The Age reports today:
THE rapid growth of faith-based schools under the previous federal government has threatened the social cohesion of the nation, according to Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s most senior education adviser.
The frank comments of Professor Barry McGaw, appointed this month to be the new head of the National Curriculum Board, contrast with the Howard government’s celebration of the proliferation of small independent schools, encouraged by generous public funding.
“These people often form a narrowly focused school that is aimed at cementing the faith it’s based on … If we continue as we are, I think we’ll just become more and more isolated sub-groups in our community,” Professor McGaw told The Age.
Professor McGaw’s comments are, of course, absurd. Our community is diverse and that diversity extends quite naturally to how people believe their children should be educated. The very fact that so many parents are opting out of the government-controlled education system in favour of private schools — secular or religious — demonstrates this diversity.
The real threat to social cohesion comes not from parents exercising their parental choice but from governments that seek to force these parents to conform with the state’s ideas about how and what their children should be taught. On this point, Andrew Norton, responding to McCaw’s comments today, writes the following:
As John Locke convincingly argued more than three hundred years ago, not only is the project of creating common belief futile, it creates the conflict it is intended to resolve. And this is as true now as it was in the seventeenth century, except now the religious believers are quietly getting on with their lives while the public school lobby stirs up conflict by attacking them. The ’social cohesion’ argument is a euphemism for intolerance.
Rather than limit the range of educational options available to children, we should welcome them: just as competition in every other market leads to a better range and quality of products, so will competition between education providers lead to better outcomes for students. For this reason, approaches such as school vouchers make a great deal of sense. As Milton Friedman, who invented the idea of ’school vouchers’, explained:
Government, preferably local governmental units, would give each child, through his parents, a specified sum to be used solely in paying for his general education; the parents would be free to spend this sum at a school of their own choice, provided it met certain minimum standards laid down by the appropriate governmental unit. Such schools would be conducted under a variety of auspices: by private enterprises operated for profit, nonprofit institutions established by private endowment, religious bodies, and some even by governmental units….[Vouchers] would bring a healthy increase in the variety of educational institutions available and in competition among them. Private initiative and enterprise would quicken the pace of progress in this area as it has in so many others. Government would serve its proper function of improving the operation of the invisible hand without substituting the dead hand of bureaucracy.
8 comments ↓
Amir said:
The real threat to social cohesion comes not from parents exercising their parental choice but from governments that seek to force these parents to conform with the state’s ideas about how and what their children should be taught.
Amir said:
“The real threat to social cohesion comes not from parents exercising their parental choice but from governments that seek to force these parents to conform with the state’s ideas about how and what their children should be taught.”
I totally agree with this point. The government should not be invoked regarding social matters, especially those regarding education.
Furthermore, when someone discusses the idea of integration, which is more of an issue in Europe, it entails people defining what it means to be British, or French or whatever. This sort of thinking is not only dangerous for Muslims in those societies but those who are ethnically British, French or German.
It also changes the whole vocabulary of the discourse to reflect authoritarian tendencies. Like “that is not how German’s behave” or the ever irrational appelation, “unAmerican.” Instead of invoking moral principles for good conduct they invoke ethnic or national qualifications which is the seed of racist and tribalistic thought.
Your post has been Islamified
I’m guessing this voucher system is one stop on the road to complete privitisation of education?
It’s a step in the right direction, Eudaemonion. Complete privatisation of education would be the end state, I’d hope.
[…] Amir believes that forced one-size-fits-all public education is destructive to social cohesion. […]
“Instead of invoking moral principles for good conduct they invoke ethnic or national qualifications which is the seed of racist and tribalistic thought.”
Hmm, and what about religionist or theist thought?
I think the voucher system sounds very exciting.
That demand for good quality Muslim schools among Muslim parents certainly exceeds supply is something I have encountered in the research I have done.
As a parent myself, reasons I like my daughter’s Muslim school (she is in kindergarten) include: she is surrounded by people who think being Muslim is a good and normal thing; I don’t have to battle to explain Muslim religious requirements i.e. no pork in the food, why Mummy wears a headscarf, why we don’t gorge on chocolate in April etc.; her comprehensive curriculum includes time for Arabic and learning Qur’an and basic Islamic beliefs.
BUT, if we were in doubt about the standard curriculum of subjects offered (the three Rs etc.) at that particular school, we would take her out and put her in another school even if that was a non-Muslim school.
My personal experience (both as a parent of a child who attends a Muslim school, and as friends of teachers at Muslim schools) is that by and large Muslim schools are very interested in promoting engagement with the wider society. Years ago King Khalid (now AIA) set up a program with Wesley and a Jewish school - whose name escapes me - where children would develop pen-pal friendships and meet up at the end of the year. Yesterday my daughter came home having learned Maori songs. I think it is rubbish to suggest religious schools are inherently isolationist.
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