Sunday, 11 September 2016

Segregation in Schools in the UK

Do they never learn? The UK government is proposing that faith based schools should be able to pick all their pupils from their religious background.Under these proposals state funded schools will be able to become exclusively one religion. This is a policy of division in society which goes against the government's stated policy of trying to get more integration.
I can recall before I retired as a university lecturer having students from Northern Ireland where the catholics and protestants had never spoken to somebody from the other side. Over time they realised that they were all human and did not have horns and could be spoken to without some kind of contamination. There was a case on an M Sc course where there were South Africans who had never spoken to black people. They were very agitated about having to share the lecture room with black students let alone share a table over lunch. In the end they all got along.
If this is what the government wants, I despair. The idea of segregating children is wrong. The only hope for the world is for children to mix at an early age.
This idea is explored in my fantasy series The Rombuli Sagas Book 1 The Teacher of the Rombuli, Book 2 The Return of the Exiles and Book 3 The Prisoner of Parison.
Available from Kindle, Amazon and Smashwords.