There is currently a daft & pointless row between Michael Gove (Education Secretary) and Theresa May (Home Secretary) about who’s ideas are best to fight ‘religious extremism’ in schools.
They have not, and cannot, define extremism, yet the ill-defined argument nevertheless rages in the “poli-news”*1
Both want to gain credit for “fighting extremism” in the wake of the UKIP earthquake, which has woken up the Tories, if not Cleggy and Millibean!
Gove may but Theresa wont; If looks could kill eh? ;-)
This is a further example of how our party political leaders suffer from a lack of philosophical clarity & backbone. In meBook I explain that a better way forward for British society can only be met by the removal of the useless party political system, but anyway, back to the issue.
The real question for debate is “Why have primitive cultural practices have been allowed to multiply in our schools?” These practices*3 separate the children of Muslim parents from mainstream British society, are socially divisive and create the breeding ground for a future home grown Islamic jihad of terrifying scale.
A deeply mistaken, and socially divisive pandering to Muslim religious sensitivities is shared by all three main political parties and it all started with Blair’s damned academies.
The unpleasant truth is that many British parents are hypocrites and indirectly and unwittingly provide support for an Islamic extremist future. They send their children to Christian / Jewish faith schools simply because they promote better discipline and, as a result, have quieter classrooms and as a result, better exam results. This is all done under the pretence that they are practising Christians or Jews. Once upon a time we had little to worry about the gentle C of E schools and the slightly more rabid Roman Catholic Schools.
But now, this new tranche of Muslim faith schools are effectively destroying a traditional British identity that took a thousand years to form. I know it’s not perfect, but it is the best set of cultural practices to be found anywhere in the world, and it is being destroyed in a matter of decades by our idiotic party political leaders.
Why? Because party politicians:-
a) dare not risk losing any faith vote
b) are completely at a loss how to deal with this “sensitive” issue
c) dare not appear to be “racist*2”
d) dare not face up to primitive cultural practices because of their fear of violence from our ever increasing Muslim population.
But, now we are faced with a serious and growing threat to traditional British values from 7th century Islam which has to be addressed by an enlightened government.
Hypatia of Alexandia (370 – 415 A.D.) understood the threat of violent extremism caused by teaching the young mind religious dogma as truth:-
“Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain, and perhaps tragedy, can he be later relieved of them. Men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth, often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.”
“Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.”
The solution is simple, painful but entirely necessary.
- Cease public funding for ALL faith schools and slowly change them all to a secular4 ethos but including the missing discipline regimes.
- Religion should play no part in a child’s education and Britain should adopt the French Secularism charter which is now established in all French, publicly funded, schools.
- The only way forward is a secular and philosophical based government who have the best interests of the whole population of Britain at heart. Those people who have a faith based lifestyle can continue with it, but not in national state funded schools.
*1 poli-news is my term for the discussion in the media of the politics of the problem rather than the issue itself.
*2 There is no definition of the term ‘racist’ in the Oxford English dictionary, yet the word is used everywhere to mean almost anything.
*3 practices include separating boys from girls; divisive cultural clothing practices (hijab, Burkha etc.); separation of children, whose parents are Muslim, from the rest of British society; refusal to teach aspects of science because they challenge religious texts! )
*4 secular; the separation of religious belief from any national, publicly funded institution; i.e. government, the legal system and education.
