51 Offences in 45 Minutes

hawkinspeter wrote:

 

For the sake of your kids’ education, you could just lie about being a lapsed member of the relevant faith (assuming they don’t require genital mutilation to be a member of that faith) and simply educate your kids about the nature of faith. The kids could then decide for themselves if they want to sit through the religious stuff or to make a stand against it.

Hmmm.  Teaching your sprog early on about the importance of cycnicism and lies to getting on in life?

Plus, make sure they cycle there so as to learn how power is always abused, and they’ll have a firm grounding in how the world works.

davel wrote:

Having been through the Catholic school system, it just doesn’t work like that (at least not in my experience) It was actually a lot closer to compulsory Religious Education, with other religions only held up as ‘context’ to show how wrong they are. We had two (others had more) Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child videos sprung on us – just horrible anti-abortion propaganda. And then there’re all the clubs set up around confirmation time to shepherd you into The Club. I count in the Pope’s gang, even though I knew it was shit by the time I was 14.

If an organisation has your kids’ ears for longer than you do, and wants to drip feed a message that you fundamentally don’t agree with, do you really want to spend the energy balancing it out and possibly creating conflict in your kids, as opposed to just send them to a school that doesn’t peddle that bullshit? I’ve actually no problem with my kids signing up to a religion, to a point, but I doubt they’re going to get a balanced view of any of them via a school of any religious flavour. 

Yeah, it could be a difficult choice depending on just how much better the education is versus the amount of indoctrination.

I’d prefer schools to be focussed on the education aspect and not have any religious involvement (except for teaching about religions in religious studies etc), but history has left us with a bunch of good schools that happen to have been funded and run by different religions. I’d expect there to be a big variation in just how religion focussed they are but I expect it also depends on which religion they follow.

Simon E wrote:

vonhelmet wrote:

davel wrote:

Schools being secular would help, too. We could practically throw our kids into a decent school from our garden… Problem is, they’d get a daily bible bashing, so we go past that to the nearest non-sky fairy one a mile away.

You could send them to the church school and just opt them out of collective worship, but I guess you wouldn’t be able to get on your high horse about it then. 

Is it really a ‘high horse’ to have such a view? Can you not see why they may want to avoid a school that teaches/preaches stuff they fundamentally disagree with? Like asking a vegan that he/she has to work at a meat processing plant and say “It’s fine, you won’t touch the dead animals, just be dealing with paperwork, accounts, shift patterns and so on” but facilitating the thing they disagree with.

There are lots of CofE primary schools in Shrewsbury, ours attended the one in our estate. Religion wasn’t at all heavy, the head cares far more  about the SATS scores than bible-bashing in the school, to the extent that I consider it to be detrimental to the pupils’ development. 10 year olds don’t need hothousing and cramming. SATS are a distraction and not indicative of the quality or value of a child’s education.

I was brought up absolutely saturated in Christianity but I think schools should be agnostic and discuss religion as part of general Philosophy. Teach them to understand what religion, politics etc are, not what they should believe; but a lot of people don’t want them to think for themselves.

Schools don’t “preach” anything nor what they”should” believe  either religion or politics – trust me, they don’t have the time – and even faith schools are supposed to do exactly what you say  (i.e teaching about religionS plural + teaching them what those concepts are rather than forcing a particular point of view down their throats.   OFSTED doesn’t  – quite rightly – allow that!)

Using 1970’s phrases like “bible bashing” is not very helpful to the debate though…

hawkinspeter wrote:

FluffyKittenofTindalos wrote:

vonhelmet wrote:

davel wrote:

srchar wrote:

KendalRed wrote:

Now kids routinely go to schools that require long journeys, often passing by schools much closer to home. “Ooh, we’re over the moon, we managed to get our Tarquill into St Beckhams Academy – it’s a two hour drive, but the Ofsted was outstanding”

Don’t be too harsh on parents – in some areas, schools are so oversubscribed that “choice” simply doesn’t exist – you go where you get sent, even if it’s an hour’s bus ride away.  We’re planning to move out of London when ours hit school age, for this very reason.

Schools being secular would help, too. We could practically throw our kids into a decent school from our garden… Problem is, they’d get a daily bible bashing, so we go past that to the nearest non-sky fairy one a mile away.

You could send them to the church school and just opt them out of collective worship, but I guess you wouldn’t be able to get on your high horse about it then. 

 

Don’t religious schools get to discriminate in favour of pupils of the right religious background, though? (And with teaching staff as well, come to that).

If you want to opt out of worship on the grounds of not having that religion, they could choose to put you to the back of the queue for admission.

Seems fair to complain about that.  It seems blatantly wrong, to me.

 

Nicked from a NSS website:

 

We are non religious parents of a 3 year old child that will be attending primary school from September 2010. There are only four schools in the immediate catchment area and of these, three are faith schools who take pupils based on their religious beliefs or church membership. As this is our first child, we were unaware that we would be excluded from certain schools based on religion but feel strongly that religion should be kept separate from education.
All three of the faith schools have ‘outstanding’ Ofsted reports and because of this are always oversubscribed whilst the non-faith school offers a lower standard of education. We are only 100m from the nearest school, which happens to be a faith school, and as such we assumed that we would have a good chance of our daughter attending. However, this seems unlikely purely
because of our religious beliefs

That doesn’t sound particularly fair, but personally I don’t see it as too much of an issue and I’m a confirmed atheist.

For the sake of your kids’ education, you could just lie about being a lapsed member of the relevant faith (assuming they don’t require genital mutilation to be a member of that faith) and simply educate your kids about the nature of faith. The kids could then decide for themselves if they want to sit through the religious stuff or to make a stand against it.

Having been through the Catholic school system, it just doesn’t work like that (at least not in my experience) It was actually a lot closer to compulsory Religious Education, with other religions only held up as ‘context’ to show how wrong they are. We had two (others had more) Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child videos sprung on us – just horrible anti-abortion propaganda. And then there’re all the clubs set up around confirmation time to shepherd you into The Club. I count in the Pope’s gang, even though I knew it was shit by the time I was 14.

If an organisation has your kids’ ears for longer than you do, and wants to drip feed a message that you fundamentally don’t agree with, do you really want to spend the energy balancing it out and possibly creating conflict in your kids, as opposed to just send them to a school that doesn’t peddle that bullshit? I’ve actually no problem with my kids signing up to a religion, to a point, but I doubt they’re going to get a balanced view of any of them via a school of any religious flavour. 

FluffyKittenofTindalos wrote:

vonhelmet wrote:

davel wrote:

srchar wrote:

KendalRed wrote:

Now kids routinely go to schools that require long journeys, often passing by schools much closer to home. “Ooh, we’re over the moon, we managed to get our Tarquill into St Beckhams Academy – it’s a two hour drive, but the Ofsted was outstanding”

Don’t be too harsh on parents – in some areas, schools are so oversubscribed that “choice” simply doesn’t exist – you go where you get sent, even if it’s an hour’s bus ride away.  We’re planning to move out of London when ours hit school age, for this very reason.

Schools being secular would help, too. We could practically throw our kids into a decent school from our garden… Problem is, they’d get a daily bible bashing, so we go past that to the nearest non-sky fairy one a mile away.

You could send them to the church school and just opt them out of collective worship, but I guess you wouldn’t be able to get on your high horse about it then. 

 

Don’t religious schools get to discriminate in favour of pupils of the right religious background, though? (And with teaching staff as well, come to that).

If you want to opt out of worship on the grounds of not having that religion, they could choose to put you to the back of the queue for admission.

Seems fair to complain about that.  It seems blatantly wrong, to me.

 

Nicked from a NSS website:

 

We are non religious parents of a 3 year old child that will be attending primary school from September 2010. There are only four schools in the immediate catchment area and of these, three are faith schools who take pupils based on their religious beliefs or church membership. As this is our first child, we were unaware that we would be excluded from certain schools based on religion but feel strongly that religion should be kept separate from education.
All three of the faith schools have ‘outstanding’ Ofsted reports and because of this are always oversubscribed whilst the non-faith school offers a lower standard of education. We are only 100m from the nearest school, which happens to be a faith school, and as such we assumed that we would have a good chance of our daughter attending. However, this seems unlikely purely
because of our religious beliefs

That doesn’t sound particularly fair, but personally I don’t see it as too much of an issue and I’m a confirmed atheist.

For the sake of your kids’ education, you could just lie about being a lapsed member of the relevant faith (assuming they don’t require genital mutilation to be a member of that faith) and simply educate your kids about the nature of faith. The kids could then decide for themselves if they want to sit through the religious stuff or to make a stand against it.

davel wrote:

srchar wrote:

KendalRed wrote:

Now kids routinely go to schools that require long journeys, often passing by schools much closer to home. “Ooh, we’re over the moon, we managed to get our Tarquill into St Beckhams Academy – it’s a two hour drive, but the Ofsted was outstanding”

Don’t be too harsh on parents – in some areas, schools are so oversubscribed that “choice” simply doesn’t exist – you go where you get sent, even if it’s an hour’s bus ride away.  We’re planning to move out of London when ours hit school age, for this very reason.

Schools being secular would help, too. We could practically throw our kids into a decent school from our garden… Problem is, they’d get a daily bible bashing, so we go past that to the nearest non-sky fairy one a mile away.

srchar wrote:

KendalRed wrote:

Now kids routinely go to schools that require long journeys, often passing by schools much closer to home. “Ooh, we’re over the moon, we managed to get our Tarquill into St Beckhams Academy – it’s a two hour drive, but the Ofsted was outstanding”

Don’t be too harsh on parents – in some areas, schools are so oversubscribed that “choice” simply doesn’t exist – you go where you get sent, even if it’s an hour’s bus ride away.  We’re planning to move out of London when ours hit school age, for this very reason.

Schools being secular would help, too. We could practically throw our kids into a decent school from our garden… Problem is, they’d get a daily bible bashing, so we go past that to the nearest non-sky fairy one a mile away.