Accord May Have Come Into Being, But Is Still Lacking in Reality Nonetheless

nick cowen, 2 September 2008

Yesterday was the first day of the month in which children return to school after the summer holidays. (Cue for cheers or boos depending on age.)
Along with the start of the new school year, yesterday also saw the launch of a new anti-faith school initiative.
Named the Accord Coalition, what distinguishes this new organisation from all other lobby groups campaigning for the same end is that its membership includes several prominent religious figures and groups. It is not just the usual group of virulently anti-religious suspects such as Polly Toynbee, Phillip Pullman and A.C.Grayling, although all of these belong to it.

Because Accord contains persons of faith, not just secular humanists, its principal grounds for opposing faith schools are not the usual humanist ones that they allegedly indoctrinate pupils with beliefs that are devoid of any rational basis.
Rather, Accord opposes faith schools on the grounds that their selective admissions policies are socially divisive and thereby subversive of community cohesion.
Epitomising these grounds is a quotation prominently displayed on the group’s website from its chairman Rabbi Jonathan Romain which runs:
“I want my children to go to a school where they can sit next to a Christian, play football in the break with a Muslim, do homework with a Hindu and walk back with an atheist – interacting with them and them getting to know what a Jewish child is like. Schools should build bridges, not erect barriers.”
Doubtless, there are plenty of schools in this country that would satisfy his wishes to which Rabbi Romain could send his children if he wanted to, and good luck to them and him if he did.
But what about those other parents whose wishes for their children are somewhat different?
What about those who want their children to attend some faith school so that some specific faith be nurtured in them?
What about those whose principal wish is that their children be spared bullying at school by children of a different faith or ethnicity to their own?
What about those parents who simply want their children to receive as good an academic education as they can possibly get and who rightly believe that it is likeliest at some school whose ethos is fortified by its staff and pupils sharing some similar faith commitment?
Doubtless, Rabbi Romain and his fellow Accord members will protest that all such denominational schools as cater to such parental wishes are divisive because they segregate children along religious lines. In an article on the Accord website first published in the Guardian earlier this year, Rabbi Romain spelt out this argument so:
“The better faith schools may teach about different religions from books, but that is no substitute for children of different traditions actually seeing each other on a daily basis, mixing in class and during the break, and frequenting each other’s homes. That is what makes for a society cohesive and at ease with itself. Conversely, those growing up apart from each other will lack knowledge and be prone to the suspicion and fear that ignorance breeds.”
There are two things wrong with this argument, however.
First, Rabbi Romain might well be right that no diverse society can be cohesive or at ease with itself unless young members of it who come from different traditions mix socially outside of school. However, it does not follow that denominational schools will necessarily preclude such mixing.
My own two teenage children go to a faith school attended exclusively by those of the same faith, being highly popular and therefore over-subscribed. Both children have extensive networks of friends drawn from a very wide variety of different faiths and who regularly visit each other’s homes including my own. They are a living refutation of the claim that faith schools necessarily breed sectarianism, as are countless other children as broad-minded and well-balanced as my own two.
Second, even if a diverse society cannot enjoy cohesion or be at ease with itself unless members of it who come from different traditions can and do mix socially, there is no warrant for supposing such mixing is capable of being artificially engineered by a state against the will of its citizens by manipulating its school system.
Even when mixed schools are forced upon a populace by a state, wherever for some reason its different groups do not care to mix socially, they will not do so, even when made to attend the same schools as each other. The continued residential and social segregation of blacks and whites in the United States fifty years after the end of school segregation there is living proof of that fact.
Given all the pressure that faith schools here have come under in recent times, I am increasingly beginning to question by what right the state should be considered entitled to interfere in the education of children growing up within it all, beyond requiring that they all receive one, and ensuring that no child fails to through lack of parental means or care.
What business should it be of Rabbi Romain’s, or Polly Toynbee’s or Ed Balls’ to what kinds of school other parents may care to send their children, provided these schools offer a basic education that meets some minimum conditions of acceptability?
Someone should start up a campaign group to lobby on behalf of faith schools. ‘Discord’ would seem an appropriate name. Certainly, someone needs to challenge the highly dubious statist assumptions on which the entire debate about faith schools has hitherto proceeded.