Christian fundamentalist schools put kids ‘at risk’ with exorcisms and marriage grooming: inspectors
Several Christian fundamentalist schools have been downgraded in the UK after a government watchdog group followed up on an exclusive report done by The Independent.
As the site reported this summer, LGBT students were being taught that homosexuality was unnatural and girls were being told that they had to obey men. Other students reported other forms of “serious mistreatment,” including “corporal punishment, exorcisms being performed on children and schoolgirls being ‘groomed’ for marriage to much older men.”
These Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) schools were designed to create a Bible-based education for homeschool students, pastors and private religious schools, according to their site. The schools teach thousands of students at over 26 institutions, but now those schools are coming under fire by the institutions responsible rating them. As a result, their score has been downgraded, The Independent‘s exclusive reports.
The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) is the group responsible for regulating such schools. After the initial report, Ofsted investigated 10 schools, deciding those once rated “good” or “outstanding” must be downgraded to “inadequate” or “requires improvement.” One Ofsted report even concluded that children at one school “are at risk.”
Those students who once attended the schools said that the Ofsted reports don’t go far enough. They also want the government to be held accountable for not regulating, investigating and watching the schools they’re assigned to audit. They are demanding to know how the government fell short so “generations of children were failed.”
The ACE program actually comes from one in the United States. While the Department of Education publishes a state-by-state breakdown of the rules outlined for private schools, each state is responsible for regulating the schools in their district and determining if there is abuse. This summer, it took an expose from The Boston Globe to spark an investigation into 67 New England private schools.
Many of these religious schools have a strict interpretation of Christianity and require students to teach themselves using only the textbook. Students in some schools were put into desks facing the wall that prevented them from seeing any other students near them. It’s to inspire discipline. They look like a desk in a voting booth. This kind of Christian fundamentalist schools put kids ‘at risk’ with exorcisms and marriage grooming: inspectors: