Re: The Condition of the Church in the UK vs USA

On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 11:34:44 +0000, Gareth McCaughan put finger to
keyboard and typed:

Mark Goodge wrote:

There's a difference, though, between "supplied by" and "funded by".
Faith schools fall into the latter group, they are funded (partially)
by the state but the state doesn't actually supply them. In this
context, they're no different from all the other independent and
charitable organisations which provide services to the public and
receive at least part of their funding from the state. Youth clubs,
sports groups, arts organisations, ethnic minority groups, etc - all
of these have their own criteria for who may benefit from their
services and the government is happy to support them financially. Why
should schools be any different?

Because religious schools are (among other things) tools for
proselytizing, and arguably that's not a suitable use of the
government's money.

Arguably, yes, although I'd make at least one of your
counter-arguments :-)

However, in a sense it's true to say that *any* religious
organisisation is a tool for proselytising, and yet that doesn't stop
religious groups from being recipients of state funds in all the other
areas I mentioned. You could argue that education is different, in
that it's fundamentally about instilling knowledge and opinions into
children in way that, say, a youth club or drama club is not. But the
counter-argument to that is that a state-funded faith school is still
partly controlled by the state, and that gives the state a certain
amount of influence in key areas such as the curriculum. By contrast,
a church-run youth group can be in receipt of grant funding and yet be
entirely committed to using the club primarily for the purpose of
converting the attenders to Christianity.

(I've snipped the rest of your aguments, because I think you've
countered them yourself better than I could so I've got nothing to
add).

I think there's a lot to be said for that (and for, as you
suggest, allowing schools to select in any way they like).
But there are other problems with that: moving a little way
from selecting on the basis of religion and teaching a
religion's doctrines as the truth, we get (say) selecting
on the basis of race and teaching a particular (perhaps
extreme) political position as the truth. And there are
reasons to be pretty uncomfortable about that sort of
thing.

Since race is one area where discrimination is illegal anyway then the
question of schools using it as the basis for selection wouldn't arise
under the current legislative framework. We've been over this before
in debates about anti-discrimination legislation in general, but in
the case of race I am generally persuaded that the harm prevented by
the legislation outweighs (and thus justifies) the harm done by the
legislation itself. Selecting on the basis of political position is an
interesting conundrum; I don't think it would be a good thing but, on
the other hand, I think it would be almost impossible to legislate
against. Some might argue that, given the predominence of left-wing
views in the teaching profession, there would be a strong and entirely
justified demand for schools which promised a more right-wing (or even
centrist) approach :-)

Mark
--
Blog: http://Mark.Goodge.co.uk Photos: http://www.goodge.co.uk
"Let's see colours that have never been seen"
.

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