By you and me, please. Not by you and I. Did you get your C at GCSE English?

Did they get taught evolution?

This doesn't surprise when, at schools like Eton, it's compulsory to have a faith.

If my future children are ever required to have "a faith" to get into a school, I'll just produce the documentation that verifies them as Sith apprentices.

Yes they did.

Although the head at the primary school discouraged them celebrating Halloween and listening to John Lennon's "Imagine".

On the other hand when I was at a secular primary school the teachers there discouraged us from growing our hair over our collars and wearing cowbells to school in the summer of love (1967, not some cheap imitation).

My son went to a church school (because it was the best available, so I'm another hypocrite

). After the first day he came home and said he didn't like it and didn't want to go back. We asked him what was wrong and he said 'they have a dead bloke nailed on the wall', which was a full size model of Jesus on the cross.

The key question you all need to be asking is WHY faith schools are generally the best in any area?

If WE all need to be asking that, you obviously know the answer. What is it?

That's for YOU to ask YOURSELVES and decide.

For the same reason that all schools with a selection policy are generally the best in any area - because as part of the selection process, even an undisclosed part of the selection process, they can select the more academically inclined, leaving the less able to be picked up by the non-selective schools - you may as well ask why grammar schools invariably had better academic results than secondary schools.

Is that really true of, say. Muslim schools? Jewish schools? etc?

No as they dont get the same funding from both the goverment and church.

Not in my opinion, you have to do what's best and give your kids the best possible start.

If you refuse to send your kids to these schools their the ones who pay, getting the church out of schools is down to people in higher places (and I don't mean god).

And it's a good test to see if their stupid, if they believe in "god" (which ever they get taught out of the 2000 and odd) when they get to 13/14 start worrying.

Do you mean to ask if they get to pick and choose their pupils ?

Yes of course they do.

They do get funding though. For example, two or three years ago, the local council free sheet announced that agreement had been reached to provide funding for an Orthodox Jewish school for girls in Stamford Hill.

It would mean, the article explained, that the pupils would spend 50% of their time on the national curriculum and 50% on their other religious studies.

Both mine went to the same church primary school, one is a firm atheist, the other has no thoughts on the subject one way or the other.

My daughter is moving to an Anglican high school this year, which is supposed to be a good school. What I like about the school is the fact that it purposely takes on a significant number of kids with disabilities - resulting in seemingly poor national standards tests on average.

My older sister has sent her kids to an RC school in Surrey, which did make them attend mass etc for a while in advance of the oldest in order to be able to get a letter off the priest, but that seemed reasonable to me. Where she lives there are few schools which aren't either ridiculously expensive or cr*p - the religious schools offer good quality for a far more reasonable fee.

So to go to a government funded school she had to go to church?

A [inon sequitur[/i, to go to a Catholic school she had to go to Catholic church. (Although they do take a significant number of non-Catholics too). The point is, she did not [ihave[/i to go to that church, or any church. It was the parents' choice of school which brought the situation about.

Plus, Catholic schools have to raise about 10% of their own funding, so Catholics are in effect paying part of the cost of education of the many non-Catholics they educate, so it ain't as simple as that.

And wouldn't that be the point in getting them out of schools?

You say they didn't have to send her to that school but it was the best available so of course they 'had' to, if they take a number of non Catholics (does that include theists?) why did she have to go to church? A faster easier way?

How do the church raise this 10%? Tax exemption? Or do the 24 priests/vicars who are allowed into the house of lords, without vote, pass it through?

The system stinks.

Other loons are waiting in the wings to have their agendas promoted in our schools. The ridiculously named [url=http://www.truthinscience.org.uk/tis2/index.php/home.htmlTruth in science[/url for example.

There was a brief series on TV a couple of years ago with Richard Dawkins looking at evolution.

If I remember the details correctly, he went into schools (obviously with permission) to talk to pupils, but found a substantial reluctance among pupils to 'believe' evolution over ideas of divine creation, even after he'd done things like take them on field trips to hunt for fossils.

Now I cannot recall whether the school in question was a faith school or not, or whether this was simply a case of a group of young people whose home unbringing had created that situation, but it raises the issue of just how easy or likely it is for children to simply 'throw off' such beliefs because they decide/want to.

And if, as we already know has been the case, the lines between science and religious studies are quite deliberately blurred, then do people really simply think that youngsters will be able to sort the one from the other?

I mentioned earlier, the case of the Orthodox Jewish girls' school in Hackney, where 50% of the pupils' time is spent on religious studies. How is the conducive to anything other than continued ghettoisation?

But it also comes down to the contentious issues of selection.

Faith schools can – and do – select. So it's not difficult to see that the state schools that cannot operate selection will end up, for want of a better description, with the less desirable pupils – those with learning difficulties, those who are more disruptive, those from homes where the parents don't give a toss etc.

Is the answer selection in all circumstances, then? I don't think so – on the basis that, having seen the education that my sister received in a state secondary school and later, in a CofE secondary, having not passed her 11 plus.

Part of the problem, it seems to me, is in treating those at one end of the educational pile as not worth investing in – so you get a generally substandard level of education. To start with, we need more vocational education and training – not less.

We need streaming at some level or other for those with a more academic bent – but not treating those who don't have such leanings as inferior.

Personally, I think that insisting that all youngsters stay at school until 18 is ridiculous and counter-productive in many cases. It's just as flawed an approach to demand that someone who wants to go on a course to learn plastering has two GCSEs in order to get on that course.

Continuing the themes I touched on above, [url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12282505this raises some interesting points[/url.

but the counter argument is that the acquisition of 2 GCSE's shows some form of personal investment/comittment on the behalf of the individual?

The whole education system is screwed, I know people with degrees and no common sense, and I know people without degrees that are way more intelligent than their peers.

The question is, what can be done to realign things?

Nice one, I got the LOL.
First time I've seen "CofE" and "Organised" in the same sentence.



My view is simple.
Education is education, not indoctrination.
Attempts at indoctrination, regardless of their efficacy or lack of it, should not happen in the same curriculum as education.