Apathy Sketchpad

I am once again forced to return to the topic of “collective worship”, which I first covered when I awarded Religious Crackpot Of The Month to five government cronies. For those who aren’t up to speed on this, despite any amount of human rights legislation people may have passed, despite protests, and despite all common sense, it is a legal requirement for British schools to hold an act of collective worship every day — Christian for preference.

Rather reasonably, hundreds of people recently signed a petition asking for this ridiculous rule to be scrapped.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to remove the statutory obligation in schools to provide a ‘broadly Christian’ daily assembly.

Religious observance in schools is divisive, especially when the obligation is exclusively to the Christian faith. The link between state education and religious observance should be removed completely allowing atheists and those of other faiths to participate in school life on an equal basis. Allowing an individual to “opt out” is not sufficient as this categorises and potentially stigmatises children. Furthermore in rural areas often ONLY faith schools are available locally. This discriminates against non-religious children and teachers (who often can’t be employed without religious hypocrisy) and those of other faiths.

I honestly can’t imagine there’s a single word of that that any reasonable person could object to. Therefore I can only assume that the government does not contain any reasonable people, as this was their response:

The Government believes that Collective Worship stimulates thinking–

I promise this is real. Look, here’s a link. It even has a .gov.uk TLD — you can’t just buy those. I swear they really said that. How scary is that? The country’s being run by total fucking morons!

The Government believes that Collective Worship stimulates thinking and encourages pupils to learn about Christianity as well other religions and belief systems, nurturing respect and tolerance. It also offers schools a unique opportunity to develop their particular ethos and set of shared values.

All maintained schools are required to carry out a daily act of Collective Worship of a broadly Christian nature for all pupils. This reflects the religious tradition of this country. For schools where this is not appropriate the head teacher can apply to the local authority to have it lifted so that the Collective Worship in that school does not have to be of a Christian nature.

Every parent has the right to withdraw their child from Collective Worship and we believe this is important. In addition, from 1 September 2007, a new clause in the 2006 Education and Inspections Act came into force which gives students over the age of 16 the right to opt out of collective worship, without parental consent.

The Department for Children, Schools and Families will be updating their guidance for schools on Collective Worship to ensure that schools are aware of these issues.

In rural areas, Church of England schools have traditionally seen their role as catering for all the children in an area and admission arrangements for church primary schools in rural areas make no distinction amongst pupils.

There’s really nothing I can say to that, is there? It’s bullshit, from start to finish. There’s not a single word of it that any reasonable person would endorse. I mean, the third paragraph is vaguely laudable, but I don’t see how excluding children from assemblies based on their faith can ever be the correct solution.

I don’t mean to be obscene, but sometimes there’s really no other way to express an emotion, is there? Especially when you have nobody to blaspheme against.