Posted on 12/25/2001 5:47:26 AM PST by NewAmsterdam
Faith schools are part of the solution, not the problem
--Damian Green--
AFTER 50 years of unquestioned acceptance, church schools - or "faith schools", in the modern jargon - are now the most controversial part of our education system.
The attacks on them have escalated with the publication of a report accusing them of encouraging divisions between Asian and white communities and contributing to the tensions leading to last summer's riots.
Some long-standing opponents, a motley coalition containing leading Liberal Democrats, the Economist, some trade unions and Frank Dobson, have jumped on the bandwagon, saying all faith schools are inherently divisive.
To hold this view means ignoring two salient facts. First, most of the cities that saw unrest involving Asian youths in the summer do not have a Muslim school, so it is plainly unfair to blame them, even indirectly, as the Cantle report does.
Second, two thirds of British faith schools are run by the Church of England, and in modern Britain the idea of an Anglican riot is simply oxymoronic.
More to the point, most of these "traditional" church schools are happy to take in children from all faiths and none. The Labour MP Ann Cryer has told me that, in her Keighley constituency, there is a Church of England school with a 95 per cent Muslim intake.
Very often the best chance for a child in an inner city to acquire an excellent start in education is the church school.
But I would like to move the debate away from the purely domestic arena. We have been discussing this as though no other country faces similar problems. Perhaps there are lessons we can learn from others.
Last week, I was in the Netherlands as part of the Conservative Party's process of policy development. I was looking at the broader issues of Dutch education, but the effective way in which they have dealt with the issue of faith schools is eye-opening for the British visitor.
Much as we do, the Dutch have some inner-city areas with a high concentration of ethnic minorities. There are stresses and strains, but, unlike us, they have avoided explosions of rage.
It will come as a shock to those who campaign against our faith schools that two thirds of Dutch children are educated by religious groups. Most of them are Roman Catholic or Protestant, but there is also room for Jewish, Islamic, Hindu and humanist schools.
All of these schools have the power to impose their own admissions criteria, but in practice 90 per cent of them have open admissions to all children.
I visited one typical Protestant primary school in the small town of Schoonhoven, where a third of the children came from non-religious families. The head teacher told me that these other parents wanted the better discipline and strong ethos of his school. (This may sound familiar to British readers.)
Does this mean that, under its liberal exterior, the Netherlands is a much more religious country than Britain? Not at all. About 10 per cent of the Dutch go to church every week, which is a higher figure than in Britain, but not much.
The key to the different organisation of schools in Holland is freedom. Article 23 of the Dutch constitution guarantees freedom of education. They interpret this as the freedom to found schools, to organise the teaching and to determine the principles on which the school is based.
So anyone who can gather enough pupils to make a viable school is entitled, as of right, to public funds both to create the buildings and pay for the pupils. What the Dutch call the private sector in education is not fee-paying, but simply run by non-state bodies.
The result in the 80 years since this system was introduced has been the growth of the non-state sector, and a gradual shrinking of directly run state schools to about one third of the system.
The practical effect is that the church schools have to do a good job, because of the possibility of new entrants. In some areas of Amsterdam, there are Christian schools with an entirely Muslim school roll - even more stark than the Keighley experience.
When I asked them how this worked, they said the parents wanted their children to learn about the country they were growing up in and that, as long as they received a good education that gave them a chance in life, they were happy.
It was put to me by one centre-Right politician: "We want them to learn some Dutch songs in school, so that they can belong to our country and be happy." This seems to me an admirable ambition.
The balance of the freedom granted to Dutch schools is an inspection system based on Ofsted - Chris Woodhead is a name on the lips of many Dutch politicians - to ensure that the right things are taught in schools. This inspection system is combined with a less prescriptive national curriculum than ours.
Some Dutch teachers are bridling even at this degree of central control, which is much less intrusive than the experience of English teachers, but the need for independent inspection is the main lesson that the Dutch take from us.
The lesson we can take in return is that a combination of more freedom for schools and transparent inspection systems can solve problems that the British top-down system does not address effectively.
Rioting is always an expression of rage at the hopelessness of the rioters' condition. People who have been educated well enough to feel that they have a good future in the society in which they live will not riot.
It is not whether they have received an education based on their own religious principles, or those of another faith, or no faith at all. It is whether their education has transmitted the skills needed to find a place in society, and the values of tolerance and diversity that are common to all Western democracies.
We can learn from Holland that church schools are part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.
Even if they can't reed or rite or spelle it is good to no that they got a good edumication so we can "all get along".
Anglican schools are not the same as Islamic schools. Christianity does not equal Islam. Is this so hard to understand?
The reason why that other poster above was ridiculing the effort to get children to 'just get along' at the expense of reading, writing, arithmetic and basic skills is because in America many people have come to the conclusion that giving children basic skills in reading, writing, history, arithmetic, etc., what used to be normal, has now been replaced by the overwhelming purpose of merely socializing the children into attitudes judged to be correct by the elite who run the schools.
As America has public schools with a near complete monopoly on the funding those who administer those schools have become out-of-touch, ineffective and completely unconcerned about real education for the welfare of the children. There is a high frustration level.
Our universities I feel are still the best in the world. But our grades 1-12 are pitiful in most public schools. If you live in an upper income city in America, then chances are your public schools are good. But lower income areas virtually always have garbage public schools. This situation in America is compounded by the fact that upper income cities will not allow buildings to be constructed that would provide affordable housing for anywhere from 30-70% of the population. So, there are cities here in America that effectively do keep 70% of the population out simply because these individuals don't make enough money to live in what is allowed by law to be built. That's where the good public schools are.
We do have some schools in the poor areas run by churches that do a fantastic job and get great results with the poor people's children. These schools normally do not get public funding though. They exist on charity and are very much on a shoestring budget typically. Meanwhile the public schools in some of these cities are extraordinarilly well funded and yet they get very bad results.
Sixty to eighty years ago we did have great schools in our nation for grades 1-12. The decline has been so great that many people do better keeping their kids out of school and trying to educate them at home. This phenomenon is called home-schooling and it is very big. The home-school kids do outperform the public school kids when they get to college.
The public schools in America are so bad that the term 'dumbing down' has been developed to describe them. People in America actually believe that there is a conscious effort on the part of those who run the schools to make our people dumber from generation to generation.
Parents frequently jump at any opportunity to get their kids into a school different from the public school. However, the politicians don't want the public's money to go to anything but the dysfunctional public schools. The people alas are becoming sheeples and unable to make their will be reality.
Still, we too, suffer from a decline in educational standards and results. Perhaps a lot of this is as much due to a general cultural decline as it is to ideologically motivated staff. On the other hand, I don't think we have gone down as far as many American (as you described) or British schools. I teach at a University in Britain. Without wanting to boast immodestly I often have to correct students' grammar and spelling although English is not my native tongue.
Maybe such a 'mixed' system whereby money is not the sole element to decide what sort of education a child will receive is the best way forward. Some on this site might consider that 'socialist'. But personally I rather have a country where the majority is decently educated than a country where only a hand-full are. Still, I think we could free up our system a little more to get the same sort of results we used to get 20-30 years ago.
Merry Christmas!
The only advantage the parochials have is the ability to refuse students who are bent on being disruptions. They are, however, governed by regulations in most states dictated by the public educational establishment.
Article 23 [Education]
(1) Education shall be the constant concern of the Government.
(2) All persons shall be free to provide education, without prejudice to the authorities' right of supervision and, with regard to forms of education designated by law, its right to examine the competence and moral integrity of teachers, to be regulated by Act of Parliament.
(3) Education provided by public authorities shall be regulated by Act of Parliament, paying due respect to everyone's religion or belief.
(4) The authorities shall ensure that primary education is provided in a sufficient number of public-authority schools in every municipality. Deviations from this provision may be permitted under rules to be established by Act of Parliament on condition that there is opportunity to receive the said form of education.
(5) The standards required of schools financed either in part or in full from public funds shall be regulated by Act of Parliament, with due regard, in the case of private schools, to the freedom to provide education according to religious or other belief.
(6) The requirements for primary education shall be such that the standards both of private schools fully financed from public funds and of public-authority schools are fully guaranteed. The relevant provisions shall respect in particular the freedom of private schools to choose their teaching aids and to appoint teachers as they see fit.
(7) Private primary schools that satisfy the conditions laid down by Act of Parliament shall be financed from public funds according to the same standards as public-authority schools. The conditions under which private secondary education and pre-university education shall receive contributions from public funds shall be laid down by Act of Parliament.
(8) The Government shall submit annual reports on the state of education to the Parliament.
But I especially love the article because it sheds a bit of light on this left-over notion from the era of White Hats and Black Hats (the Cold War) that we are freedom-loving rugged individualists and Europeans are fetid socialists.
I'll bet it shocks people to read that the socialist, dope smoking Dutch have SCHOOL CHOICE!!! LOCAL CONTROL!!!
The control of almost every aspect of American Life by either Big Government or Big Business makes European "socialism" seem benign by comparison.
But back to the educational aspect of this article--why have the most poisonous intellectual trends from continental Europe--from Freudianism to Gramscian marxism washed up on our shores and had so much more virulent an effect? Is it the remnant of our Puritanical nature that we can't do anything halfway--including the destruction of our civilization? It's all or nothing.
I take it back. I hated this article. There is no hope that anything even remotely as reasonable, as American will ever be instituted here. So why do you taunt us with these things?
Oh, you noticed that too, did you? Are we becoming nothing more than a series of advertising slogans? Painted on the tips of tomahawk missiles?
Is this where we mention Kliebold and Harris and others (under our breath, of course) and wonder (silently) if the shock is not that they did what they did, but rather that so few follow in their footsteps...
Even though the working poor and middle class can barely get by on two paychecks? I hope conservatives get over the terrible (and un-conservative) idea that they're supposed to defend consumer capitalism to the death...
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