Should full face veils be banned in schools?
A lot of it will come down to the school uniform policy – a case went to the House of Lords a few years ago where a muslim girl claimed that she had been unofficially expelled from school as she had been told that she couldn’t attend until she wore the school uniform (which didn’t include a face veil) the Law Lords ruled that she hadn’t been expelled as she had chosen to refuse to comply with a request to wear the uniform and would be allowed to go to school once she was appropriately dressed. This judgement (in the article) won’t mean that niqabs are banned in every school, it just reinforces the Begum v Denbigh High judgement a few years ago and gives schools the right to decide what they want to have included in their uniform (after consulting the local community); a school could still choose to include a niqab in their uniform if they wanted to.
It is commonly accepted that approx. 93% of listening is actually done through non-verbal clues (facial expressions; etc). Now in my work experience as a student-teacher I teach French. Personally I find it most hard to assess children who wear veils not only as their voice is muffled, but due to this barricade to what has been tested to be true. As a religious person, I can fully accept why they choose to do this, but I think there comes a time when priorities must be made and education is at the top of my list, and it would appear the governments too.
Political Islam works through the aggressive use of symbolic speech. The full face veil is one example. The example to be set in schools is obedience to the laws of nature, and the facts of reality, not deferrence to the laws of Sharia. In a Madrassa, the rules are different, but that’s not a public school, and all the pupils there are volunteers, at least by proxy. One could look for, and possibly find, health and safety aspects of this question — but that would be quibbling, and niggling, and quisling, and it’s not my style. I take the question, entirely head-on. No, in school, I don’t want to hear about what a great big fat Moslem you are, how holy you are, how pious you are, don’t tell me, just shut your gob and do your job. I believe in school uniforms just so that kids do not get a chance to turn the school into an encounter session of “getting to know you” multi-culti psycho-babble. Students should have personalities, but not on display, where such display is a distraction from
