To The Daily Telegraph
Faith schools in Northern Ireland helped to foster division and mistrust, encouraging children to grow up thinking those of another faith were different, if not downright enemies. Allowing Muslim faith schools is surely likely to have the same effect. It would appear that we never learn.
Michael Edwards, Haslemere, Surrey
I wholeheartedly agree. Some Moslem schools in Britain have been accused of being breeding grounds for extremism, hiring jihadists as teachers, concentrating on the boys and making girls, heads covered, sit at the back of the classroom. One school took its pupils on a trip to Saudi Arabia – at public expense.
Epicurus might say, were he alive today, that the culture of a country is its glue. Faith schools are accused of being divisive, the substance of their teaching out-of-date, especially in science, and of breeding hostility, distrust and a feeling of “otherness” towards the rest of society. In the US they teach creationism and distrust of modern science; in Britain (in a few schools) jihadism If you want to spend your short and precious life on organised medieval religion, that is your affair; just don’t do it at public expense. The underlying culture of both the US and the UK is tolerance. Britain went through a bloody period of religious torture and war, along with the rest of Europe, but painfully learned the lessons of tolerance. Militant religions should not be allowed to undermine it.
The source of most of the current trouble is Saudi Arabia, where the ruling family made a deal with pre-historic desert mullahs to support their brand of religion, which seems to consist only of studying the Koran and nothing else, in return for political support. The Saudis aggressively export these beliefs, undermining any hope of modernising countries like Pakistan and Yemen. When they start to do this in the West it is time to stop supplying them arms, stop them training extremists, and allelujah! begin to stop buying their wretched oil.
It has now been revealed that there are secret ultra- Orthodox Jewish schools in London that operate both secretly and illegally.. Hundreds of boys are cloistered from 7.30 in the morning until 7 at night ( to keep them away from ordinary people). They study only the torah and are indoctrinated in hatred of the society in which they live. Girls get no “education” at all. The media has focused only on the moslems, of course, because to criticize Jewish subversion and medieval practice gets you called anti-semitic, as if the antics of these people are not anti-British, illegal and cruel. yÿ
Are “faith schools” tax-financed?
Yes, they are. It is all an effort to squeeze out the teacher’s unions so that bad teachers can be sacked, among other things. Well, so they ought to be, But along with that goes a very mixed bag of semi-independent schools that specialize . Some specialize in sports, in music, in text messaging and watching porn on the web ( I am, sort of, joking) . No one seems to be able to justify this specialization at an early age. But the scandal are the so- called religious schools that deny science and want to produce yes-men who will do what rabbi or imam, or whatever, tells them. These are a menace to civilized life!