There, but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford
My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.
I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation.
England
We live in a world where people with very different worldviews are forced to live together and indeed have a shared experience of much of their everyday lives - there are going to be conflicts because people want to live by their own values as best as they can.
Of course I agree that hardline Islamist views are inherently oppressive, but when it comes to the more general principle of wanting your kids to be raised in a good environment, I can sympathise - the secular school system is just as relentless in forcing secular ideas upon schoolchildren, be they Muslim or Christian.
I don't want my kids to be brought up believing that there is no God or that we evolved from a common ancestor with monkeys (beyond the scientific debate, I think such ideas are mentally traumatizing and deny our humanity*), but that is what the secular world and its school system forces down their throats these days.
*One of my most depressing memories is my dad telling me there is no God when I was around 8-10, kids should not have to feel that way
At the end of the day politics is just trash compared to the Gospel.
You said 'common ancestor', chapeau. Religious schools can exist I don't mind, but these are public schools. It has no place there. It sounds like a genuine attempt of islamisation of public space to me.
Thus far, it looks like there's more than a little substantiation - though it will not be the same across the board. The context here is that these are secular schools overwhelming attended by Muslim children, the same way rural schools here are overwhelmingly English. This has been a very rapid shift, and as a result you have English staffed -schools without any English pupils Over time you'd expect a certain amount of demographic re-alignment there, just as we have more Muslim teachers in English schools thanwe did.
What we appear to be seeing here, though, is certain people getting elected to the board of Governors, replacing the English heard, intimidating the English teachers, and enacting policies like sex-segregation. Nobody is more riled up, I hear, than the Muslim parents who chose a secular school over an Islamic one (the UK has Islamic schools just as it has Jewish and Christian ones).
"If it wears trousers generally I don't pay attention."
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