Liberal secularists don’t like faith schools. Obviously. When confronted with stories of Islamists overtaking state schools in Birmingham, they have no difficulty diagnosing the problem. It’s not an Islam issue, or an extremism issue — it’s faith schools. Faith schooling is where the rot starts, even if these Islamified academies are not actually faith schools. We should therefore oppose all state funding for faith-based education. Catherine Bennett said as much in the Guardian, and lots of social media types seem to agree.
Dan Hodges of the Telegraph this morning tweeted: ‘All faith schools are Trojan horses. We need faith based education like we need a hole in the head.’ It might be silly to judge what people say on Twitter, but let’s consider that thought for a moment. What Dan, a clever journalist, is saying is that every single religious school is pretending to be something it is not in order to impose its agenda on nice liberal Britain when nice liberal Britain isn’t looking.
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