Thursday, July 27, 2006

Amartya Sen - Against Faith Schools

Nice article on Amartya Sen (Nobel prize winning economist and moral philosopher of note), on the government's policy in encouraging faith schools. While not going all out to call for completely secular education, Sen prefers the idea of christian schools rather than Islamic, Hindu, Sikh etc. What he seems to value in christian schools is tolerance, diversity of ideas and a tendency not to obviously indoctrinate. In other words what he likes most in christian schools is the lack of religion...

The values he supports are what you would expect from a secular education. There are certainly christian schools run by some of the more strict sects (no evolution, the bible is the literal word of God etc), which have all of the faults that he associates with Islamic and other faith schools.

Let's hope that someone, somewhere sees sense enough to put a stop to the continuing advance of divisive and dangerous faith schools.

Enough is enough - religion is poison, let's not forget that.

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