I had the misfortune of going to a Church of England school, where I was put through regular religious assemblies. I recall asking, with genuine curiosity, who created God. My teacher giggled and muttered something along the lines of: “It doesn’t work like that.” The babbling local vicar, who was later arrested for drink-driving, made the occasional appearance, explaining to us that the wide knowledge of Jesus’s (actually false) birthday showed how he was the most important human in all history. We sang hymns almost every day – something I now find surreal.
Faith schools comprise 19 per cent of all state-funded secondary schools and 37 per cent of state-funded primary schools. Originally, the government only funded Jewish and Christian faith schools, but this was expanded to other faiths in 1997. This has brought with it a fresh spate of problems but we should first consider what the existence of faith schools asks the taxpayer to do.
To think that such schools are justified, one must believe that it is right for money taken from the wages of citizens to be used to impose a particular religion on impressionable young children. It isn’t necessary to be a staunch secularist to see this as a clear overstepping of the state into personal and religious matters. We are all entitled to religious freedom but this does not include the freedom to have others finance your child’s inculcation.
In a society now dealing with many different religions and cultures, at best faith schools exacerbate segregation and division; at worst they teach Stone Age, poisonous ideologies. It is not good for pluralism if communities do not grow up learning with each other and respecting their differences. Hopefully we will see an end to government-funded faith schools – the majority of the population supports this – although there are no signs that this will appear on any party’s agenda in the near or even distant future.
The British Humanist Association campaigns on faith schools. More information at humanism.org.uk
A version of this article appears in the Witness section of the Summer 2016 issue of the New Humanist. Subscribe today.
