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Nichols: Children are polluted by market
by Pat Ashworth
 Warning: The Most Revd Vincent Nichols at his installation last month PA |
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MARKET forces, and society’s emphasis on objectives and attainment, could pollute schools if they were allowed to take hold, the new Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Revd Vincent Nichols, has warned. Schools should be places where the “civic virtues” of trust, respect, honesty, and concern for each other and for the common good were generated, he said in a lecture given at Heythrop College on Saturday. “A good school will be able to show not just how it generates such civic virtue, but also give an account of why it tries to do so.” Catholic education was truly open to all that genuinely served the human good, he told his audience. Development of the person, pupils, and staff took precedence over everything else, and was “more important than the success of the school, the demands of political pressure, and the requirements of the economy”. The Archbishop criticised society for applying “the efficiency test” to almost all social and economic activities. “Everything is broken down to clear objectives and attainment, and each is given its price. Once this really takes hold, then education has truly entered the marketplace, and its entire ecological system is threatened with pollution,” he said. Market forces reduced people to “nothing more than consumers and suppliers”. Voluntary and faith-based groups, the family, and the school, were the generators of civic virtues, he said. Archbishop Nichols’s remarks coincided with questions about some of the provisions of the proposed Equality Bill as it affects education (see this week's story here). A letter published in The Times on 2 June, signed by members of “nine religious traditions”, complains that the Bill currently contains “two forms of discrimination”. The first, it says, is the right of state-funded faith schools to reject applications from those of other religions; and the second is the right of voluntary-aided schools to reject qualified staff from other denominations. The signatories write: “We question what sort of faith requires other schools to discriminate against children and teachers. . . Creating educational ghettos smacks of weak faith and is a poor recipe for social harmony.” The letter brought a strong rebuttal from the C of E’s chief education officer, the Revd Jan Ainsworth. The signatories’ proposals to “strip faith schools of the right to use any faith-based admissions criteria would dilute a key ingredient that can help to make these schools distinctive, popular and successful”, she said. A poll commissioned by the Accord coalition, which seeks to promote “inclusive” schools, was published on Monday. It found that 57 per cent of respondents agreed that state-funded faith schools undermined community cohesion. A further 72 per cent thought that “all state-funded schools should operate recruitment and employment policies that do not discriminate on grounds of religion or belief.” |
