Secularists do come across as a bunch of defensive nutjobs sometimes, as indeed they do in the Guardian article you cited.

Christian faith schools (I can't speak for Jewish or Muslim or indeed any other faith schools) generally have an extremely good reputation academically, both at primary and secondary level. That should be reason enough to allow them more freedom to operate. Surely the aim is to raise standards? The schools which offer best practice should therefore be encouraged. I'm entirely in favour of the government's proposals on that point alone.

Secondly, some of the claims in this thread are slightly erroneous. For example, when a faith school is state funded (and there are Muslim and Jewish government funded faith schools as well as Christian) they are obliged to teach the National Curriculum OR a curriculum that is of the same breadth and standard as the National Curriculum as confirmed by OFSTED. Obviously this does not apply to private schools.

Incidentally, a lot of Anglican and Catholic schools are part funded by the respective churches and therefore they are entitled to have some say over which children get priority. ALL schools make such choices, whether that be by the rather daft lottery system invoked by the previous government or by some other means. No one school can educate everybody and of course the best schools, whether faith or secular, will attract the highest number of applicants. But not all those applicants can be accommodated and so some form of discrimination has to be applied.

Thirdly, a school is a place of employment in the same way as an office or factory is and is subject to the same employment laws as any other place of employment. The furthest a school will push so far as the faith background of a teacher is concerned is in asking for references from their local clergyman and requesting specific disclosure about their personal faith. However, I have yet to meet a teacher who wants to teach in such a specific faith environment when they have no background in that faith. Most (Christian) faith schools simply ask an applicant whether they have sympathy for the ethos of the school and in that the faith schools are no different from non-faith schools. To teach effectively in any school a teacher must have sympathy with that school's ethos.

Finally, the academies that have come into being since the coalition came into power have diverse reasons for being and I think that is very refreshing. For example, there is one in London which only targets children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Presumably that sits happy in the mind of the OPer? But throw faith into the mix and suddenly the monsters are coming to get us! It's all a bit paranoid.

Which school did you go to?!

Science and Religious Education are distinct subjects and are taught as distinct subjects all the way through the education system. Within the National Curriculum, Science is a core subject which means students have to study it from day one of Year 1 and they are frequently tested on it. RE is unique in its standing in that it is neither a core subject nor a broad curriculum subject. It has to be taught but there are two broad headings under which schools have a fairly free licence: faith practice and faith traditions. All primary schools have to teach about Christianity plus at least one other faith; most teach about two others (usually Judaism and Islam). I don't know what the situation is in the secondary sector as I'm a primary school teacher. But this applies as much to a state school as to a state funded faith school (including Muslim and Jewish state funded schools) and so everybody is exposed to the two broad areas of RE teaching entirely separately from anything taught about science.

Oh, and I can assure you that youngsters are perfectly capable of distinguishing between science and faith. I've enjoyed a couple of fascinating discussions on both with Year 1. Don't underestimate the capacity of children.

Whereas all religious types are shining beacons of rationality I suppose?


As pointed out earlier, a large chunk of that good reputation is simply down to selective admission standards. Fill a school with smarter and better behaved pupils and you'll get better results. Simples.

It's also worth noting that the aim of education is not to raise standards regardless of potential negative consequences. The fudging of the Science curriculum that regularly occurs in faith schools is too high a price to pay IMO.

Religion should have no role in state-funded education. Period.

Five different ones.

Three primary schools (of which one was a faith school) and two girls' grammar schools (of which one had a deep religious connection – hence my parents sending me there after I'd passed my 11 plus. That was an exam that we all had to take in the olden days).

How about you, chucklette?



Indeed they are. Well done. They're not proper nouns, however.



Well done again. There is, however, evidence from the past 15-20 years that, in some situations, the lines between the two subjects have been blurred – mostly by evangelical creationist findamentalists. This is quite openly on record.



'Two and two are four; four and four are eight ...'

Sorry – did you have a point?



Ah. That's obviously the problem. I'm too decrepit to remember such complex situations. We did basic Christian stuff at my primary schools – yes, all three of them – and at my first grammar school, for the first two years, followed by stuff that was more about ethics.



So how much teaching about other religions do you think that that state-funded Jewish school in Hackney, which I mentioned earlier in this thread, gets in order to balance the 50% of time that its pupils spend studying the Torah and other fairy tales, at the cost of the taxpayer?



Oh, I must have imagined my own upbringing, that of my sister and the programme with Dawkins that I mentioned earlier.

What a jolly little fantasist I am.

Now, for the sake of information, are we correct in assuming that you are not, yourself, a defensive religious nutjob? Because – presumably on the basis of some fantasy or other – you don't half come across as defensive.

In Australia priests who are put into a counsellor role in schools are not required to complete a child protection course, nor are they subject to the same rules (eg they can have one on ones with the door closed) is this the case in the UK?

The teaching of faith beyond what each one represents and the various differences should have no part in the schooling, if parents wish their children to be indoctrinated then they are free to take them to church, better still wait until they are old enough to make that choice for themselves.

What is people's experience of "RE"? Mine was that it was taught by teachers from other disciplines who often took the p*ss out of the subject whilst teaching it. If anything, it would have been detrimental to developing faith. A friend of mine who was religious wanted to take it as an O Level but was told by the school that RE wasn't a 'real' subject and was treated as an O Level in the same way as woodwork - i.e. a second-class qualification.

My dad regularly taught RE at another school (despite being a science teacher and an atheist), and I still remember him marking books and reading in one the story of Jonah and the whale written by a kid, which ended with the comment that my father had told them it was nonsense because whales couldn't actually swallow a person whole and keep them alive in their stomach.

I honestly don't recall ever having a lesson on the subject at secondary school.

I do recall my primary school days of signing hyms and listening to stories from the bible, although we were unable to discuss it.

I've asked my parents why they never took me out of assembly, their both atheists although they (well my Mum) lied about it , and was told they didn't want me to be picked on for been different like the 2 JW children where.

I don't really remember much about it at primary school – more really about going to services once a week when I was at my first primary, a CofE school, and assemblies at my third school, which was not a church school, but where the headmaster was a strongly religious person who led strongly religious assemblies, as well as grace before lunch etc.

In my first grammar school, which was strongly linked to a religious community (Moravian) RE lessons were specifically [iBible[/i-based for the first two to three years. They were taught by, first, a former clergyman and, after he died suddenly, a lay clergyman. Assemblies were a traditional, Christian affair.

Later, we explored more at ethical issues, such as capital punishment and euthanasia. At my second grammar school, it was taught by a Quaker and was much more concentrated on ethics – essentially because this bore some relation to the O level exam that we had to take. This wasn't a church school, but assemblies were also expected to have a traditional basis; when the school's Christian group was to take an assembly, there was a fight with the head to sing a modern hymn, which she initially decried as 'a pop song'. The school also had strong links with the local priory.

As an only slight aside, we had eff all in the way of sex education (birds and bees, plus the basic biology of human reproduction), which was fun, since I wasn't getting any at home either, beyond my mother checking whether I understood what periods were and that they would happen to me at some point, and my father's dinner time rants about the sinfulness of sex. It was as simple as nobody being around to say that puberty brought mental changes as well as physical ones – and they were normal and not remotely sinful.

And indeed, sex education is another point I'd raise about faith schools.

They have every reason to be defensive, given the disproportionate degree of influence religion already has in the running of our country. This influence will only increase if the proposed changes are adopted.



As has already been pointed out (I would have thought it was pretty obvious anyway), any school that is able to select which pupils it takes will obtain better results than those without such a privilege. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that there's not a single shred of evidence to support the view that the improved exam results in faith schools are as a consequence of the religious flavour of the education rather than the selection policy.



Academies have a great deal of freedom in the curricula they teach. I linked to a lecture given by the head of 'science' at one of these academies earlier in the thread, and what he was teaching was anything other than scientific. If the church becomes the biggest provider of state education (as is planned), they will be in a far stronger position to push forward this sort of agenda.



Not academies. They are state funded, but independently controlled. Some academies have a sponsor, who is required to put up an initial figure, but that figure is peanuts and, once it's paid, the sponsor doesn't have to cough up another penny. It's all paid for by the state.



But that discrimination shouldn't be based on who attends what church, or who is likely to bump that school's exam results up.



Why should a person need a reference from a clergyman in order to show that they can teach children effectively? Or to disclose their faith (or lack thereof)? Their ability to do the job should be the [ionly[/i factor in the selection process.



If faith academies become the majority, they might not have a choice.



But that's where it falls down. If the church becomes the largest provider of secondary education, teachers will either have to lie about their faith, or face having only a limited number of schools to which they may apply for work. In a time where the overwhelming majority of the British public do not attend church regularly, this is intolerable.



It's not about monsters, you dimwit. It's to do with the curriculum (particularly science) being subverted by a minority group, and lack of equality in both staff and pupil selection. Would you be happy if the majority of schools in this country were run by the Muslim faith? Or Scientologists, perhaps?

As my opening link made clear, there are only 3.6% of British people who [isay[/i that they attend a church once a month. The actual figure could be quite a lot less. Even if it's not, should the unfounded beliefs of less than 4% of the population have such a great influence on the education of the remaining 96%? And all paid for by the taxpayer? If churches want to fund their own schools for the indoctrination of children, that's one thing, but expecting the government to fund the project whilst they run it for their own ends is preposterous.

I don't have a problem with RE if it's taught from a cultural and historical perspective. The Bible as a piece of literature is very interesting (and I'm sure other religious texts are too). It's when it's taught as fact or scientific theory that I must object.

I couldn't agree more. We have two schools in our village, one CoE and one (supposedly) secular. I applied to the secular school for my son even though we were outside of the catchment area. I was very pleased when he got a place as this school also has a better OFSTED report than the faith school. I was rather less pleased when, after two weeks there, he sat down at the table and said,

"Dear God, thank you for this food."

That depends entirely on how they're taught. My son believed the nativity was true until I pointed out to him that it was just a nice story someone had made up, like his TV programmes. If many more academies spring up and have the power to set their own 'science' curricula, those lines will become very blurred indeed (as they already are in some faith academies).

Exactly. I read about the programme you mention in The God Delusion, and Dawkins was horrified at just how unwilling the children were to believe the evidence he had presented them with.

:26k8tiru

WTF is CofE on paper? Do you believe in God? If you don't, whatever it says 'on paper', you're an atheist. If you do, then you need to have a look at the evidence a little closer.

This is part of the problem. When people are asked to put down their religion on any sort of official form/survey/census, they often put the religion they were brought up in, or put 'Christian' because they're British and we are a 'Christian country'. If everyone who thought it was nonsense put 'atheist', the true picture would become a lot clearer.

:26k8tiru

I don't applaud this attitude one little bit. I'm not picking on you personally, as loads of people have said it, but I can't stand the hypocrisy of it. It's like people who get married in church despite never attending any other time. It's .

Thankfully, the non-faith school in my village is better than the faith school, but if it wasn't, I would have worked harder alongside the teachers to ensure that my son knew everything he needed to know before starting secondary school.

:26k8tiru

I would have told him that we evolved from a common ancestor with [i:26k8tiruapes[/i:26k8tiru (not monkeys), and that, whilst some people don't believe that to be the case, the evidence does not support their position. In simpler terms, obviously.



As someone has already pointed out, it's always a cause for concern when children believe something that is so demonstrably incorrect. It's never too early to teach your child that reason and evidence will always trump blind faith.

Sorry for flooding the thread, everyone, but I had a bit of catching up to do.

Could you clarify something for me. I regularly listen the Australian podcasts "The Skeptic Zone" and "The Pseudo Scientists" They have discussed scripture lessons in Australian schools in their respective shows and claim that children can be opted out of these by their parents. However the schools are not allowed to provide alternative lessons for these children during scripture lessons. Is this true?

I can't provide a link to this but, I have heard that in the USA, the states that provide abstinence only sex education tend to have the highest rates of teenage/unwanted pregnancies and STIs.

Why, was it too formal? Why not encourage him to use "Rock"?

I prefer 'Mr God', actually.

I'm not.

Firstly, as has been pointed out, many of these faith schools are selective in who they will accept.
Selection by faith is immoral ... and selection by merit skews their results.
I am not against selection by merit per se, but where selection occurs you cannot make a fair comparison.

Secondly, how far do you go in allowing something just because they improve standards in one area?
What do these faith schools teach when they find that science and religion differ? Which side of the argument do they present? How do we enforce a balance?
More to the point, why on earth should we offer-up innocent children to be taught unproven and superstitious nonsense?

Thirdly, to re-iterate slightly, is indoctrination a fair price to pay for apparently higher academic standards?

Fourthly, it is not possible to give a truly representative picture of what science is (with its built-in ifs and buts and constant searching) when you are also going to teach the kids that God definitely exists, in which it is implicit that searching for any other answer is futile.

When I was in hospital to have an ear operation in the 1960's I was asked my religion (it was one of the boxes on the questionnaire) and I replied "agnostic".
Later, I saw in my file, "C of E".
The bstds had ignored what I said because I was under 18.

Nowadays I'd say "humanist/atheist".

There was a documentary made about exactly this, [url=http://www.pbs.org/pov/shelbyknox/[iThe Education of Shelby Knox[/i[/url.

Creationists ask for balance in the evolution vs creation debate. What in fact they asking for is false balance since, IIRC less than %1 of working biologists disagree with natural selection. The balance is achieved by teaching only peer reviewed science in science lessons and religion taught in the context of culture/literature/history in a comparative religion class. This one area where I wouldn't mind us being more like the USA where teaching of religion is forbidden in state schools along with school lead religious observance. It doesn't stop creationists trying have force their own agendas into schools but, when it gets to court they nearly always lose like in [url=http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/kitzmiller_v_dover_decision.htmlKitzmiller v. Dover[/url What is really annoying about such cases is the level of dishonesty displayed by those who claim to hold the higher moral ground.

A lot of this is down to the spread of US-style evangelical fundamentalism.

Not that long ago, even most evangelicals in the UK would not have made an issue of the subject. Most church people accepted what had been a routine way of interpreting the [iBible[/i story since Darwin published [iOn the Origin of Species[/i – that the seven days of the creation story was a simple way of explaining what might have meant seven millennia, for instance. In this way, a divine creation could sit alongside evolution with no major clash. It was known as ‘old Earth theory’.

And that, in essence, was the approach when my father was doing his theological training in the 1950s. But that decade also saw the start of a more US-style evangelism in the UK. Billy Graham’s first major crusades in the UK were in 1954.

By the time there was a major, two-week evangelical crusade in the Thameside in the mid-1970s, at least two of the three-man team of evangelists were from the US, if I remember correctly.

That approach has been spreading. You can equally see it in the rise of small, evangelical churches in the UK – there’s an African and Caribbean influence there too.

So you had people who grew up with that or were introduced to that much more fundamentalist approach and who then took that into their workplaces and that included schools, while business people with similar beliefs have used their own money to support such independent churches and, indeed, to spread the same creationist approach in academies, as has been mentioned.

Nor is it just about schools. In Wigan, for instance, a few years ago, one such local congregation (with big-money backing) was contemplating trying to have a local, independent business closed down. The Coven was a sort of new age, hippyish, pagan café and shop. But this latest incarnation of fundamentalists don’t like such things. They’re not much cop at tolerance. And they believe that such things are of the devil and are evil – which isn’t really that far from believing that a teenager is a witch and needs it beating out of them, even if that leads to murder.

We sneer at such beliefs though – and conveniently forget just how many of our own fellow citizens are really not that far from very similar views. My own father has attended exorcisms and absolutely believes that some unexplained things he’s seen have been miracles.

It does also seem that fundamentalism across a wide spread of religions is growing – perhaps we’ve become particularly aware of it since 9/11?

But you see it in the worldwide Anglican communion, where the clash is not simply Western congregations v developing world ones; you see it in the dogma of successive popes and their drive to drag that church back into older practices. You see it in the rise of the evangelical churches, while many of the conventional denominations in the UK are slowly dying. It seems that the only growth area for religion is among people who want the simplicity of a fundamentalist approach.

And that, of course, is without mentioning the rise in Islamic fundamentalism and Jewish fundamentalism – the latter, as illustrated by the recent events in Israel, where some ‘ultra-Orthodox’ Jews share many of the same attitudes as fundamentalist Muslims toward, say, the segregation of the sexes. Indeed, the ultra-Orthodox (polite speak for fundamentalist) Jewish community in north London, which I have already mentioned in terms of its girls’ school where the pupils will spend 50% of their time being taught the [iTorah[/i, is hardly light years apart.

So it can hardly come as a surprise that the CofE sees an opportunity in the government’s plans to let (indeed, encourage) increasing numbers of new, independent schools, together with existing schools being able to opt out of the state system and even into partnerships with the church.