One of the ladies in my group of local mother friends recently expressed horror that her five-year-old daughter had been taught a Bible story at their local non-denominational primary school. She said she was appalled that the school would teach children about God and read them stories from Genesis. Said friend, after lodging her complaints with the school, went straight onto Amazon and bought her daughter a book about evolution.
This reaction is clearly mad – even atheists understand that Christianity is part of our country’s identity and that teaching children the odd Bible story is, at the very least, providing them with a cultural reference.
All the same, I am glad I was not present when this particular grievance was aired as I’m not sure I would have been able to “stay cool”. The last time I saw this mother she said she thought the government had been right to lie to the population about vaccine safety and lockdown efficacy based on her belief that most people are too stupid to be allowed to make up their own minds. I almost exploded at the lunch table and am still not over the experience two months later.
But back to teaching children the Bible. As I have written in my column previously, I have been in a quandary about where to send my four-year-old daughter to school in September, the choice being between two: a very convenient rural Church in Wales school 10 minutes drive away with a woke lady chaplain, or a Catholic primary half an hour’s drive away often through heavy traffic. My husband has always been keen on the first option because of the length of the school run. You can imagine the discussions (arguments). Me: “Are you saying that you are prioritising your own comfort over our child’s morality?” Him: “You are a religious fanatic.” Etc, etc.
Anyway, luckily these disagreements are now behind us. I have decided on the more convenient option based on a number of factors, none of which have anything to do with the school run, although that is a major bonus.
The first reason I have decided on the Church in Wales school is that I have now understood, partly thanks to my fellow columnist Katherine Bennett who has been teaching in Catholic primary schools for the last 20 years, that most Catholic schools no longer teach Christian morality. In her recent article “Progressive ideology has replaced Christianity in many of our Catholic schools”, Katherine writes about how she was reprimanded at her place of work for teaching children that abortion is immoral.
Instead, she writes, contested political the-ories, such as an imminent doom linked to cli-mate change, are being sold to children as a means to salvation. This observation is consistent with my own experience when looking around Catholic primary schools. In each of the three that I saw, the walls were plastered with the children’s “artwork” – a display of posters with terrifying images of the earth self-combusting, people burning alive, etc. The point of this exercise can only have been designed to scare the living daylights out of the kids. As it became increasingly clear to me that my child wasn’t necessary going to learn Catholic values at a Catholic school, but was instead going to be indoctrinated with woke ideologies, I decided that this may as well take place at a location which is geographically more convenient to me.
And then the other day I had a chance conversation with an acquaintance from our local church who told me that she, a Catholic, was delighted with the local Church in Wales primary school because her atheist husband had recently complained that their daughters were being taught “too much God and Christianity”. This mother was delighted that her girls were being taught all about Jesus and God, Easter and Christmas, as well as to recite prayers and sing hymns.
Fantastic, I thought, at least that, even if they are presumably being taught that he will send a plague on all their houses if they don’t segregate their recycling correctly.
On top of all this, I am also feeling comfort-ed that the highly disturbing content of the Relationships and Sex Education curriculum is now being discussed at government level thanks to Miriam Cates MP who has called for a proper inquiry into it. The latest news that schools will now be obliged to keep parents informed should their child express a desire to change gender is also very welcome, as is the closure of the Tavistock clinic. It seems that things are going in the right direction at the moment in this regard.
Neither school option is perfect, but I am certainly not going to spend hours in traffic every day to send my daughter to a school which is Catholic only in name, and as woke as anywhere else. I just have to steel myself for, in the words of Laurence Fox, “un-indoctrinating my children in the car on the way home” where necessary.
