'David Cameron's governing Conservative Party is a big fan of faith schools. He wants more of them, and he's changing the law to make it easier for faith schools to be set up in this country. Faith schools, especially in rough inner cities, where comprehensive education is hit-or-miss at best, are far and away the best way for poor children to get a good education, and offer an excellent path to university and success in life. They consistently rank among the best in whatever region they operate in, and parents jump through all sorts of hoops to get their children into faith schools. This is true of faith schools of all faiths: Church of England, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish -- they all provide a consistently and substantially higher standard of education than comprehensive schools in the same area, producing students with consistently and substantially better results at GCSE and A-levels. The overwhelming majority of faith schools are Christian.

I believe that parents have the right to decide how their children are brought up. Their education is part of that, and if a parent wants to teach his kid to be a Christian, he's going to do that irrespective of whether the kid goes to a Christian school or a state comprehensive.Faith schools clearly deliver the goods, so I find arguments against faith schools existing at all rather arrogant. It would be great if we could throw money at comprehensive schools and attract the kind of staff that magically makes faith schools better, but we've been doing that since 1997, and it hasn't worked. To me, faith schools offer a cheap way of raising educational standards in this country.'

I saw this, and thought it deserved a considered reply.

If faith schools are better, and I'm not willing to believe that outright, then are we sure that it's due to faith? That'd be an astounding claim: that religious belief itself makes you more intelligent. It would lead us to ask why such a huge proportion of top academics are atheists or agnostics. Certainly the evidence suggests that more academically successful people have less religion than the rest of the population.
I have no problem with selective state schools pursuing higher standards than comprehensives can or do. I would fully support a grammar school system.
I do not support a system in which good education goes mostly with religious indoctrination and parents. I can't think of a good reason why it would be faith, rather than independence and selectivity, that makes faith schools better. Since faith is not something that we ought to allow children to be taught or told to have or mimic, we should cut the 'faith' part out of faith schools, but keep the rest. The most likely reasons for faith schools being better include determined parents (children who attend tend to have pushier parents who get their children into selective schools); better funding and more resources (from the religion in question); independence (so that teachers are better able to respond to context-dependent situations and manage the school and classes as needed); selectivity (of the school selecting good pupils, as well as, as mentioned, better pupils selecting the school); and teaching quality (teachers might be better motivated when teaching pupils in an environment and culture that they feel more comfortable with, and when they therefore feel closer to the pupils).

I am not keen to forgo good results just because of an emnity for the sloppiness of thought and indoctrination that are religious education.
I take the opposite attitude to that described, though, in that I don't see why we should give faith schools a chance just because they're faith schools. We know that faith schools have many factors that we know lead to better results. Why should we support the introduction of something that is either neutral or harmful to education (i.e faith) before we're sure that it's worthwhile? Why do we not simply have independent, selective state schools?

Any school run independently by a private organisation is likely to tilt towards bias in some aspect of education: that's why the private organisation wants to teach children! The government has no place in promoting faith as a reasonable bias over political or economic beliefs. If there were a Labour school and a Conservative school each would be the focus of vicious condemnation from the other party and the media. Faith schools are no different: they are set up with the specific purpose of teaching children what to think.
It doesn't matter if we regard that 'what' as harmless to good results. Schools should not be teaching what to think: they should be teaching how to think, and facts to consider in those thoughts. It is possible for indoctrination schools to teach critical thinking whilst also promoting its absence in one field, but the overwhelming incentive is not to do so, because those two lessons directly conflict. We therefore need to regulate such schools very carefully, if we allow them at all.

There's a fine line between the secular ideal of allowing religion to be a personal, private thing and allowing due expression of beliefs, and preventing children (who are especially vulnerable) from questioning and thinking about a dominant and culturally imposed regime.
A perfect faith school would be run according to that religion's tenets: children would be allowed to avoid mixing their fabrics, not go on school trips on Sundays or whatever they chose, and school activities planned around such requirements, but children would not be taught that these values are anything special. They would be taught critical analysis of faith and religion just as they should be. Thus the school would be particularly compatible with the religion, but no more.
That sort of school is unlikely to happen. Faiths want to run schools specifically to overstep the boundaries of secularism. We need to decide whether secularism is more important than the little extra funding or organisation a faith brings to a school. Given that we can explain faith schools' performance without invoking their faith, it seems silly to make faith an important feature of good schools.

This touches on the previous dissection of secularism. Here I have neatly defined it in an educational context as being taught how to think, not what to think. As it happens, little teaching of how to think occurs at any school nowadays, so we're talking in ideals already. Nonetheless, moving in the wrong direction in pursuit of exam results is hardly sensible. We can certainly question the importance of exam results as a test of anything useful or as indicators of later success, as sir Ken Robinson has done when analysing education, and others have done when considering social background and its importance.
Beyond that, we need to ask whether this improvement in performance in pointless and irrelevant testing is worth the burden it will bring: of indoctrination of children into beliefs that they have not been equipped to assess. That faiths wish to run schools is evidence enough that indoctrination works. Many people have observed, in aphorisms and academic papers, that children are vulnerable to indoctrination. We need to protect children until they are adults and ready to cope with such things, not sacrifice their freedom to decide their own goals, desires and ambitions on the altar of exam results and parental freedom.

School is the only access the state has to children, given the way we raise children in nuclear families, and so it is necessarily the place in which we can protect them and equip them to protect themselves. Until we discard the isolated, nuclear family as a way of raising children we must use school as a wedge to insert or help germinate the seeds of rationality in children whose parents are abusive and stifle their intellectual growth. We should not cave in to parental demand and extend their abuse and power over their children to state institutions, or allow replacements of them. If we are to accept secularism, we must ensure that religion truly is a private and personal thing, and is not taught in schools. If we do not accept secularism, then this should be made clear: that we are a theocracy or an anarchy of rival and incompatible attitudes.

Finally, I have already implicitly expressed my disregard for 'parents' rights' over their children. Children are independent beings, vulnerable, and therefore in need of extra protection from the state. If we do not allow husbands' rights over their wives, nor owners' rights over their slaves, then why the rights of parents to dictate the lives of the children they own? Someone who believes that parents have a right to decide how their children are brought up, to the extent that this conflicts with individual autonomy and freedom, is espousing the same principles that justify any sort of subjugation and slavery. If we cannot trust individuals to do what is best for their wives, but recognise wives' rights to decide for themselves, why should we trust individuals to decide for their children? Of course, children are vulnerable and still learning, so the state must help them learn to decide for themselves and help them decide for themselves. Supporting indoctrination is not compatible with this aim.

Research into faith schools can be found here:
http://accordcoalition.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/Databank-of-Independent-Evidence-on-Faith-Schools-updated-May-2010.pdf

Secularism

I was fortunate to attend yesterday a Lee Lecture in Examination Schools by Wendy Brown, entitled
'Civilizational Delusions: Equality, Secularism, Tolerance'.

I can summarise this talk as suggesting that secularism views itself as separate from cultures, but that actually it's just another culture. Professor Brown didn't go so far as to invoke cultural relativism (she specifically stated that she wasn't going for the 'bogeyman of moral [sic] relativism'), leaving possible solutions to her 'analysis' unaddressed.
She identified five assumptions of secularism that she disproved.
1. Secularism generates a religiously neutral state
2. Secularism is equally available to all religions
3. Tolerance is a practice of mutual respect
4. Secular regimes are culturally neutral
5. Secularism leads to women's freedom and equality

Her derivation of western secularism, that requires a personal and private religion, and personal relationship with God, from Protestantism, was interesting and believable. But just because secularism and protestantism are compatible, and the former grew from the latter, does not mean that secularism is necessarily based on protestantism. This point is crucial.
That secularism is not religiously neutral because some religions are more compatible with secularism than others is not necessarily true: it takes a consequentialist understanding of neutrality to get to that conclusion. My opinions on consequentialism can be found elsewhere; I find it ridiculous and unjustifiable to make moral judgements on the basis of consequences. Secularism can be called neutral, despite being more compatible with some religions than others, because its precepts can be derived without needing to adjust them to give bias towards or against certain cultural or religious attitudes. That, once derived, secular precepts might be more compatible with some beliefs than with others, does not mean that secularism is somehow not neutral after all.

In describing her second point, she mentioned that secularism is purported not to transform religions, but defines public and collective expressions of religion as zealotry: improperly tamed, excessive and pre-modern. I agree with her that secularism is not equally available to all religions: I disagree that this is a common assumption about secularism, or a necessary one. It is verging on a straw man argument, as any attempt to describe a broad and vaguely defined ideal (or deliberately undefined, in her case) will be.

She had some interesting things to say about tolerance: how it manages but naturalizes inequalities, normalizing the tolerators and their opinions and maintaining the excluded and different nature of the tolerated. She suggested that no definition of what to tolerate can be justified a priori (which says a lot about her opinion of secularism, which does just that), but is instead defined by government, culture and hegemonic institutions. It's mostly quite decent stuff, except for that little part giving the game away about not knowing what to tolerate.
I'll quickly insert assumption four here, but hold that last paragraph in your mind. Assumption four was that secular regimes are culturally neutral. This one is very much like number two, which in turn was rather like assumption one. She argues that secularism assumes rationality in the west and that we have no intrinsic culture, but that forcing immigrants to internalize what might have been a very external culture, whilst enjoying our own external culture which we call cultureless, is hypocrisy.
If we cannot justify anything except solely within our culture, and if any attempt to extract ourselves from cultural bias simply gives rise to another culture (a culture of not having culture?) then there is indeed no way to judge cultural demands, and despite her avowal that she didn't think we needed to resort to the spectre of relativism, and that we could find other solutions, she has, through her other arguments, given no option but to accept cultural relativism.
If we accept cultural relativism, that no culture can be objectively better than another, and we accept her basic idea that objective justifications for cultural institutions is itself a culture, then we might as well overtly promote our culture anyway; we find it the most pleasant, and so we should protect it, rather than going through the whole rigmarole of pretending to judge objectively things which apparently cannot be judged objectively. Although she refused to examine the consequences of her argument, it does therefore lead to the sort of culture wars and intolerance that I guess she'd find actually quite objectionable.

Let me now return to that accusation of hypocrisy on the part of secularists. Certainly there are some people who regard Western culture as decidedly Christian, and conflate the two (mostly self-aggrandizing or deluded western Christians). However, these people are not the same secularists who believe that we are cultureless, or objective in our culture. The secularists who wish immigrants to accept secularism because of its objectivity are not simultaneously allowing Christianity: they typically bemoan all insidious religious influence in their countries. The Christians, on the other hand, make exactly the same claims to objectivity that other religions do, and are not secretive about defending their religious culture.
So there is no hypocrisy, bur two rival attitudes that are not part of the same system of belief.
But beyond this, her analysis offers no change in behaviour as a solution. She has not argued that defending one's culture, or promoting it within one's own region, is wrong. Promoting secularism, even if it is merely another culture like all the rest, is no worse than publicly espousing and promoting any of the rest, even if she can justify suggesting that it is no better.

Her last point is separate from these arguments, and is about women's rights. Her sympathies pretty clearly lay with either second wave feminism, or else inaccurate understanding of women's current position in society. She pointed out that the secular French revolution made women worse off. She also points out that the nuclear family, with its relationships of need and female inferiority, was and is supported by western 'secularists'.
At this point my brain melted with the effort of remembering all the errors she was making in reasoning. Let's start by saying that just because secularism is not sufficient for women's equality does not mean that it is not necessary. Next, I've had a few snipes at the nuclear family myself (e.g http://whirlingsilently.blogspot.com/2010/05/marriage.html), so secularism does not necessarily support it. Finally and similarly, those 'secularists' who support the nuclear family most are actually religious zealots of the sort she says shouldn't be called zealots! These are mostly religious people who are imposing cultural attitudes that we (including professor Brown) find unpleasant. Secularism explicitly fights such discrimination (or, at the very least explicitly allows the absence or it, and allows people to fight it, unlike many other systems). To conflate secularism with the discrimination it aims to fight simply because of the historical growth of secularism from Christianity is either very confused, or a very cunning attack on it. Either way I'm not convinced that secularism is simply a label we use to conceal cultural imperialism rather than being an ideal in its own right. Maybe some people find their aims allied with secularists at times and co-opt the secularist's arguments, but that does not make secularism hypocritical.

There are some interesting questions that she did raise, but only right at the end!
Questions of whether wearing burkas involve more coercion than wearing high heels, about whether sex separation in sports is justifiable, and whether the nuclear family is intrinsically discriminatory (I'd tend for yes).
The point about secularism is that you might find yourself persuaded to wear high heels, but there is no means of redress for those who wish you to do so except through personal relationships. This is not true for burkas, hijabs and nikabs: these are mandated by doctrine, and punishments are specified for unchaste or blasphemous women. Children should not be governed by doctrine; adults we must assume have the ability to choose. These garments are far more problematic for society than high heels because they cover the face, which we need for recognition, and therefore accountability.
It's harder to justify the current system of sports teams, but given that humanity does divide quite clearly into a roughly binary system of potential athletic ability it seems plausible to split adults up.
As for the nuclear family... well, it's better than orphaned children or single adult families.