I need the advice of CentreRight readers, because I cannot make up my mind about an important issue, and I'm wondering what other Conservatives think. To take time to reach an opinion isn't that odd, nor even to understand and sympathise with two opposing viewpoints; but to be able to hold both those opposing viewpoints at almost the same time is a little uncomfortable, and possibly takes my enjoyable lack of ideological conviction a tad too far. I'm talking about Faith Schools.
On the one hand: I think the planned Gove-ian supply-side revolution in the provision of new schools - free from local authority control, set up and ran by any group of interested parents, teachers, stakeholders - is one of the most exciting and valuable reasons for voting Conservative at the next election. I don't think any educational theorist or Town Hall planning officer should be able to over-ride the wishes of parents in determining the education for their offspring; nor should anyone other than parents choose the philosophical values used to underpin any particular curriculum. If the world consisted of reasonable and open-minded people, such as those who've opened some of the first Academies, or who sit on the Boards of Governors of Church of England schools, I'd be so enthusiastic about the coming wave of new schools I'd be close to frothing. We will roll back the frontiers of the state and let communities grow the schools they want for their children.
But.
On the other hand: the world is not populated solely with reasonable and open-minded people. I come from the West of Scotland, which as recently as the 1980s had a policy of deliberate educational apartheid. The children of Roman Catholic families were educated separately from the children of their Protestant neighbours, with profoundly negative consequences. I hope I'm quite reasonable and open-minded myself, but I know I carry the scar tissue within. I probe it sometimes with my thoughts, the way your tongue can't resist rubbing at the painful gum after a dental extraction. Where I grew up, you were Us, or you were Them. I'm doubtful if it's possible for the urbane English to understand quite how virulently this planned segregation operated in 1980s Scotland, or how wide was the chasm between communities which it engendered, but the segregation existed and the chasm occurred, in large part because of the separate schooling provided for the communities' children. My point is that this segregation didn't happen by accident. It happened because two groups of parents demanded the right to educate 'their' children separately. Localism in action, no?
I thought about this when I read about the country's first Hindu school, which opened in north-west London last week. I thought about it too, earlier in the week, when I took part in the "More Maths Graduates" project in east London, spending a day with A Level students, most of whom came from a Bangladeshi Girls' school (double segregation!) in Tower Hamlets. (I'll write more about that later - it was one of the most eye-opening days of my life).
Once we open up the machinery for educational provision, isn't it highly likely that parents and ethnic/religious communities will seize hold of it, and set up their 'own' schools, at an ever-increasing pace? Is it ridiculously pessimistic to fear that this will lead to even less interaction between people from different backgrounds, as surely as night follows day? That the one 'winner' from such an outcome will be the practitioners of Identity Politics?
There's my problem. If you asked me to answer the question "What is the one thing we could do to ensure a more malign cultural outcome for the country in 50 years' time?" I'd probably answer We could reinforce minority groups' feelings of alienation from one another by educating them all in isolation - see West of Scotland for implementation details. If you asked me next to answer the question "What is the one thing we could do to improve educational outcomes for the next generation of schoolchildren?" I'd answer just as unequivocably Make sure parents get control over the size, number and curricula of their area's schools. Is this a fatal contradiction?
