MARILYN MASON

‘Faith schools lead to increased segregation’

Unfortunately, I do think faith schools have a future, because we live in a society where choice is considered an unquestionable benefit, and where “improving” education seems to be more about tinkering with the structures and ownership of schools than with improving the curriculum, school leadership and teaching.

Choice of schools, as with other goods, depends on spare capacity; this works well with, say, computers or baked beans, but few are prepared to pay for empty places in schools, with the result that popular schools, for whatever reason – accessibility, facilities, status, faith, league table position – become oversubscribed and can choose their pupils, not the other way round.

It surely can’t be right for children to be refused entry to their local, publicly-funded school because their parents are of the wrong or no religion, though, this kind of selection seems to be the reason that faith schools (or at least those in the less challenging catchment areas) have, amongst middle-class parents, become associated with well-behaved pupils and good results.

Selection and its accompanying hypocrisies aside, I think the expansion of faith schools over recent decades is unfortunate because it leads to increased segregation of minority groups and less contact between children of all religions and none. Our historic acceptance of large numbers of state-funded Christian schools has, understandably, led to demands from minority religions for their own state-funded schools, meaning that even the minority of faith schools with open admissions policies have little or no take-up from those of other religions or none and so remain mono-faith. Do we really want a society where Muslim or Sikh or Jewish children, for example, grow up without getting to know children from other religious or non-religious backgrounds – and vice-versa?

It would be difficult, in the current political and economic climate, to ban or nationalise all faith schools. But, if existing faith schools became truly inclusive – with no favouring of their own faith, a broad and balanced religious education and no opt-outs from the national curriculum – they could contribute more positively to a harmonious multicultural society (though these changes probably miss the point of faith schools for some of their supporters). And, if ordinary state schools made more efforts to accommodate minority religious needs, the desire to segregate children could wither away. Despite the difficulties, this widely-shared alternative vision for our future schools is surely worth working for.

Marilyn Mason was the British Humanist Association’s education officer from 1998 to 2006. She is now retired

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HARRY BRIGHOUSE

‘It’s impossible to believe that we will be better served by exclusively secular schools’

The best case in a complex, multicultural society, is for children to have a right to an open future: A right not to have their own deepest value commitments determined by their parents or by other institutional forces beyond their control; a right to an education that opens them up to understand and reflect on traditions, practices and commitments beyond those in which their parents participate.

The fear people have about faith schools is that they will reinforce parental influence, thus inhibiting rather than expanding the child’s capacities for reflection. This fear is reasonable, and no doubt some faith schools fail some children by unduly reinforcing parental influence. But to make the case against faith schools decisive we need more arguments.

First: How do faith schools actually behave? Most of them do not aim to induct children into a narrow set of religious beliefs and practices, they see themselves as providing schooling with a spiritual dimension, seeking to instill an appreciation of their particular faith tradition, but also to foster respect for others, and non-believers. The practices and climate of the schools reflect these values, not the narrow indoctrinatory aims some secularists like to imagine.

Second, we should look at the values and practices of secular schools. If they set the bar high enough, by fostering careful and emotionally-sensitive critical reflection on the received opinions of home and society, then even many liberal faith schools will fall short. The research base on this question is small. In the absence of systematic research, experience suggests that many secular schools, far from setting the bar high, participate pretty unreflectively in the materialist values of mainstream society and leave parental influences largely unchallenged. De-funding faith schools, far from improving this situation, might make it worse, by reducing the diversity in and integration of the system.

Finally: What would happen to faith schools if the state system excluded them? The US model provides a dystopian possibility. Excluded from the public system, denied public funding, and self-consciously serving private, not public, purposes, far more religious schools in the US than in the UK fit the indoctrinatory model secularist liberals rightly reject. (Notably, most Catholic schools are exempt from this criticism.)

The architects of the UK parliament’s 1944 Act planned for all state schools to be secular. They compromised for financial reasons; the state had limited resources, and churches had the schools. But I find it hard to believe that the proper liberal secular goals would have been better served by the architects’ original plan, and impossible to believe they would be better served now by returning to it. Faith schools will be part of the system for a long time to come, and it’s a good thing too.

Professor Harry Brighouse grew up in the UK, but now resides in the US where he is professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an atheist