Gove half-heartedly backs “atheist schools” – but do atheists want them?
The Government is ready to back the creation of atheist schools as part of its series of reforms, the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, said yesterday.
He told MPs: “It wouldn’t be my choice of school but the whole point of our education reforms is that they are, in the broad sense of the word, small ‘l’ liberal. They exist to provide that greater degree of choice.”
His comments, made to MPs on the all-party Commons Education Select Committee, come after a group of mothers urged Professor Richard Dawkins, a self-avowed atheist and author of The God Delusion, if he would help to set up an atheist “free” school. Professor Dawkins replied: “I like the idea very much – although I would prefer to call it a free-thinking school. I would never want to indoctrinate children in atheism, any more than in religion. Instead, children should be taught to ask for evidence, to be sceptical, critical, open-minded.”
The call for an atheist school comes in the wake of fears that the Government’s plans could pave the way for more religious groups to run state schools. Between 35 and 40 of the 150 expressions of interest in the scheme are faith-based.
Mr Gove, whose two children attend primary faith schools, said he “recognised that there are some people who explicitly do not want their children educated in a faith-based setting”. He added: “If Professor Dawkins wants to set up a school, we would be very interested to look at an application.”
Faith groups wanting to take advantage of the scheme must pledge that they would keep only 50 per cent of their places open to admission on grounds of faith. However, Mr Gove said he doubted whether it would work the other way round. “I don’t think we will have children saying in assembly, ‘Our Father, which art not in heaven.’”
Neither the British Humanist Association (BHA) nor the National Secular Society support the idea of an atheist school.
And a little flashback…
As the British Humanist Association have been pointing out, a worrying aspect of the coalition government’s proposal to extend the role of academies in the schools system is that it is likely that many of the new schools will be faith schools, with greater freedom to set their own curricula than existing, non-academy faith schools.
That’s the downside, but new academies don’t necessarily have to be faith schools – the idea is that any ambitious and well-meaning group of people can start a school and shape its ethos. So how about a humanist school? Taking part in an online chat about faith schools on the Mumsnet website yesterday, Richard Dawkins responded enthusiastically when a participant suggested he should set up a secular, or atheist, school. Now it’s worth pointing out, given how Dawkins’s comments tend to be twisted in the news (remember how him saying he thinks the Pope should face legal action of child abuse cover-ups became him saying he wanted to personally arrest Benedict XVI?), that he isn’t at present planning to set up a school, and it’s also worth noting that he stressed he wouldn’t want it to be an “atheist” school so much as a “freethinking” school.
