Even if Operation Trojan Horse is real, and as much as anything else it would have been highly unlikely to have been given a name from Homer rather than from an Islamic text, none of the schools in question is a "faith school", and such infiltration would in fact be impossible if it were, just as it would have been back when LEAs were still LEAs, and no enemies of that old-time religion.
The Catholic Church, the Church of England, the Church in Wales, Northern Ireland's Transferor Churches, nondenominational structures in fact bound up in numerous ways with the Church of Scotland, Conservative LEAs in fact bound up in numerous ways with the Church of England, Labour LEAs in fact bound up in numerous ways with the Methodist Church (to this day, many schools in places such as County Durham still repair to their local chapels each December for their Christmas Carol Services): there would have been, and there is, none of this with them.
Nor the shenanigans that sometimes surround American School Boards. Nor any takeover by the 1980s Loony Left, as those of us who attended state schools in the Old Labour heartlands in the 1980s can testify. Nor any takeover by today's "libertarian" Loony Right, against which there would appear to be no remaining bulwark within the Conservative Party, never mind UKIP. Watch that space.
The rednecks who kept you down are traitors to this country.
ReplyDeleteWe sold the pass on faith schools when we created comprehensive schools.
ReplyDeleteFaith schools have far fewer children on free school meals than the average in their catchment areas and are highly selective-Peter Hitchens went through the pages of complex criteria to get into one local Catholic school.
You simply cannot have both a comprehensive education system and selection by interview, multiple criteria and religion.
Those of our politicians who oppose selection by ability-but support selection by faith-are hypocrites and frauds.
The free school meals argument used against grammars applies even more to faith schools, as all the research shows.
And in selective Northern Ireland the poorest kids get to University in greater numbers than in comprehensive Scotland Wales or England.
Our education system was much better when the Churches provided it. Letting the state take it over (and letting the state take over faith schools) was a travesty.
ReplyDeleteThe last 50 years of educational decline prove conclusively that the government has no idea how to run schools, puts politics before education,
As exemplified by the creation of comprehensive schools turning schools into tools to achieve the political goal of equality, and to hell with education.
Ask the churches, which still do run a lot of education, about comprehensivisation. They will give the full theological case that it is positively more Christian.
ReplyDeleteThat claim about school meals is positively bizarre to anyone outside the Anglican, Tory Home Counties. But even there, I expect that the church-based state schools are mostly serving the children of the farm hands and the footmen. Who else would need them?
ReplyDelete