http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/online-quran-teaching-pakistan

A hard-line Islamist based in Pakistan is teaching English children on the web to read the Koran.... with all the 'interpretation' he likes to give it.

Can, and should, this be controlled? And if so, how?

This is an excellent question and a difficult moral issue. The first thought that entered my head was, to paraphrase Voltaire, I don't agree with what the man says, but I'd die for his right to say it. The trouble is many do die for this right. Voltaire lived in a time when secularism and reason was already engaged in a battle to wrest control from archaic religious fanaticism. Today the world is different from Voltaire's 17th century reality; the internet provides instant mass communication of ideas round the world and people of all races, religions and nationalities can far more easily move around the globe,

people from cultures that can only be described as pre-enlightenment. I'm not even certain it would be possible to ban online teaching, flash drives can be carried in a pocket and downloaded to file sharing sites, besides which doing so would allow western leftists to compare such measures with the censorship of totalitarian regimes such as China.

I suspect that a better approach would be to ensure that all English pupils have to be exposed to a western curriculum. Nadim Walayat in the link I provided on the UKIP thread suggested stopping state funding of all religious schools, I would go further and ensure effective policing of the materials taught in religious schools to ensure it does not contravene our laws on what constitutes hate speech - though this may if honestly carried out mean it would be difficult indeed to sanction a syllabus consistent with any of the main Islamic schools of jurisprudence. It does occur that this issue is worthy of a thread of it's own.

Coming back to online teaching I suspect that blocking unacceptable content is of limited use unless people who subscribe to extremist views are rooted out and a strategy of teaching British cultural values is made compulsory.

My daughter teaches in a very well known academy that is Catholic-based.

The promary school nearest to where I live is Anglican-based.

There are also Quaker schools, Methodist schools and other faith-based schools in Cambridge, let alone the rest of the country. What about the colleges in Cambridge University? Very few were founded on a secular basis (two that I can think of). The rest of the country has a similar build-up.

By withdrawing funds from faith-based schools you would close half the schools and most of the universities in England - even more schools in Wales, where the Methodists did so much good work in educating the working classes.

To me the answer would be to put CCTV into every classroom and every place of public debate, such as churches and mosques. I also want ID cards and DNA records kept of the whole population. Facial recognition laws to be able to identify anyone in a public place, maybe even a microchip such as are put in dogs. This would apply to all visitors, immigrants, citizens, without exception.

We have a G8 meeting going on at the moment - it would have been good to microchip Obama, Putin and Merkel.

As a Catholic, I certainly wouldn't want to block faith-based schools! One aspect of the problem is that we, the West, are not offering any viable alternative. In the days when the West was predominantly Christian, our defence lay in precisely that.

Another aspect is that the IT revolution is still relatively so new that the school generation is, by and large, more savvy than their elders. Parental Control is something they can easily circumvent.

Teaching British cultural values, Dan, sounds a great idea, but where is the basis for these values once we have discarded the Christian religion? We may have a beautiful house, but without foundation it is bound to fall.

And before all those who are so ready to attack Christianity jump at my throat, would they please tell me of what that foundation consists?

To me the answer would be to put CCTV into every classroom and every place of public debate, such as churches and mosques. I also want ID cards and DNA records kept of the whole population. Facial recognition laws to be able to identify anyone in a public place, maybe even a microchip such as are put in dogs. This would apply to all visitors, immigrants, citizens, without exception.

We have a G8 meeting going on at the moment - it would have been good to microchip Obama, Putin and Merkel.

Hitler and Stalin would have loved to be able to do this! Think how it would help our tourist industry if every person coming into the country was DNA-ed and microchipped! The police state par excellence! And you would have to do it to everybody to make it effective.

It would be much easier to be a dog.

As a Catholic, I certainly wouldn't want to block faith-based schools! One aspect of the problem is that we, the West, are not offering any viable alternative. In the days when the West was predominantly Christian, our defence lay in precisely that.

Another aspect is that the IT revolution is still relatively so new that the school generation is, by and large, more savvy than their elders. Parental Control is something they can easily circumvent.

Teaching British cultural values, Dan, sounds a great idea, but where is the basis for these values once we have discarded the Christian religion? We may have a beautiful house, but without foundation it is bound to fall.

And before all those who are so ready to attack Christianity jump at my throat, would they please tell me of what that foundation consists?

Yes, I see your point. I remember back to my school days, my brother and I were the only Jewish children in a catchment of 2000, to my knowledge there were no Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists either. Assembly was unapologetic in it's Christian basis, we had hymns, we had harvest festivals etc. It never occurred to me to ask for any exemption, indeed I would have refused it had one been offered. The same applies to school meals. The trouble is the world has changed and aggressive secularism twinned with political correctness has greatly diminished Britain's cultural Christian identity.

So what do you do? You can't monitor all religious schools sufficiently, even though we know where the problem lays. You can't single out one religion just because it happens to be problematic.

Returning to online problem, I think there are sufficient would be hate preachers within the UK itself to make blocking such activity all but impossible, so I return to filling the void left by our receding cultural identity. Perhaps national service would be a step in the right direction, but all the approaches I can think of consist of reaching to the past that was.

This is the problem - time has moved on and we are living in a world unrecognisable from my childhood and youth, fifty-plus years ago.

Towards the end of the war I was in the last intake of a Grammar School at age 7 years. I was the youngest boy in the school for three years, until the 11+ brought in others. I still had a bit of a German accent at that time, my parents having sent me to the UK to relatives when I was a baby. The world I grew up in was hostile, to an extent, but I survived the early years and was eventually accepted throughout the school - more for my ability on the rugby field than for my charming personality.

But at that time the adults were completely in charge. Kids may have sneaked into the toilets to have a smoke, or copied someone else's homework, or pushed me into the blast walls around the doors and windows in the playground, but the teachers knew exactly who was doing what. And at home one's parents or other adults knew what you were doing and how well you were doing it.

Nowadays communication is totally different. Television gives instant news of events happening far away with (often erroneous) interpretations of such events. The Internet allows into your personal space many people, some hateful, some trying to take from you, some friends and acquaintances. But all can put on a deceitful facade to try to persuade you that you should act in certain ways, to their benefit but not necessarily to your benefit. And these forms of communication are not monitored in the way newspapers used to be. (Newspapers are also drifting away from responsible reporting into sensationalism and hack headlines).

I cannot see a clear way to keep society as we have known it in a safe shelter. All manner of ideals are being compromised by both the developing science of communication and the differing aims of businesses and religious extremists - both christian right-wingers and muslim fundamentalists. I offer extreme solutions not because I really support them, but because I see no other way to rein in the powerful forces that increasingly restrict our lives.

According to the Guardian article linked to in the OP, the website concerned is a shoe string operation; most Muslim parents who make use of such services employ more reputable ones.

Using the existence of such sites as an excuse to close, or at least remove state funding from, religious schools is ridiculous.

State schools in the UK are obviously subject to regulation, but so are independent schools; Registration of independent schools.

Personally, I think that the state has no business giving religious instruction. Teach pupils a bit about the major faiths, maybe; but if parents want their child taught a particular faith then send them to a private faith school or arrange it through their own church, synagogue, mosque or whatever.

There is a great debate at present about blocking certain sites connected with child porn and obviously any site which preaches hate or attempts to encourage or recruit terrorists or other criminals should be blocked too.

I'm no IT expert, but from what I've read that would require the cooperation of the ISPs and search engine companies; all of whom seem to be saying it can't be done!

BTW, as a Catholic at a C of E grammar school I, along with (if memory serves) a couple of other Catholics, four Jews, a Plymouth Brethren and a Sikh were excused the religious part of school assemblies; but not what was called RE. The school saying that they didn't teach any particular faith, but what in those days was called Comparative Religions. But parents could withhold their sons from RE if they chose; only the Plymouth Brethren's did.

(I remember the Plymouth Brethren because he wasn't allowed TV, so had no idea what we were talking about in the inevitable "Did you see..." type conversations. I remember the Sikh because as we got older he was the only boy in the school allowed a beard.)

OP leave it to the SAS.

This is the problem - time has moved on and we are living in a world unrecognisable from my childhood and youth, fifty-plus years ago.

Towards the end of the war I was in the last intake of a Grammar School at age 7 years. I was the youngest boy in the school for three years, until the 11+ brought in others. I still had a bit of a German accent at that time, my parents having sent me to the UK to relatives when I was a baby. The world I grew up in was hostile, to an extent, but I survived the early years and was eventually accepted throughout the school - more for my ability on the rugby field than for my charming personality.

But at that time the adults were completely in charge. Kids may have sneaked into the toilets to have a smoke, or copied someone else's homework, or pushed me into the blast walls around the doors and windows in the playground, but the teachers knew exactly who was doing what. And at home one's parents or other adults knew what you were doing and how well you were doing it.

Nowadays communication is totally different. Television gives instant news of events happening far away with (often erroneous) interpretations of such events. The Internet allows into your personal space many people, some hateful, some trying to take from you, some friends and acquaintances. But all can put on a deceitful facade to try to persuade you that you should act in certain ways, to their benefit but not necessarily to your benefit. And these forms of communication are not monitored in the way newspapers used to be. (Newspapers are also drifting away from responsible reporting into sensationalism and hack headlines).

I cannot see a clear way to keep society as we have known it in a safe shelter. All manner of ideals are being compromised by both the developing science of communication and the differing aims of businesses and religious extremists - both christian right-wingers and muslim fundamentalists. I offer extreme solutions not because I really support them, but because I see no other way to rein in the powerful forces that increasingly restrict our lives.

Interesting post, HB. I agree with you that society has gone through such enormous changes in our lifetime that the whole fragile system of interrelationships which made up the society we were brought up in has disintegrated.

I went to a public school, boarding at that, and when I left was one of the last entries to do National Service. (if I'd chosen to go to University first, I would have missed it) I went into the RAF, and it was an eye-opener. I simply hadn't realised people like this existed! Nice people a lot of them were, too. Many of them didn't seem to have the cushion which middle-class society had provided me.

I think in hindsight that it is a pity National Service was discontinued. It gave people some sense of discipline in their lives, and taught people to rely on the group instead of being wholly individualistic.

Back to the topic! The breakdown of the societal interrelationship system has coincided with the rise of the IT era, with the result that the internet is totally anarchic. I'm no IT whizz, but it seems to me that though there are ways of controlling things, there are also always ways of getting round the controls.

I don't think there is an effective way of stopping such things as the teaching of the Koran (with terrorist interpretations) which I highlighted in the OP. I think it requires a long process of rebuilding our society from within, and I don't see how that can be done unless the churches play a major part.

As an atheist, and a Jewish one at that, I find myself agreeing with you about the desirability of a resurgence of Christian belief, if that is what it takes for people to regain their moral compass. Who was it who wrote tolerance and apathy are the last two attributes of a dying culture? I spoke to an old acquaintance last week, he is a UK citizen with Polish parents. The jist of it was he no longer felt safe living in South London and was sick of people mocking his religion. I reflected there should be hate laws against that, but after 45 years he had had enough and was leaving the UK.

To recap, I don't think censorship works, but attitudes contrary to British values can't be replaced by a vacuum, so we badly need to redescover the confidence to spell out what these values are. As it is we are addressing the symptoms without defining the underlying cause of problems. It seems so obvious to observe, but large numbers of people arriving from third world cultures are going to retain the values and behavior of said cultures, unless they are given education, compulsory imho, regarding how people are expected to behave in the UK. This would go a long way to stop a search for identity being derailed by radical Internet teachers.

It is somewhat ironic that in the Visas and migration forum there are regular posts from people complaining about what they call the irrelevance of the LitUK test, yet the above post is, if I read it correctly, calling for it to be made more difficult and comprehensive!

A view I do have a lot of sympathy for (bet that surprised you, Steely Dan!).

I don't get to Thailand anywhere near as often as I wish; but the end of the above post has reminded me of the many (not all) westerners there, women and men and not just tourists, wandering round in their tank tops and shorts and generally ignoring the social mores etc. of Thai culture and feel that they should be given compulsory education on how people are expected to behave in Thailand!