Faith schools

I think any kind of response from me is going to trail off into a much wider and different debate on the applicability to post-capitalist society of values whose development relied upon and informed the development of capital and capitalist society itself. If there is an interest in this I'm sure a mod will do the necessary dislocation of the thread. But needless to say I have a really different way of looking at things than the one expressed above.

I'm not really talking about the possibilities of the distant future here, I mean in the here-and-now. Hence the relevance to faith schools - clearly our attitude to faith schools must be shaped by our attitude to faith in general.

I get quite impatient with discussions of exactly what communism will look like. It's just so far away at the moment that any such debates are really pretty meaningless.

~J.

I don't mean to direct discussion to what communism will look like at all. The idea of tolerance and freedom of thought and action is embedded in our current economic/social/political order. We don't really know what it would look like outside of it, or in what form it could survive. Whether or not resistance to the capitalist way of life should work through a simple negation of tolerance etc. or try to move beyond it in some other way is the issue here, and it is at the heart of how we respond to some of the questions around faith schools. Obviously you can already tell I am not for the simple negation of tolerance (I'm not assuming you are for it, but you take a different approach than I do). This is a post-capitalist issue in the sense that if we are trying to move away from capitalism and be something other than capitalist in our present actions then the question needs to be reckoned with.

So I'm talking about what we do right now, and not in some ideal society, as well. I hope I've expressed all this in a clear way.

I'm not really sure what you mean by 'negation of tolerance'. Can you elaborate?

~J.

A simple negation of tolerance/liberalism would be just to abandon it, to say for example that if something offends you, or isn't part of what you want the world to be like, it's your business and you're entitled to try to hound people about it. I'm not saying that this is your position though.

Well, I don't really see 'liberal tolerance' as a guiding principle of my own actions, no. I don't think it really makes sense, apart from anything else. Things like religion, nationalism, etc. aren't just personal foibles which I may or may not find offensive - they're social relationships and belief-systems that directly effect my life. I can't just be indifferently tolerant of them.

~J.

Is it important for people to have the ability to shape their own lives in a way that doesn't match up with the values of the majority?

Yes, I'd say it is important. But it's less important than a lot of other things.

~J.

Faith schools would not be being set up in a society with a stong class consciousness I hope. I don't see how segregating the place where children are spending their formative years can possibly be a good idea.
You think that working class organisation would be harmed by succesfully organising against anti-working class government action? Especially as I'm not even sure how many people are actually asking for faith schools.
To be honest I can't see how faith schools are justified on any level apart from a desire to divide the working class and pander to some minority interest groups. Organising against existing schools is a tough sell but stopping new ones should be something organised against where possible.
I'm also strongly against academies but I've found that teachers are generally seduced by the extra funding (although this might be less of an issue). At the school I was at last year they were basically deciding to go for academy status so they could keep up with the (worse-performing) school down the road (in non-academic ways such as providing the kids with blazers etc) and ensure that they continued to get the best of their joint intake (which had already been skimmed by other schools.)
I agree with what choccy and J have been posting although I think J has changed his position a fair bit.

Is government setting up faith schools in areas where there is not strong demand for it? If so, opposing government policy is fine and very natural. If government is setting up faith schools where there is demand (for what I agree are cynical motives on the govt part) then mobilizing against it is in a meaningful sense organizing against less conscious working class (as well as organizing against a cynical govt). This is an impractical way of conducting a struggle, I suggest.

Also, I don't think faith schools always segregate. e.g. a lot of muslims attend catholic schools or jewish schools.

Actually, I don't think many Muslims attend jewish schools. One Jewish school even got into trouble for not letting in the son of a woman who had converted - it was so orthodox it didn't believe someone could convert. Not just normal intolerance - racial intolerance. Lovely.

The reason many Muslim kids go to Catholic schools is that there aren't many Muslim ones. If a religious school is perceived as "good", loads of parents lie or pretend to attend church in order to get into it. It's not a situation we should encourage, though I suppose the kids will at least see how fickle their parents' faith is.

Once there are quite a few Muslim schools, how many non-Muslim kids do you think will attend them? About as many as there are Protestants in Catholic schools in Northern Ireland and vice versa. Or even fewer? One of my colleagues sends his kids to a Muslim school (though he is an Islamist, so it's at least consistent) - they even have different term times to fit in around Muslim festivals, rather than fitting around Christian ones that even us atheists do.

I think the next govt's choice agenda may start to undermine some of the religious schools. In many places there isn't a lot of choice (of the 4 primary schools within easy walking distance of my house, 2 are religious.) It's also true that "religion" is seen as an easy fix for a school that has other problems. There's a Catholic Academy secondary near me which is actually very unpopular - rare for either a religious school or an academy. The "magic touch" of religion here seems to have failed.

Regards,

Martin

That wasn't the exact case. In this situation, it is the kind of conversion that was question: there are different sects of Judaism in existence, with varying levels of strictness, roughly ranging between Reform Judaism, which is the most lenient and modern, to Orthodox Judaism, which is very strict. The conversion process is appropriately less to more elaborate. In the Jewish Free School case, it wasn't a matter of race that was problematic (although that is an issue for religious schools in Israel, so I imagine the situation over there might be similar), but the matter of whether or not her son was covered under a strict interpretation of conversion. This being an Orthodox school, their problem was that his mother had converted in a Conservative process (more-or-less the midpoint between Reform and Orthodox), which they deem as lacking.