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Mar. 14th, 2006 11:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hathycolI'm currently scrolling through the Guardian Online and some old articles about faith schools and generally I'm feeling a little uncomfortable.
I am a Catholicand was educated at a Catholic primary school and a Catholic high school.
I was not always a Catholic.
There's a long story to this. I wasn't actually baptised as Catholic. Oh no, I was baptised as good old C of E. It was part of the Agreement that my parents had - Mum would move to Ormskirk but she got the say over the rituals. They were married where my mum wanted and me and Megan were both baptised in Ormskirk Parish Church. That's one of my earliest memories, Megan's baptism.
So, we lived in Ormskirk and more importantly we lived precisely three minutes away from the local Catholic primary school, so off I was sent to St Annes. It turned out I was one of the very few kids in that school who wasn't Catholic, and because my mum didn't want me excluded from anything - and we're not very religious, as a family - so I got all the Catholic rituals apart from that nagging baptism thing. First Holy Communion? Got that at six, the dress is still hanging somewhere in the attic. First Confession? Age eight, I remember it well.
So, I'm coming up to age 10 and Mum begins to worry about my seconday education. The thing is, the local schools in Ormskirk really aren't that bad, as comprehensives go. You could go to the Grammar (misnomer; not an actual grammar but pretty difficult to get into), Crosshall or St Bedes. There were other schools in local towns and villages - dotted about in Skelmersdale and Burscough amongst others but my parents didn't want me commuting. (I agree with that, to be honest, although I had no qualms in going 45 minutes a day on a bus for college, hmm.) I had a damn good chance at Bedes, or so we assumed. I was in the catchment area - I was walking distance from the school. My Dad went there, and that sort of thing rather depressingly counts. Also, I went to St Annes, and everyone at St Annes went to Bedes. Well, there were three who didn't; two of them went to the private Catholic school in Crosby and one went to the grammar, never been sure why of that one.
Problem: Bedes only allows 10% of the pupils to be non-Catholic and I didn't stand a chance.
My mum decided to buggar all the principles rather than send me to Crosshall and decided that conversion was the way forward. Priest was very happy to do this - technically, after all, I was from a Catholic family and knew the stuff so it wasn't an issue - so me and my sister both got some words said. There were biscuits. I remember the biscuits.
Was Bedes a good school? As things go, it was probably the best for me. I dunno, really. Damn good history teacher, which was nice, but pretty obsessed with getting people above a C and then leaving them, which I think screwed up my sciences, but that's a bitter note for another day.
I am completely opposed to the religious side of it, though. We actually had a bigger population of ethnic minority children in our school than the two others did, which is unusual. Ormskirk, however, is a weird little bastion of white power in the North-West, so it's not the best example. However, we had RE. Not proper RE, whoich I would have enjoyed, but Catholic RE which taught us What We Would Go To Hell For. My history lessons, I'm beginning to realise, were a tiny bit biased. Our school houses were named after Catholic martyrs burnt by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I! I went for years thinking that Mary I wasn't such a bad sort. We were totally split off from the rest of society, and it was ridiculous. I had assemblies speaking about the evils of, basically, other religions ("we should be nice to them because they don't know better" type of thing) and basically it didn't help my learning in any way, shape or form.
I just... what's the point of faith schools? When you get right down to it? Is it a good idea to seperate kids off becuse they happen to be a Muslim or a Sikh or a Catholic? It's stupid. Yeah, the schools work because kids aren't actually put into the real world, where you're made to compete for things and ARGH. It's just sectarianism, and I'm sorry, but it is. It's bloody stupid. Teach kids about religion, I'm totally on side with that, and bring your child up in the chuirch or the synagogue or the mosque but do not ruin the way they see the world by a bloody faith school. All you end up with is close-minded and often frankly racist children. Don't believe me? We may have had the largest intake of ethnic minority pupils but that didn't stop the attitude of half the people I went to school with. It was appalling and I reckon it was probably aggravated by attitudes like "Well, Islam is good in that it accepts Jesus as a prohpet but bad because they deviated from the true faith."
Plus, I'm reading articles about depserate parents complaining that their children aren't going to the first-choice, and I'm sorry, but that's life. I'm not going to start passing judgement on private schools and the way it works in inner-city London because I had attended neither, but I'm uneasy about the entire thing. Especially when a private school fosters a similar attitude - I find a lot of people here in university who are entirely clueless about how the real world works because they've never been exposed to it.
Basically? Don't segregate your kids off. It's a bloody stupid idea. I can see that my mum thought she was doing the best thing by sending me to the smaller school but... eh.
~Hathy_Col~
I am a Catholicand was educated at a Catholic primary school and a Catholic high school.
I was not always a Catholic.
There's a long story to this. I wasn't actually baptised as Catholic. Oh no, I was baptised as good old C of E. It was part of the Agreement that my parents had - Mum would move to Ormskirk but she got the say over the rituals. They were married where my mum wanted and me and Megan were both baptised in Ormskirk Parish Church. That's one of my earliest memories, Megan's baptism.
So, we lived in Ormskirk and more importantly we lived precisely three minutes away from the local Catholic primary school, so off I was sent to St Annes. It turned out I was one of the very few kids in that school who wasn't Catholic, and because my mum didn't want me excluded from anything - and we're not very religious, as a family - so I got all the Catholic rituals apart from that nagging baptism thing. First Holy Communion? Got that at six, the dress is still hanging somewhere in the attic. First Confession? Age eight, I remember it well.
So, I'm coming up to age 10 and Mum begins to worry about my seconday education. The thing is, the local schools in Ormskirk really aren't that bad, as comprehensives go. You could go to the Grammar (misnomer; not an actual grammar but pretty difficult to get into), Crosshall or St Bedes. There were other schools in local towns and villages - dotted about in Skelmersdale and Burscough amongst others but my parents didn't want me commuting. (I agree with that, to be honest, although I had no qualms in going 45 minutes a day on a bus for college, hmm.) I had a damn good chance at Bedes, or so we assumed. I was in the catchment area - I was walking distance from the school. My Dad went there, and that sort of thing rather depressingly counts. Also, I went to St Annes, and everyone at St Annes went to Bedes. Well, there were three who didn't; two of them went to the private Catholic school in Crosby and one went to the grammar, never been sure why of that one.
Problem: Bedes only allows 10% of the pupils to be non-Catholic and I didn't stand a chance.
My mum decided to buggar all the principles rather than send me to Crosshall and decided that conversion was the way forward. Priest was very happy to do this - technically, after all, I was from a Catholic family and knew the stuff so it wasn't an issue - so me and my sister both got some words said. There were biscuits. I remember the biscuits.
Was Bedes a good school? As things go, it was probably the best for me. I dunno, really. Damn good history teacher, which was nice, but pretty obsessed with getting people above a C and then leaving them, which I think screwed up my sciences, but that's a bitter note for another day.
I am completely opposed to the religious side of it, though. We actually had a bigger population of ethnic minority children in our school than the two others did, which is unusual. Ormskirk, however, is a weird little bastion of white power in the North-West, so it's not the best example. However, we had RE. Not proper RE, whoich I would have enjoyed, but Catholic RE which taught us What We Would Go To Hell For. My history lessons, I'm beginning to realise, were a tiny bit biased. Our school houses were named after Catholic martyrs burnt by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I! I went for years thinking that Mary I wasn't such a bad sort. We were totally split off from the rest of society, and it was ridiculous. I had assemblies speaking about the evils of, basically, other religions ("we should be nice to them because they don't know better" type of thing) and basically it didn't help my learning in any way, shape or form.
I just... what's the point of faith schools? When you get right down to it? Is it a good idea to seperate kids off becuse they happen to be a Muslim or a Sikh or a Catholic? It's stupid. Yeah, the schools work because kids aren't actually put into the real world, where you're made to compete for things and ARGH. It's just sectarianism, and I'm sorry, but it is. It's bloody stupid. Teach kids about religion, I'm totally on side with that, and bring your child up in the chuirch or the synagogue or the mosque but do not ruin the way they see the world by a bloody faith school. All you end up with is close-minded and often frankly racist children. Don't believe me? We may have had the largest intake of ethnic minority pupils but that didn't stop the attitude of half the people I went to school with. It was appalling and I reckon it was probably aggravated by attitudes like "Well, Islam is good in that it accepts Jesus as a prohpet but bad because they deviated from the true faith."
Plus, I'm reading articles about depserate parents complaining that their children aren't going to the first-choice, and I'm sorry, but that's life. I'm not going to start passing judgement on private schools and the way it works in inner-city London because I had attended neither, but I'm uneasy about the entire thing. Especially when a private school fosters a similar attitude - I find a lot of people here in university who are entirely clueless about how the real world works because they've never been exposed to it.
Basically? Don't segregate your kids off. It's a bloody stupid idea. I can see that my mum thought she was doing the best thing by sending me to the smaller school but... eh.
~Hathy_Col~
