Funding religious schools is bad policy

National Post ^ | Farzana Hassan And Salma Siddiqui

[Clive]

Ontario Progressive Conservative leader John Tory says he wants to "ensure that students from the widest range of faith and cultural backgrounds are part of public education." Many Ontarians have interpreted this to mean that Mr. Tory would provide public funding for religious schools of all types -- not just Catholic schools, as under the current system.

While the status quo may be flawed, providing more government funding to religious schools would only make matters worse. Such a plan would further ghettoize religious communities -- especially the Muslim community, which is already quite insular.

Conservative Muslims may support Mr. Tory's plan, and downplay differences between Islamic and Canadian values in an attempt to win support for public funding. But step into their schools, and you may be shocked at what they're teaching.

In some Muslim schools, girls must pray behind boys, and segregation based on gender is advocated as a religious duty. This is obviously in conflict with Canadian norms.

Furthermore, Muslim children, like other Canadian children, must be provided a full opportunity to explore their creative talents through instruction in subjects such as music, art, drama and dance --disciplines that are often shunned in Muslim schools due to educators' austere religious outlook.

Advocates of public funding argue that such funding would ensure that private schools will be subject to more governmental oversight. They assert that extremism will be discouraged because curricula will be closely vetted. This ignores the reality that values within schools are rarely taught through

formal curricula. Rather, it is the school culture which plays a dominant role in imparting values to children.

If Mr. Tory's proposal leads to the funding of conservative Islamic schools, then Ontario taxpayers will be subsidizing an indoctrination program that treats Muslim girls as second-class citizens. Because faith-based education would become cheaper, and therefore more accessible for Muslim families, more Muslim children will attend religious schools, and therefore have less contact with other Canadians. In the mosques, a new generation of young Muslims will come to embrace a more orthodox and archaic understanding of Islam.

Ontario would do better to gear its policies toward greater integration of ethnic and religious communities. Funding private religious schools will not advance diversity, which is best promoted in the public school system. There, children of all backgrounds can prepare to live together under a common set of Canadian values.

- Farzana Hassan is the president of the Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC). Salma Siddiqui is the senior vice-president of the MCC.

[Clive]

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[goldstategop]

John Tory is a Red Tory. He's no small government conservative.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

The education of the children of Muslims certainly does challenge one's belief in sectarian education . . . but then, when one considers what one reads of the sort of history books used by government schools, you almost wonder what could be worse. I suppose treating girls as inferior qualifies, but what if they are segregated by sex and are separate but "equal?"

But this business of teaching that some races of people are pigs has just naturally got to stop. Americans have the Declaration of Independence to appeal to for the argument that "all men are created equal" - but a proposal to mandate the teaching of the DoI as a form of indoctrination in citizenship was defeated in NJ. In Freedomnomics John Lott makes the point that teachers employed by government schools are a special interest group which has motive and opportunity to teach that high taxes are good.

[fanfan]

[gridlock]

With government funding comes government control. Nobody who believes in religious education should entertain for a moment the idea of government funding. Right now, religious schools provide an alternative for parents who want an alternative to the cess-pools of public education. If religious schools are funded by the government, they will be just as the public schools within ten years.

And that argument is completely apart from the fact that public funding of religious schools would require public funds for Madrassas. Of course, they are doing that in Brooklyn, anyway.

[mountainlyons]

Funding religious groups know for terrorism is even worse.

[LetMarch]

Yes! Amen! Some, maybe many, tell why the Bible, prayer, etc. should not be taught in schools. Our signers of our Constitution, wrote why the Bible should be taught in our public schools, (and the conquences if it is not). We have seen and do see the consequences today, and when do not teach these things we replace it with that which much worse.
“Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” (Psalm 33:12)

[timsbella]

Your theory follows the thinking that in the absence of G-d people won’t believe nothing - they’ll believe ANYTHING. And they do...

I pay for my children’s religious education. It would be nice to get a break from paying school tax to public system, but my money would still send them to a faith-based institution (in this case Hebrew School) regardless.