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Notes -
https://news.sky.com/story/muslim-student-loses-legal-challenge-against-michaela-community-schools-prayer-ban-13116385
In what is perhaps the first win Secularism has experienced in a long time, a high court judge has ruled against a challenge brought forward by a muslim pupil claiming that lack of prayer rooms at hier school were a substantial opposition to her faith. The judge's reasoning is that the school explicitly advertised itself as secular and would not permit certain activities in an attempt to minise friction between pupils. This outcome was accomplished in spite of threats and bomb scares made to the school and criminal damage to both the school and a few of the homes of the staff who worked there.
Michaela Community School is not a typical institution, hence why it was not only able to fight back against Islamists, but also win. Situated in a particularly deprived part of London, it boasts extremely successful grades compared to not only the borough but the wider country as a whole. It accomplishes this through rules many consider extreme, including no talking in corridors, demerits for failing to remove your book from your bag and flip to the correct page in under 10 seconds and mirrors removed from bathrooms in order to avoid distractions.
Its head, Katharine Birbalsingh, is not a typical educator. An Indo-Guyanese woman and once a Conservative advisor for social mobility, her comments on education, society and the role of its members routinely antagonise left of centre commentators. Michaela is a free school, indepedent of the local authority and thus she is immunised against potential attempts by that local authority and other insitutions to instill accepted views into her school. This is I think a large part of why she won - she ultimately only answers to herself and those parents in her community who are in favour of her school and the way she runs it, and can thus ignore detractors in a way that an LEA controlled, union dependent teacher can't.
The school really is pretty grim, though. Its big selling point is that it takes children from all sorts of different minority backgrounds, forces them to get along, and manages to educate them to a high level. But the price for that is severe: anything which might cause cultural conflict between children is removed. So all meals are vegetarian, to prevent conflict between vegetarians and meat-eaters. Muslims don't get to pray, and neither do Christians. I have sympathy in this specific case because the prayer conflict resulted from aggressive children forcing others to pray or be labelled bad muslims, but my feelings about the school are ambivalent.
If the only way to make a multicultural community work is an aggressive secularism that excises huge bits of everyday life, I'm not sure that's worth it.
I am pretty sure that the school is for the underclass/lower class. In those cases, yes, in order for people to get along even to the point that they stop disrupting the learning process you practically have to beat the tribalism out of them.
Multiculturalism is not necessary for a disruptive learning environment (CVUHSD in LA is ~75% Hispanic and tests even worse than the average LA high school) nor is it sufficient (plenty of wealthy zip codes with a lot of immigrants where the kids is definitely learning, even if they have their own dysfunctions).
Yep. It's non selective and draws its pupils from a known poor area full of poor people. It's not somewhere I'd want to send my future children too (it would stifle them) but its policies and ethos are excellent for turning little shits (who have nothing in them to be stifled in the first place) into decent if unremarkable members of society, I want to see 100x of these schools all over the country.
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Yeah, I went to a "multicultural" school mainly made up of the children of middle-to-upper-middle class people from across the globe. Russians, Chinese, Nigerians.
None of this shit was needed, because people mostly self-segregated and figured out a way to live within that* and teachers simply didn't tolerate shit, it's not like they couldn't find someone else to pay those extortionate tuition fees. My first assumption hearing this was this was a no-excuse school for the problem kids (I wonder if this is a "win" or not for Wax's model: the 'no-excuse' school still faced attempts to destroy it on grounds of difference, just as she claims income-integration schools do, yet it survived)
* Though maybe the next generation will lose the segregation aspect and have more conflict as a result...
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