Weird people like atheists and egg eaters are banned. And the ban is being paid for by me!
Krishna-Avanti Primary School will be opening in Harrow, Middlesex, next September, having received a UK government grant of almost 10 million pounds. The school will have some of the most stringent religious entry requirements in the country. Parents who want their children to gain one of the thirty places will have to be practising Hindus (defined as those who pray daily, carry out regular voluntary work and abstain from cigarettes, alcohol, meat, eggs and fish). The borough has a Hindu population of 40,000.
Keith Porteous Wood, Executive Director of the National Secular Society, said: “I’m sure the priests are very pleased with this school — what better way to drum their fantasies into the heads of vulnerable children? — but the tax-payer should not have to pick up the tab for this exercise in religious proselytising.”
See also:
I agree the tax payer should not be footing the bill.
Is this all part of political correctness?
You know my connections with Oxford. I heard something about a mosque being built there. Fine, but what about say a Methodist church in Baghdad. I don’t think so some how.Religious tolerance is fine, provided it is a two -way street, which when up against the eastern world doesn’t appear to be the case in the majority.
On the subject of religion, I am wondering when you will be writing a blog concerning the British teacher, now serving a jail sentence in the Sudan, all because of a named toy. Oh, perhaps I should write one -if I dare.
I think I would want to be tolerant to people having any ideas they want provided that I don’t have to pay for them, and provided that they don’t actively harm others.
As for the teddy bear, others are doing a fine job, I am trying to avoid becoming too predictable, and I am trying to ration my anti-religious extremism postings (though it is very, very, very difficult).
The only good thing to come out of the government funding of faith schools (and it should not be funding any faith schools) is the unprecedented attention that is being paid to these places and the unprecedented level of concern that is being generated in turn. I just hope that this will make them all so unpopular with the public that the government will find it necessary to stop funding them.
This applies of Catholic and C of E schools as much as to Muslim and Hindu schools.
I’ve been reading a bit on some blogs about these religious-emphasis schools in Britain. What’s up with that? What is the rationale behind this?
It seems to me that, if people want a school that emphasizes their beliefs, or puts curriculum in the context of their beliefs, then they should pay for that privilege with their own nickels. I’m with you on this one. Your tax money should support religiously neutral, dare I use the word, secular? schools that build upon many common values that cut across religions.
Man, sometimes this stuff makes my head hurt.
the chaplain: There seems to be at least two things behind separate faith schools.
One is the disaster of multi-culturalism which has enabled separate communities to grow in isolation and therefore suspicion of each other. The logical outcome of this political correctness gone mad is separate faith schools, and lots of faith communities are only too pleased to set them up to preserve their children in aspic. This isolationism has been cited in various government reports as one of the things prolonging the religious war in Northern Ireland.
Secondly, there is a belief that faith schools actually are better schools and produce better examination results. (This, of course, may merely reflect parental interest and influence over children. The schools may be no better, they may just be skewing the intake.)
Many of us think the way forward is to make all schools better, prevent religious segregation, and while faith schools exist, remove tax payers’ money from them. Many of us don’t want to part finance the absurdity.
[...] question the privileged position that some faiths have - for example, government money going to support religious schooling, various tax concessions, and bishops in the House of [...]
[...] them pay for it themselves. My taxes are already being used to fund a school which promotes of a faith which discourages eating eggs, and to fund schools which teach a woman was beamed up to heaven at the end of her life. Please [...]