Unpicking the philosophy of faith schools

Unpicking the philosophy of faith schools

Christian schools are perfectly acceptable but other faith schools, especially Muslim ones, are a big mistake and should be scrapped if the Government wants to encourage a unifying British identity, according to the man reckoned by many to be the world's leading moral philosopher.

Commenting on the damage that he believes is being done by Muslim, Hindu and Sikh schools, set up because the Government wanted to give them parity with Christian institutions, Professor Amartya Sen said: "I am actually absolutely appalled."

Trying to curb Islamic terrorism in Britain by going through Muslim organisations and defining the identities of immigrants only on the basis of religion had been another serious error.

Prof Sen, 72, who has come to Britain from Harvard, where is he is professor of economics and philosophy, is currently delivering a series of lectures on how religion is being used to pull Britain apart and also encouraging inter-communal violence.

Born in India into an academic Hindu Bengali family with links to Rabindranath Tagore, the polymath 1913 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Prof Sen has lived and worked in Britain for many years and was Master from 1998 to 2003 of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he did his undergraduate degree and PhD. Widely respected as possibly the world's top economist, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998.

He praised Britain's multicultural society, from which he believed all of Europe, notably France and Germany, had much to learn. However, he felt that Tony Blair's government, for which he had voted, had unwittingly made two serious policy blunders - increasingly encouraging a society in which the ethnic minorities and especially Muslims were defined almost exclusively by their religion and endorsing the establishment of faith schools.

Prof Sen, who is addressing the Institute of Public Policy Research, the Asia Society, the Nehru Centre and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, explained to The Daily Telegraph: "It overlooks the way Christian schools have evolved and often provide a much more tolerant atmosphere than a purely religious school would. A lot of people in the Middle East or India or elsewhere have been educated in Christian schools."

He recalled: "A lot of my friends came from St Xavier's in Calcutta [a Jesuit-run public school] - I don't think they were indoctrinated particularly in Christianity. But the new generation of Muslim, Hindu and Sikh schools are not going to be like that."

Although he wanted mainstream British schools to broaden their curriculum to include more on the contribution of, say, Muslim mathematicians to science, he added that faith schools "are a pretty bad thing. Educationally, it's not good for the child. From the point of view of national unity, it's dreadful because, even before a child begins to think, it's being defined by its 'community', which is primarily religion. That also drowns out all other cultural things like language and literature. I am a believer in the importance of British identity."

But he wanted the definition to be framed in such a way that allowed the evolution of a "plural multi-cultural society", rather than a "mono-cultural" one in which different groups lived side by side with little interaction. "We have many different identities because we belong to many different groups," he said. "We are connected with our profession, occupation, class, gender, political views and language, literature, taste in music, involvement in social issues - and also religion. But just to separate out religion as one singularly important identity that has over-arching importance is a mistake. One of the problems of what is happening in Britain today is that one identity, the religious identity, has been taken to represent almost everything."

He argued: "Of course, this policy immediately has the effect of making some people extremely privileged - those who speak in the name of religion. There may be some moderate people but mostly they are extremists who appeal by saying, 'Forget everything else, you are a Muslim' ." Prof Sen, who has written a book, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, added: "This is a point of view that Islamic terrorists share with western theorists who define human beings only in terms of their religion because both agree that if you are Muslim, then that is your primary identity. Religion has been inadvertently politicised by the UK Government in a way that is counter-productive. It makes the battle against terrorism so ham-fisted and clumsy."