Thursday 30 May 2002

More on religion in schools

There is an interesting letter in today's Glasgow Herald from Iftikhar Ahmad. He says:
Educating children against the wishes and demands of Muslim parents is a breach of their human rights and un-Islamic.

The state schools have been mis-educating and de-educating Muslim children for the past 40 years.

He is quite right about the "mis-educating" and "de-educating" in state schools but that's caused by the schools being run by the state in the first place. In Scotland, we have state-funded Catholic schools and state-funded "secular" schools and now others, like the Muslims, understandably want a piece of the action. The only moral solution is to get the state out of education altogether. When parents purchase education in the marketplace there can be a whole variety of schools, religious and otherwise, without any group feeling hard done by.