Desperate parents are bribing priests with muffins – our faith school system must end

Por Zoe Williams

Parents pretend to be religious and clerics pretend to believe them. Getting into state-funded church schools encourages hypocrisy all round

Everyone knows how church schools work. It isn’t even fun describing it to foreigners any more, so well known is it that we have a cock-eyed system where state-funded establishments will only educate the adherents of a particular faith, who are so few in number – and mostly retired – that there are probably not enough real ones to fill a single primary school. For a brief window, citizens pretend to be religious, clerics pretend to believe them and all the right children get into the right schools. Somehow, this foundation of mutually acknowledged deceit is really good role-modelling.

It can be subtle: a vicar will write you a recommendation if he knows you, but to know you, he has to see you. But did he see you? Did you sit at the front? Does he know your name? In areas densely packed with Roman Catholic schools, priests haven’t enjoyed this much power since 16th-century Florence. They can’t walk into Waitrose without being given a muffin.

But the more modern way – in which everything has to be measured, because we all love transparency – involves a great deal of counting. In some schools, it is 10 points if you were baptised before you were six months old, five points after. I know someone who ended up serving the eucharist to get his numbers up. How did he even know how to do that? Oh, apparently, it is really easy.

In south-west London, there was a church with a book: you got a mark for attending; 40 ticks in a year assured your child a place at a church school, 20 might get them on a waiting list. It sounds like a manageable number, 40, until you take out hangovers and holidays and realise that means every week. Nevertheless, it was working fine until someone stole the book.

What is a reasonable vicar to do? Clearly, someone needs to set fire to all the parents, as a lesson for the future. Geneva conventions, Geneva schmonventions. There are times when only collective punishment will do. Or lay waste to the school. See how they would like that, having their children educated in the secular tradition that is so poisonous to young minds, even though it seems to be working fine for everyone else.

But what if the theft was not committed in self-interest? What if it was someone protesting that the sublime act of worship had been debased into a set of transactions, a system blatant but not honest, faith-based but not faithful? What if, on the day of reckoning, God agreed with the thief? The conundrum is so unwieldy it is like trying to get a moral duvet into a spiritual duvet cover.

Everything that is wrong with the process is contained within the book, everything that renders us powerless in the face of it is contained within the theft of the book. I would paymoney to know where the book is now.

We should reject faith schooling. Apart from all the nonsense, it is discriminatory. If you are the child of atheists, or people who want to stay in bed, or people who do not understand the bells, whistles, smoke and mirrors, that is not your fault. This system is the opposite of comprehensive and runs counter to all the principles upon which a universal right to an education is founded. Unfortunately, it is not at all interesting until you have a child of four, or 10, at which point all you want to do is give a priest a muffin.

It is not unusual for Boris Johnson and his works to give you an eerie sensation of falling through time, landing in a decade you never wanted to see. His marriage over, journalists are picking apart the character of Miss X as though they are in a 50s knitting circle. (Is she a “party girl”? Sources suggest that she is.) Yet Johnson’s reputation remains untouched. Most people do not care that he committed adultery and find it irrelevant to his fitness to govern. And when I say “most”, that is not a referendum most; that is a real, 72% most, according to a Sky Data poll.

There is an obvious explanation, which is that his reputation for deceit was so well established that it would have taken far more than a simple affair to diminish it; it would have had to be a mega-affair, with the Duchess of Cambridge, or his daughter’s boyfriend, or the entire membership of a branch of the Conservative party, treasurer included. It is not interesting when a snake swallows a mouse; it needs to swallow a football or a Magimix.

While that is plausible, it misses the bigger shift: sexual politics has moved on and left the media behind. Most people distinguish quite well between public and private; more importantly, most people see sex as a crime only when it is non-consensual.

If you take that principle seriously, to bring the weight of your disapprobation down upon two people having consensual sex is diminishing, and not just of your own maturity. You can’t make a strong or meaningful case against sex as an act of violence, an exertion of power, if you think all sex is your business and all of it is disgusting. Johnson’s shagging may be the most mysterious thing about him, but it is the least dishonourable.

A sperm bank in California is offering lookalike genetic material, enabling you to choose a baby that looks like a star. Ben Affleck is a favourite, but you can also choose David Beckham, if what you want is a son who looks like a person who is really good at football. It seems a little shortsighted: what if you ended up with a girl who looked exactly like Ben Affleck? But consider multiple children and the vista cracks open: you could have one Ben Stiller and one Owen Wilson and create a mini-Zoolander when they are seven. I would get a Tony Benn and a Roy Jenkins, give each a pipe (a fake one – I am not a lunatic) and make them debate.

Source of the article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/12/desperate-parents-are-bribing-priests-with-muffins-our-faith-school-system-must-end