wild_quinine wrote:Whilst this may be an effective tool for making people stop and think about what they're actually saying, and I do applaud that, it is not a useful substitution to make vis a vis the undesireability of Catholic Schools....
Yes I knew Fascist was a dangerous word to used (I almost went with flat-earth or marxist or whatever) but it was easiest to change from 'faith'.
You see Hennessy is trying to make a pragmatic assessment of the value of Catholic Schools based not on their doctrine, but on their success as schools.
No, he made a point of mentioning that the catholicness didn't rub off on him and presented this as a good thing. I agree, this is a good thing, but that doesn't make the school itself good, merely inept at doing a bad thing. I was pointing out that ANY other form of school (fascist, flat-earth, marxist) could be inept at indoctrinating other forms of bs and his point would be just as valid.
To then substitute another undesireable value into place of Catholicism doesn't work. Why? Because the argument is a pragmatic one, and therefore rests on the specific undesireablility of Catholic indocrination.
It works perfectly if I am arguing against the principle of such schools in general and not specific examples such as catholicism. The principle is that any old cult can take the reigns of an educational institution and provide a more 'faith based' approach to the children of parents of said particular cult (especially when it comes to sex education). Yes, some will be more harmless than others. For example, I wouldn't argue that a Wahhabi faith school was just as bad as an Anglican one, though they are both products of a bad premise, which is what I am arguing against.
not least the fact that schooling itself seems to me to be about nine tenths indocrination.
And I'd be making the same argument if the indoctrination was only one tenth of one percent. The principle I'm arguing against isn't changed by how much or how little or how (in)effective said indoctrination is.
However we are not arguing to bring such places into existence. They exist already. Hennessy's point is about whether or not it is pragmatic to dismantle them, given that they tend to perform well by some measures.
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Was it pragmatic or not to dismantle slave labour given that they tended to perform well by some measures? I've heard that the GDP of the UK decreased 10% in the year that slavery was abolished, was it therefore a bad thing to abolish it?
I simply don't care how impractical it would be to dismantle faith schools (and how hard can it be to simply place a placard at the entrance "under new management"?)