Joan Bakewell: We should not tolerate any faith schools

Now is no time to be a teacher emerging fresh from training college and eager to embark on a career you love. The Government has not only thrown a number of rocks in your way, it has now decided to add a good deal of mud to your future path.

Whoever thought the issue of faith schools would come to plague us with so many awkward questions? Well, in fact, quite of number of us did. That's why we opposed them from the start. It is no pleasure now to see the whole edifice of casuistry and appeasement gently imploding.

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Once it all seemed so simple. There was a time when all teaching in this country came from ecclesiastical authorities. Since the reformation, those have been Church of England establishments, often set up beside parish churches or within university structures. With the 19th century came Catholic emancipation and the flourishing of Catholic schools. Jewish schools also provided for their own. As the state took an increasing hand in education, it naturally supported what was already there. Funding followed, and slowly so too did the curriculum.

With the arrival of communities of other faiths came clashes of interest. The touchstone was the law against blasphemy, an archaic piece of legislation that had lain around virtually unused but unrepealed so that in 1977 Mrs Whitehouse could bring a charge against a gay poem that graphically described a centurion's lust for Christ, and win the day. The publisher was fined. Come the publication of Rushdie's Satanic Verses in 1988, Muslims found they were not covered by the blasphemy laws and called foul.

They were right to point out such inequality before the law. Then the Government made its first mistake. Rather than making all equal by abolishing the blasphemy laws, it took to heart the concerns of other faith communities and dug itself ever deeper into the pit of confusion.

Since February this year, we have to beware of giving offence to someone's - anyone's - religious beliefs, opening the doors to all sorts of allegations about plays, films and comedy routines where evidence is a highly subjective matter. How long before Scientology - the world's most celebrity-ridden religion, claims state support for its own faith schools? Cults have a habit of becoming serious religions: all it needs is followers and a shared creed.

In supporting faith schools, the Government believed it was acting in the same interest of fairness and tolerance. But its recent volte face over multiculturalism and its new emphasis on integration force it yet further into the quagmire of confusion. The Secretary of State for Education, Alan Johnson, has already indicated that faith schools must now offer a quarter of their places to non-believers or pupils from other religions. It was reported earlier this week that Ofsted inspectors will have the power to insist that faith schools increase their RE lessons on other faiths. At the same time, but moving in the opposite direction, an amendment to the Education Bill will allow faith schools to favour members of the same religion in choosing support staff. They can already insist the head is of the same faith, but not, apparently, caretakers and catering.

Add to all this the fact that dress is now an issue, and that an application for a teaching job would seem to have a number of hidden agendas, namely what is your faith, and do you propose to wear any evidence of your faith - veils, crosses , turbans - about your person? The French option - no religious emblems of any kind- now seems pretty straightforward, even enviable.

In matters of faith, we are up against irreconcilables. Any devout believer must hold in their heart the conviction that their God is supreme, and their faith the unique truth about the nature of existence. To live in the way of true faith requires the involvement of its values and observances in every moment of your life. This applies to all faiths, not just Islam. Ask Ruth Kelly, with her rumoured affiliation to Opus Dei and its practices. It is why the devout suffer such grief when their children marry out, and seek to strengthen their hold on the young by faith schools that insist on the primacy of their God and their Prophet.

The idea of tolerating other faiths was born in this country of a long and arduous journey through the bloody religious massacres of Tudor days, through a Civil War that created, in the death of Charles I, its own King and Martyr, towards the broad tolerance that came to characterise Victorian England, and which survived the shock of Darwinism. It also bore fruit in the creation of the United States of America, with its wise constitution settlement that separates church and state.

Teaching about other religions than their own requires of faith schools a conviction they don't feel. It calls for the most subtle discretion and generosity that faiths, under pressure from world politics, don't find easy. The Government - with its shifting requirements - only adds to the mess.

We should never have got here in the first place, but being here, its hard to see how the mutual existence of passionately believing communities can be sustained. When any one of them feels threatened it will close ranks and defend its own. The ideal is to extend tolerance equally to all, a tolerance that will involve concessions from everyone.

joan.bakewell@virgin.net

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