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The advocates of church schools — ie schools owned and controlled, although not necessarily paid for, by church authorities — usually manage, with very considerable skill, to win the first battle with their critics before the critics even know that it has taken place. This is the all‐important battle about the terms in which the argument is to be conducted. Ideally the argument should be based on the question: Why have church schools at all? The whole subject has, however, been so successfully mystified over the past few decades that the operative question is, in fact: What right does the state have to take schools away from the church authorities? In some societies where the churches are particularly strong and the state relatively weak, the question is even more loaded: What right does the state have to interfere with church schools?