Jewish schools are not a faith school ‘menace’

This article titled “Jewish schools are not a faith school ‘menace'” was written by Karen Glaser, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 19th August 2010 11.59 UTC

When my dad heard Richard Dawkins was interviewing me for last night’s Channel 4 documentary Faith School Menace?, he didn’t miss a beat. “Will you get him to sign my copies of his books?” he asked.

Unlike my father, I haven’t read every single Dawkins tome, but, like Dad, I am still a big fan of Britain’s most prominent atheist. I think secularists are incredibly lucky to have someone of his calibre fighting their cause and I fail to see how anyone, religious or not, could disagree with the evolutionary biologist’s core claim that faith is a matter of assertion over proof.

But when it comes to faith schools, I think this great humanist is misguided. In the film, he reports that one in three state schools in Britain already has a religious affiliation and that under the coalition’s free school system, religious groups are being encouraged to set up more. Dawkins is, unsurprisingly, appalled: faith schools, he claims, indoctrinate and divide children, and bamboozle their parents.

The case for Jewish education isn’t really made in the film. Those Jewish schools approached didn’t want to participate and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Anglo-Jewry’s representative body, declined an interview. In Dawkins’s words: “My reputation precedes me.” I, meanwhile, was happy to talk – as a journalist who has written about faith schools and as a parent whose daughter attends one – but my interview didn’t make the final programme.

My defence of Jewish education is heavily based on my experience of one particular Jewish school: Simon Marks Jewish Primary, in north London. That experience may well be atypical, but, I would argue, is still germane. For the government’s desire to see a new wave of faith schools comes with an important caveat: these new institutions must be inclusive. In which case, I think this socially mixed Orthodox Jewish primary, with its relaxed approach to admissions, is its model in waiting.

You see, not being Jewish is simply not an issue at this remarkable faith school at which Jews from all backgrounds – from the strictly Orthodox to the stridently secular, like me – and lots of non-Jews all get along.

Take Jane Martin. An avowed atheist since the age of 14 – when she defiantly informed her Catholic mother she was done with taking communion – Jane is about as kosher as a bacon butty. Or, Pentecostal Christians Ricardo and Dionne Hennie, who love the fact that their daughters are learning Hebrew and getting a thorough grounding in the Old Testament, both central to their strand of evangelical Christianity.

Plus, the school is home to very many mixed Jewish families with, for example, one parent who is white and Jewish and another who is black. Certainly, when you peer into the playground it looks like a typical Hackney school, rather than the kind of monocultural and segregated silo claimed by Dawkins. In the words of rabbi Rebecca Qassim Birk, who has two children at Simon Marks: “This faith school is certainly more culturally diverse than my local one in Crouch End. I wanted a school with people of all faiths and none, and that is what I have got.”

The reasons for this are varied, but most important is the fact that Simon Marks has refused to apply the very stringent entry criteria some Jewish schools may have been forced to adopt because they have been overwhelmed with applications.

However, Simon Marks’s appeal to non-Jews, and its several openly gay families, may also have something to do with Judaism in general which, as religions go, is very heavily centred on historic events, culture, literature, food and music, rather than theological ideas about heaven, fire and damnation. In the words of one parent: “My children come home saying today we learned about freedom, how the Jews were once slaves and now we are free, rather than asking am I going to go to hell, Mummy?”

But even if Judaism is as much a historic civilisation as it is a religion, there is still, surely, a lesson here for the new faith schools the government has promised the nation: extract what is historical and cultural from your faith traditions rather than what is doctrinal and theological, and a lot of the criticism Dawkins levels at faith schools will melt away.

Build those schools in multi-ethnic areas and things will get better still. Directly opposite the North London Muslim Community Centre and a mosque, and a few doors away from a vegetarian, yoga-practising humanist nursery, Simon Marks’s diverse community is also a reflection of its location.

That diverse community fares very well academically at Simon Marks. There aren’t, for example, too many inner-city primaries offering after-school clubs in Latin and verbal reasoning – or, for that matter, too many schools where a quarter of pupils have English as a second language but that are in the top 6% for English Sats.

Which is, of course, the main reason faith, and especially Jewish, schools are so popular: they provide an excellent secular education. The kind of secular education that turned my father, despite compulsory daily religious worship, into one of Dawkins’s biggest fans.

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