The NSS will continue to plough its own unpopular, but principled, furrow
Terry Sanderson explains why the NSS is not in accord with new the Accord coalition
The launch this week of a new coalition called Accord to oppose state-sponsored religious schools is to be welcomed. Any initiative that opposes the blatant injustice and legalised discrimination that goes on in “faith schools” has got to be worth a try.
The National Secular Society has been fighting this particular battle for 140 years and has become one of the most recognised and well-known opponents of religion in schools. Indeed, in an article in the Independent attacking Accord and defending “faith schools”, Melanie McDonagh wrote: “So far, so not-new, and characteristic of anything you might expect to hear from the National Union of Teachers or the National Secular Society. But the thing about Accord is that its ranks are swelled by religious individuals as well as professional agnostics such as Tessa Blackstone. The chairman is a progressive rabbi, Dr Jonathan Romain.”
Despite the fact that we are recognised as the leading voice in this battle, we were not invited to join Accord. We can only surmise that it’s because we tend to be rather more ambitious in our aims than this religion-dominated coalition is.
The new coalition seeks many of the changes that we do. It wants school selection on the grounds of a parents’ religion to be dropped, it wants discrimination in the employment of teachers to be ended and it wants collective worship scrapped. These are all good ideas that the NSS has been pioneering for decades. Accord says that it is opposed to Section 37 of the Education and Inspections Act that came into effect this week. This permits even more religious discrimination to be practised in the appointment of teachers in state-funded ‘faith schools’.
When this section was slipped into the Bill by Lord Adonis during its passage through parliament, the NSS was alone in finding it and opposing it. We begged and pleaded for the teaching unions to get involved – after all, it would be their members who would bear the brunt of it. But we, and a small handful of parliamentary supporters whom we alerted to what was happening, were the only ones who spoke out.
But it was too late. We were overwhelmed and the Government got away with forcing more legalised discrimination onto the statute books – with only our voice raised in protest.
But the involvement of religious groups in the new coalition means that it stops short of demanding an end to the very concept of religious schools. It wants “objective and fair religious education” – which would include humanism.
The NSS, on the other hand, thinks that schools should be properly secular places and that religion should play no part in them. This is not as radical an idea as it sounds. France and America do not permit churches to run their state-funded schools and there is no religious education in the classroom, either (although constant pressure is on from religious interests to change that). In Ireland the education system, which has traditionally been under the control of the Catholic Church, is being radically re-thought and there is a strong move to step away from Church involvement in education.
There is a growing recognition and unease at the way that religious bodies are taking full advantage of the opportunities being offered to them to exploit our school system for their own ends. Our state-funded schools have increasingly become recruiting grounds for religious ideas of all kinds – some of them highly suspect. The NSS firmly believes that schools should not be the place for ideologies of any kind – religious, humanist, political - to promote themselves. However, the access to this captive, albeit often unwilling, audience is too much of a temptation for the propagandists to resist. Until the concept of “religious education” is disposed of, we will never see an end to clerics trying to push their particular brand of belief on to pupils. Demanding time for humanism in religious education classes simply provides justification for the continuation of those classes.
The call for “objective” religious education is a hopeless one. While religion is on the agenda, the clergy will want a hand in its teaching, and while that is the system, it can never be objective.
The NSS was successful last year in getting new legislation passed that would permit those over 16 to absent themselves from collective worship in schools if they wanted to, without their parents’ permission being required. It was a small step in a large campaign. We want all children to be able to be able to walk away from religious worship if it is against their conscience or desire to participate. We would have liked that right to be extended to religious education, too, and were pressing for it in Parliament just before the recess.
The Government continues to indulge and make excuses for the Church’s self-serving and disgraceful privileges in our schools. Indeed, the Children's minister, Kevin Brennan, defended the Government’s stance, saying: “Parents should be able to choose the type of education and ethos they want for their children. Faith schools are here to stay.”
And then came the depressingly familiar squawking from the vested interests who will never willingly give up their stranglehold on education. Once again the “faith leaders” assured us how invaluable they are and what success they achieve in schools.
I suspect the NSS has been left out of the Accord coalition because we are perceived as too noisy, too demanding, too confrontational.
But if Accord thinks it is going to make any progress against such entrenched interest groups as the Church of England and the Catholic Church by pussy-footing round them and constantly trying to make deals, they have a big disappointment coming. The big, religious steam-roller will flatten them time and time again.
The churches have already shown that they are prepared to lie and cheat to keep their privileges. If the new coalition is not prepared to be tough and to confront those who are at the forefront of religious involvement in schools, then it won’t make progress and it won’t last.
The NSS — outcast from this coalition — will go its own way. We don’t mind being the hard cop, and we won’t hesitate to speak our mind. Just today, our Executive Director was quoted in the Daily Mail and the London Evening Standard, about the opening of a Hindu school in London, saying: “Until now, the Hindu community has been a pathfinder in integration. The new school will not be diverse at all, ethnically or religiously, and its opening will make surrounding community schools less diverse. This will deprive the new pupils of the multiplicity of other cultures and backgrounds and also deprive the schools to which they would otherwise be admitted of some excellent role models. The Government’s obsession with opening Christian schools engenders a “me too” attitude, and this is the result – racial and religious segregation’’.
See the whole article here
See also:
Ireland opens its first two non-Church state primary schools
01 September 2008
