The public school lobby may well concede this point, but argue that private school graduates are weak on ‘bridging’ social capital, ie between groups (this is a claim made in Bonnor and Caro’s The Stupid Country). The volunteering may be for in-groups such as church bodies. But the public school lobby have no evidence for this.

Empirically, neither of the Age articles provide any evidence that religious groups are undermining social cohesion, other than by inspiring anti-religious sentiment in McGaw and Samway. Nothing on their atittudes; in my research on this people who have been to private schools do not differ significantly in their beliefs from people who went to government schools.

My observation is that graduates of private religious schools, be they ever so humble, are more likely to promote the accumulation of social capital ie be joiners than others. Private religious schools promote social cohesion much more than public irreligious schools.

Students who emerge from such an environment will tend to be more prone to participate in team sports, voluntarism, enlist in the services and all the other daggy patriotic stuff that is considered old-hat by cosmopolitan po-mo liberals. That is because they emphasize school spirit, teamwork, uniformity & “not letting the side down”.

I have no evidence to support this apart from anecdote. (The situation of public schools in country areas is obviously different.) Evidence anyone?

Social cohesion generates a public good - trust - which promotes social efficiency. It is a good that liberals have always had a hard time getting their head around owing to the historic contentions b/w modernist liberalism and the traditional social coherers: Church, State & Family. (AKA God, King & Country).

You cant blame Locke & Hume for being a bit suspicious of over-mighty subjects, zealous priests and the like. What with civil wars & sectarianism. (Hobbes was suspicious of liberalisms anarchic tendencies which makes him more apt these days.)

But there is no excuse for this these days in our parish. Big Brother and Papism are distant memories.

Modernist liberals, although uneasy about the Church, understood that the only way that the self-seeking appetites unleashed by catallactic capitalism and democratic statism could be curbed was by encouraging public “civilism”.

The most obvious creator & conduit of such an attitude are religious schools. THey accumulate social capital, having an eye on eternity and long run returns. The more sensible liberals, such as Burke, Smith & Hayek, always knew that religiously inspired empathy for others undergirds the Open Society.

Post-modern liberalism is a totally self-centred (where “selves” often have an economic or ethnic identity) philosophy. It creates moral disaster zones wherever it is taken seriously (Masters of the Universe, home boyz in the hood).

Ah, they are supoosed to be public socialists first, not elitist carpetbaggers who insist on depriving the lower orders of choice in education, even though they themselves would rather catch public transport than subject their own children to the public comprehensive schools they run.

Keating a public Anglican?

You are conflating multiculturalism and a multi racial/ethnic immigration policy. France’s probelms are caused by a number of things, most of which are peculiar to the particular ethno-religious group that makes up close to ten percent of the population.

The US does not have multiculti and it is the most successful example of multi ethnic/racial immigration policies.

I’ve no doubt its a tricky questions, but we already do this — its just where the division lies. Uncontroversial examples include, for example, educating doctors/high risk groups about identifying various disorders that occur in some populations and not others (or are you saying the government shouldn’t have targetted, say, gay groups with the AIDS campagin, young white males for stupid car driving, or doctors for symptom X that occurs mainly in ethnic group Y) . In addition, I think there is a division between spending money on educating groups about other’s beliefs versus giving groups money for certain activities of which they are the main and esssentially only beneficiaries (which we also already do).

“Modus vivendi expresses the belief that there are many forms of life in which humans can thrive. Among these ther are some whose worth cannot be compared. Where such ways of life are rivals, this is no one of them that is best. People who belong to different ways of life need have no disagreement. The aim of modus vivendi cannot be to still the conflict of values. It is to reconcile individuals and ways of life honouring conflicting values to a life in common. We do not need common values in order to live together in peace. We need common institutions in which many forms of life can coexist.”

Conrad, as soon as you start spending public funds on particular groups that are identified by race, colour or ethnicity you are on a slippery slide to a very divisive situation.