Secular Reflection

I surprised one or two people the other day when I mentioned that this country’s laws require schools to have “collective worship” every day. Of course many of them don’t, which is about the only reason I think this law doesn’t actually cause riots, but that’s the rule. I’ve just read an Observer article about a man called Dr Paul Kelley, author of a book about how to fix education and headmaster of a school in Tyneside. He’s also fresh from his last adventure, championing the cause of a good student rejected from Oxford University supposedly because she was a northerner from a comprehensive school, who later cooled off changed her mind anyway. His school is one of the government’s fancy new “trust schools”, and he’d like to make it secular, because he is not a complete moron.

But he can’t, because apparently that would be “politically impossible”, whatever that might mean. Apparently the government, then led by Blair, “accepted it would be popular but said it was politically impossible.” I don’t understand what that means. It would seem to me that if something would be popular then that would, by definition, make it politically very, very easy. I thought that was the whole point.

One senior figure at the then Department for Education and Skills, told Kelley that bishops in the House of Lords and ministers would block the plans. Religion, they added, was 'technically embedded' in many aspects of education.

I can only infer from this (as of course the Observer would never be caught actually explaining things fully) that, due to the way the law is set up at the moment, it would be impossible to create secular schools in this system. But practically it’s very easy: what you do is you stop having a daily act of collective worship. That’s easy: a monkey could do that. Monkeys are very good at that; they almost never hold religious services of any kind. If the system doesn’t allow you to implement simple plans which would be popular and benefit society then the system is broken and needs fixing.

If a company screws me over and then says that because of some matter of policy or bureaucracy they can’t offer me a refund I won’t just say “oh, fair enough then” and go away; I’ll pester them until they cough up. I refuse to give up stuff that I’m entitled to because someone else has an arbitrary rule saying I’m not allowed to – why do you think religion annoys me so much in the first place? Luckily, Kelley seems to feel much the same way, and he’s hoping other schools will start to demand secularity as well.

More power to him.

Update: Here are a couple more blogs which have covered this topic in the last couple of days: Why Don’t You, “Ghetto Religion In The UK”, and Pharyngula, “Two Countries Separated By A Common Idiocy”.