Faith failure

Prompted by the van above to wonder about the place of faith schools in the UK. This by a life-long atheist, from an atheist family, who deplores the continuing role of faith in the public education system. While respecting the rights of the faithful to make their own arrangements, subject to meeting various standards & requirements, should they so wish.

I did not find he official offering from ONS very helpful. Faith did not seem to be a topic they focussed on, although, with the emphasis on online DIY rather than fat published volumes of statistics, it was hard to be sure without spending too much time on it. The best I could do was the Freedom of Information request at reference 1, which tells me that of around 25,000 schools in England, near 5,000 state maintained schools are CofE and just about 2,000 are Catholic. I imagine that the majority of these are primary schools.

While the humanists, of which both my parents were long-serving members, did have such a focus, opening reference 2 with: 'Around a third of all state-funded schools in England and Wales are schools ‘with a religious character’ – the legal term for ‘faith schools’, as they are known in England and Wales, or denominational schools, as they are known in Scotland and Northern Ireland. This number has grown in recent years as successive governments have increased the influence of religious groups in the state-funded education system'. And they offer a guide to the complicated arrangements for faith at reference 3.

I suppose I should keep a sense of proportion. There might be lots of faith schools and their number might be growing, but are they turning out great masses of faithful? I rather doubt it. There is also the consideration that more Muslims go to church in this country than Christians, although I dare say Muslim numbers will gradually fall off, just as those for the Christians did before - which last, after all, did have 600 year or so start.

I should also add that I have no objection to teaching children about faith, with faith having played a big role in our lives over the years. And for many purposes, much of the teaching of the Christian church remains relevant, with the ten commandments not being such a bad place to start. We have failed to come up with any very satisfactory alternative.

PS: I believe faith schooling is strong in the US and getting stronger in Russia. In some Muslim countries such as Iran. Don't know if the Hindus of India are into faith schools. Don't know about China, although I suspect the official faith there is the Party, for which see reference 4. Maybe some organ of the UN knows about this sort of thing.

References

Reference 1: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/maintained-faith-schools/maintained-faith-schools.

Reference 2: https://humanists.uk/campaigns/schools-and-education/faith-schools/. 

Reference 3: https://humanists.uk/wp-content/uploads/schools-with-a-religious-character.pdf.

Reference 4: http://cpc.people.com.cn/english/.