Andrew Copson talks ‘faith’ schools on Beyond Belief
BBC Radio 4′s Beyond Belief this week featured British Humanist Association Chief Exec Andrew Copson. The programme was a ‘faith’ schools-themed edition. Andrew explained that admissions and employment policies do indeed discriminate, that many schools with religious character do not follow parts of the curriculum, that (not necessarily deliberate) socio-economic segregation is inflated by ‘faith’ schools, and that with ethnic segregation at least implicit in much of the division occurring in ‘faith’ schools they are “storing up social problems for the future”.
You can listen again: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006s6p6
Read more on BHA campaigns on religion and schools.
Andrew Copson talks ‘faith’ schools on Beyond Belief,
The point in the programme that stuck in my memory was when the Islamic representative was talking about teaching mathematics, saying that they would teach the mathematics of chance, such as how to calculate the chance of a throw of 5 with a die, but that in his school, in Leicester, they would teach that there was in fact no such thing as chance, since everything was determined by God! Obviously this self-contradiction is something he himself believes. Religion can perhaps be defined as the ability to believe two mutually contradictory things at the same time. This completely undermines rationality.