An expansion of "faith-based" schooling... are you kidding me??

There's an election coming up in Ontario, and the notion of faith-based schooling has suddenly become front and center in the campaign, shouldering aside more important issues like... well, heck, I would have thought just about *anything* was more important.

For those of you who don't know, there is such a thing as a "Catholic school system" in Ontario, dating from the time there was a Protestant majority and a Catholic minority, with differences between the two tribes such that seperate school systems was thought necessary.

I do know that "the Catholic school system" receives tax funding just as "regular" public schools do, though I have to confess that I don't know (more research required)
a) if you have to be Catholic to go to a Catholic school.
b) if so, how you prove that you're a Catholic.
c) whether they are required to teach the Ontario cirriculum to the letter, especially if they have to teach certain theories of speciation in biology class which are very unpopular amongst some churchgoers
d) whether there are always extra "private school" fees involved (there often are I believe)
e) whether the Catholic schools are "better" in some way that would appeal even to a non-Catholic (ie better facilities, smarter kids, better teachers, etc)
f) how much extra this costs per year as opposed to directing all funding to a single school system which could more efficiently (?) use the funding, without having to provide two seperate school buildings in one town, etc.

Anyway, anyone who spends more than five minutes in Ontario (*especially* Toronto) these days will notice that there aren't just "Catholics" and "Protestants" anymore. There are plenty of Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and thankfully a growing number of loud-mouthed atheists. The Conservative leader, with the easily associated name of John Tory, has noted (correctly) that one school system for "Catholics" and one for "everyone else" is an absurdity (and rather unfair) in this multicultural melange. However, instead of the obvious and sensible solution (abolish the Catholic school system), he has proposed that ALL religions get their OWN seperate, fully taxpayer funded school systems.

!!!!!

Even if one does not have a visceral distaste for religion, an aversion to its influence in the public sphere, and an opposition to any use of public funds to delay the day when the religion meme is purged from this planet forever, one can still point out any number of problems with this chowder-headed idea.

1. It will be expensive. At a time when governments are struggling to maintain health care funding, and closing down "optional" school programs like libraries, arts, and athletics, it ought to be blindingly obvious that blowing an extra $400 million per year (one estimate) to duplicate all the services that exist now in entirely seperate school systems is the height of folly.

2. Which religions qualify? Shall the Wiccans, the Scientologists, or the Moonies get their own schools? Why not? Is it a question of popularity? What's the cutoff? Are there some objective standards by which a religion would be considered "too absurd" to qualify? And... ahem... what might those standards be?

3. Even if we decide which religions should make the grade the program will be hard to administer "fairly". How many Muslims do there need to be in Thunder Bay before Thunder Bay gets a shiny new taxpayer-operated madrassa of its very own? Tedious arguments of this nature are ubiquitous enough when there is ONE school system... imagine when there are ten?

4. One of the virtues of a single school system is that people of different faiths mingle together, and exactly the time when young people should be taking the time and having the opportunities to meet different kinds of people in the world around them. One commenter on the Globe and Mail website wrote:

I will always remember my good friend Hannah and her sister in highschool. They were Muslim, their father had arranged meetings with potential spouses for them and the were so happy and excited about this. In their view, they had a father who loved them and was helping them to find positive futures. I would never have had this insight into their culture if I didn't go to school with these girls. I would have thought what a backwards patriachal religion. Public schools teach tolerance and understanding by the simple virtue of the fact that you make friends with different people.

Now, I happen to think that arranged marriage *is* a barbaric practice, but if I were an impressionable youth it wouldn't do me any harm to actually meet someone who thought otherwise. Religion and religious people aren't going away in this society any time soon, my Dawkins-inspired fantasies to the contrary, and even a fire-breathing young atheist would be well-served in learning to get along with them. It also wouldn't do Muslim children any harm to find out some of the salient features of the culture that they, you know, *live* in.

Another smart comment from the same thread:

On balance, I do not believe that the public interest is well served by publicly funded separate schools. Ultimately, I believe it is harmful to children to educate them in a setting that creates a sense of 'other-ness' from the children educated in different settings.

Publicly funded schools can be environments in which children of all cultures, religious (or areligious) traditions, abilities and even languages can be brought together.

Call me crazy, but I'm not sure that creating a balkanized generation of students who identify strongly with their religion and cannot comfortably interact with others who do not share their group identity is the best use of taxpayer dollars.

5. I describe above what would be lost by abandoning a "single school system". What would be gained? What are the benefits? To be honest, I have no idea... if I encounter a succint description of what a supporter of this idea thinks they are accomplishing I will post it here. What is a Jew or a Muslim afraid of, such that they cannot rub shoulders in a school with non-Jews or non-Muslims? Defenders of faith-based schooling usually feel pretty threatened by the public school system, as this comment from the same thread shows:

No education system is value-neutral, even the public one... the problem is that the public school system has become one that precludes all religious values....(this is the problem for parents) who would like their children educated by a set of religious values, as opposed to the prevailing secular value-system.

That word "secular" is an interesting one. This writer uses it as some kind of synonym for "atheist", but that's not what it means, and this confusion goes right to the heart of the misguided motivations for faith-based schooling.

Secular means "not OVERTLY or SPECIFICALLY religious." It does NOT mean "not religious", nor does it imply being hostile to religion. Therefore there is no such thing as a "secular value-system" (as opposed to an atheist or humanist value system), unless it means something like "get along with others even if they are of a different religion than you."

Now, since 90% of all religious values are in direct conflict with some *other* religious value, by necessity the schools cannot teach them all without contradicting itself, and can't teach only some of them of them without opening itself to charges of favouritism. Therefore it must be secular, in the way I describe above**.

Of course, people like me are part of the problem, as our tendency towards strident hostility to religion sows exactly the secular/atheism confusion that leads to defensive reaction exemplified in the quote above.

But the troubling questions remain: Can schools really successfully avoid inculcating values at all? What if it is impossible for schools to avoid offending religious sensibilities? Can such a society survive?

** (If a school really *were* teaching atheism, it would list all these religious values and views and point out their contradictions and absurdities so forthrightly that a student would be led very naturally to atheism).