Alan Johnson's "25 per cent" sop on religious schools does little to ameliorate a problem entirely of the goverment's own making. What non-Muslim parent of a girl would send them to a school where the second-class status of their daughter was institutionalised?
But perhaps I am being unreasonable...
Yesterday Leicester City Council said it did not believe the scarves would deter non-Muslim parents from sending children to the school.
Education spokesman Hussein Suleman, who is also a member of the school's temporary governing body, said: 'We have to find a balance.
'Governors have to take into account the fact that 10 per cent can be of a non-Muslim background and use discretion where appropriate.
'At the same time, parents have a right to send or not send their children to this school. I hope discretion will be used if there are any disagreements.'
The school, which is not expected to make boys cover their heads, was also backed by Suleman Nagdi, of the Federation of Muslim Organisations.
He said: 'All Islamic schools have certain criteria for school uniform. I can't see anything different about the criteria they are setting in this instance.'
How about a benchmark for the idiocy of any Labour policy being the extent to which it is supported by the Conservative Party?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Indeed what kind of dumb ass government invades countries to bring freedom from the barrel of a gun...
http://www.amazon.com/Pride-Baghdad-Brian-K-Vaughan/dp/1401203140
...While forgetting that freedom at home is not best guaranteed by the increasing fragmentation of our society, on the upside however a recent report by Ron Johnston of Bristol University shows that - as I've often argued - this has, over the last ten years, ONLY been the case in the bigoted North (Bradford, Oldham and Leicester) and the reverse is true elsewhere. Our society is NOT becoming more divided by true natural (non-lip service) multi-culteralism. when will people realise that it is only the unreconstructed bigots of local government in the North who practise communalist apartheid and call it multi-culturalsim?
Meanwhile I suppose the governments school policies can't possibly be influenced by the religious nutter that leads it could they? He should have listened to his pope back in 2003.
What hope of a party ever advocating the COMPLETE REMOVAL of religion from schools in the UK - then again when you can have that already enshrined in the US Constitution and still SOMEHOW have the teaching of CREATIONISM in some US schools, would it help???
A further addendum - there has been a climb-down on the 25%.
Quite why is anybodies guess but my bet is on the religious authoritarianism of the leadership being a factor.
Of course it all stems back to the notion that private education is both legitimate and indeed charitable - and as examples of the law of unintended consequences go schools for zealots would be a good one, were it not for our nation's confused relationship with its own faith and resultant history of offering such zeralots power.
Post a Comment