In the UK we have private schools treated as charities for tax purposes for no good reason that most of us can see.
Other than, perhaps, the establishment who made those tax rules to save themselves money on their children’s education.
After all, they need to separate their offspring from the great unwashed (that’s you and me if you were wondering) and therefore invented charitable status to protect their socially divisive academies.
We also have a divisive education system that protects religious privilege as if it were something reasonable. Politicians promote these backward ideas as choices, when in fact all they are simply vote grabbing policies used by short sighted party politicians.
Politicians and the social worker intellectual elite dare not stop these retrograde practices because
- votes are more important than sensible policies
- misplaced human rights sensitivities (plus that’s where many of them send their kids to schools anyway).
As a result, we have Saudi Arabian Wahabbist1 funded schools promoting primitive cultural differences, with impunity, because our liberal ideologies dare not offend our oil suppliers or provoke a religion so protective of its medieval cultural practices that violent reprisal is quite likely.
The consequence of all this is the increase in Islamic self importance and the attendant religious schisms that are tearing the world apart.
We have politicians trying to make themselves heard by making short term and usually idiotic policy statement because an election is coming up next May.
The latest today is Ed Millibean calling for tax penalties if private schools don’t “do more” for the great unwashed
(remember, that’s you and me), when a rational policy would remove tax breaks entirely for private schools and cease any public funding for faith schools immediately.
The lack of firm philosophical backbone in today’s party politicians has rendered the party system completely irrelevant for the issues our society faces today.
The rise of UKIP is a consequence. The UKIP success relies on the ‘none of the above’ vote that we don’t have in our, not-so representative, democracy.
The only way to resolve the Islamist agenda is to remove ALL religion from ALL schools.
Government should promote and teach secularism and reason based philosophy, encouraging rational debating techniques, in all schools. Childish minds are most susceptible to dogma and therefore should be protected from faith based education at all costs. Religious leaders know that all too well of course…
That will take 50 years to achieve, but only once the changes are made.
Since there is no prospect of that happening soon, god help us all ;-(
Happy Winterval!
Peter O’Toole (1932-2013) actor, famous for his role in Lawrence of Arabia
“Question: How do you know you’re God?
Answer: Simple. When I pray to him, I find I’m talking to myself.”
1 Wahhabism is a narrow misogynist, austere form of Islam that insists on a literal interpretation of the Koran. Strict Wahhabis believe that all those who don’t practice their form of Islam are heathens and enemies.
