Whose inquisition?
I took a dislike to Cristina Odone years ago, some time when B&W was very young. She hadn’t commissioned a hatchet profile on me as she did to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, she’d merely said something narrow-mindedly faithy, perhaps even overtly Catholic, which got up my nose. (Why ‘even’? Because she doesn’t always admit [to put it mildly] that that’s where her narrow-minded views are coming from, and I suspect that she prefers to leave that out of the picture when she can get away with it.) I can’t remember what it was, or when, but no matter, her unpleasantness now gives us more than enough to scowl over.
Ed Balls began his witch-hunt against faith schools last spring, unleashing informants to trawl the country, knock on doors, note down names and infractions…Many see this inquisition as the latest twist in Labour’s internal politics.
That’s a good example of the not admitting habit right there – she accuses Ed Balls of doing things that the Catholic church used to do (and that Ed Balls of course is not doing) and delicately doesn’t mention her own loyalty to Catholicism. It’s a bit rich to see a bigoted Catholic charging non-Catholics with witch-hunting inquistions when no such thing is going on. A bit rich and more than a bit disgusting.
And then there’s the breezy way she says ‘Ball’s charges against faith schools can be dismissed one by one’ as if mere dismissal were the same thing as actually rebutting. Of course the Ball’s charges against ‘faith’ schools can be dismissed one by one, any charges can be dismissed one by one; it’s dead easy just to say ‘no’ repeatedly, and by gum that’s all Odone does. But that doesn’t tell us anything except that Odone doesn’t like the charges against ‘faith’ schools. The BHA gives some details on why Odone’s dismissal won’t cut it.
The BHA points out that the state funded faith schools which the report seeks to promote differ from state funded community schools in that, for example:
They are allowed by law to discriminate in their admissions policies;
They are allowed by law to discriminate in their employment policies;
They teach their own syllabus of Religious Education without the regulated syllabuses that apply to community schools.
Strident stuff, eh?
Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, looks into faith schools and that is ‘unleashing informants’? Unleashing?
He knocks on doors! He notes names!
Isn’t that part of his job?
As for the phrase ‘…many see…’ the only response to that is ‘Name eight.’ One of the weaselyist of weasel terms.
At least she does get a damn good crushing in the majority of the comments below the article…
Also, I love the way she bangs on about state-funded “secular schools”.
Oddly enough, these are merely a product of Ms. Odone’s imagination.
As OFSTED put it:
“The 1996 Education Act (repeating former legislation in the 1988 Act) requires that “all pupils shall on each day take part in a collective act of worship” (6.1) which, subject to other provisions, “shall be wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character”. The OFSTED Inspection Framework directs inspectors to look for provision of spiritual development particularly in collective worship, and to ask the question: “Does the school provide its pupils with knowledge and insight into values and religious beliefs and enable them to reflect on experiences in a way which develops their self-knowledge and spiritual awareness?” “
Now, there may well be schools which aren’t fulfilling these criteria to the letter, but it’s a hell of a long way from “secularism”.
And as for her “all but one of the 77 people convicted under the Terrorism Act of 2000 attended a secular state school (the one was home-schooled).”…it proves precisely, er, nothing.
She herself states that muslim schools are only available to 3% of muslim kids, and also fails to give the dates when these schools were built/opened (I’m guessing that not all of them were open when our terrorist chums were growing up), so none out of 77 isn’t in any way surprising. (Allowing, of course, for her rose-tinted depiction of the schools in question, and, again, her complete abuse of the term “secular”).
And as for this casual throw-away:
“the drugs, sex and violence that are part of playground life.”
Wow. Of course some of that stuff goes on (it did 20 years ago, so why not now?) but maybe the Dunfermline Press should station a reporter directly outside the High School gates, if it’s quite so flagrant and unavoidable…it’d be the easiest scoop in the world! :-)
But let’s not forget, these are, after all, Cristina’s terrible “secular schools”. So we all know who’s to blame…
Don’t get me started… over here we have Steiner making it onto the syllabus of local State schools.
More segregation! Separate but equal! Reducing religion’s petulant arrogation of social influence is a witch hunt!
…good God. It’s astounded me for years that Odone’s found print in publications like New Statesman and The Observer- what’s the deal in particular with the Guardian Media Group’s liking of pseudo-liberal theocrats?
I presume her ubiquity originates, at least in part, from what Alibhai-Brown describes as being “a canny networker”.
Like Ophelia Benson and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, I took a dislike to Christina Odone some years ago. When she was deputy editor of the New Statesman and used her column to bemoan the supposed persecution of christians. Don’t think I have read the Statesman since.
It is laughable the claim that faith schools are being undermined in the UK. This government has done more than any in recent times to increase the number of such schools – extending them beyond the tradional christan and jewish ones. It has also rebutted any attempts to secularise education (for example, by allowing mature teenagers to absent themselves from worship).
Some persecution.