods about the faith of others -- such as that the adherents of some other faiths ritually slaughter the children of members of other faiths to obtain their blood for the making of ritual bread or other such libels -- so as to be provided with grounds for hostility towards them.

With faith groups only recently settled in this country whose roots here are shallow and still only tenuous, there is every reason for the state to be concerned to set the bar very high in terms of how far their faith schools must be made to go to acculturate their children in mainstream British life before being encouraged or maintained by the state to perpetuate their own faith and retain their distinctiveness.