From Grayling to Glasman, and Ken to Noam: the week in links

Here's a few things you might have missed this week:

Terry Eagleton's description of A.C.Grayling's plan for a new college of the humanities as 'odious' is fairly typical of a certain strain of left-ish outrage (though, as we know, Eagleton has a personal animus against Grayling, Dawkins, and their 'old-fashioned Whiggish rationalism'). As Max Dunbar writes: 'From far left reaction you would have thought that Lord Voldemort himself had risen from his Horcruxes to set up a Slytherin Academy of Pure Evil (with Dark Arts BTec)'. And Max agrees that, certainly in Eagleton's case, 'there is an ideological thing going on':

Grayling and Dawkins, another lecturer at Evil University, are hated by Eagleton and similar far left academics, because they stand up to the religious right. Eagleton's big objection to Evil University is apparently that there will be no theology department, and that Tariq Ali will not be able to get a job there.

Reluctant as I am to link to spiked online, I also liked Brendan O'Neill's response:

It is ‘odious’, ‘repugnant’, ‘parasitic’, ‘hypocritical’, a ‘travesty’, a ‘money-grubbing’ scheme, and ‘it would be better all-round if its doors never opened’. Wow. What is it? A whorehouse? A Satanic church? A junk-food chain that specialises in feeding fat straight into children’s veins via a drip? In fact it’s a proposed new London-based university, called the New College of the Humanities, which says it will teach students the best of literature, culture and history for a fee of £18,000 a year. And yet judging from the unhinged coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking that someone had proposed opening a Ratko Mladic fanclub in Islington.

As Tony Blair said, in his interview (£) with the Times this week: 'Let a thousand flowers bloom!...Should it be right that people come forward with new ideas and new concepts? Of course.'

In the same interview, Blair was fairly dismissive of the nascent 'Blue Labour' movement: 'I'd be worried about indulging a nostalgia...The way the Labour Party wins, is if it's at the cutting edge of the future, is if it's modernising. It won't win by a Labour equivalent of warm beer and old maids bicycling'. Alex Massie agrees, and is suspicious of what he sees as the anti-liberalism of 'Blue Labour' and 'Red Toryism' alike: 'The spiritual renewal Glasman and Blond seem to think is necessary is, one suspects, a scolds' agenda that's the antithesis of a liberal live-and-let-live approach.' My own response would be more ambivalent, but I think Massie is probably right to conclude that Glasman and Blond - and cultural pessimist John Gray, with whom he associates them - are responding to something 'jittery, sceptical, distrusting and coercive' in the public mood. 

Also on the future of Labour and the left, Paul Anderson's reflections on being a 'Labour reformist libertarian socialist' in a cold climate are well worth a read. Though generally in favour of self-organisation and 'do-it-yourself socialist initiatives', Anderson sees the priority now as defending the social-democratic state:

In an ideal world, I'd like to see co-ops running the local buses and democratic housing associations controlling most rented living spaces – but in the absence of a revolution, which isn't on the agenda, the only context in which it could happen would be a big, generous, redistributive social-democratic state that taxed the rich and used the proceeds to forge a more equal and democratic society. I want that state, I want it now, and I want it more than I want my windows cleaned by a profit-sharing workers' collective.

According to Nick Cohen, the fortunes of the Left aren't going to revive until it cuts its ties to the 'disastrous and hypocritical ideology' represented by the likes of Ken Livingstone. Reflecting on Ed Miliband's unsuccessful attempt to get Jewish voters to support Livingstone's mayoral candidacy, Cohen writes:

I do not know what subterranean currents swirl in the Livingstone psyche, and have no particular desire to find out. But ever since he embraced Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the grim theologian who advises the Muslim Brotherhood, he has provided on the record evidence of his political predilections. Livingstone is a candidate for public office who is happy to engage with men who are not only antisemites, but support wife beating, the execution of gays and the murder of Muslims who exercise their right to change their faith or abandon religion completely.

On the subject of pseudo-leftist fondness for authoritarian extremists, Michael Deibert wonders if the indictment of Ratko Mladic for genocide will cause those - like Chomsky - who denied Serbian war crimes to undergo a change of heart:

With Ratko Mladic, predator and killer, now in custody, Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy and the others who have sought to deny justice to the victims of Bosnia's killing fields should apologize to those victims for working so long to make the justice they sought less, not more, likely.

Don't hold your breath. And in case you thought that far-left attempts to explain away tyranny and genocide were a thing of the past, take a look (if you can bear it) at this disgusting reaction to the arrest of Mladic by spiked online's Mick Hume. I told you I didn't like linking to them.

Taliban tactics in Tower Hamlets

I’m not sure why I’ve been so affected by the story of Gary Smith, the east London RE teacher who was assaulted by four Islamic extremists because they disapproved of him teaching religion to Muslim girls. Perhaps it was the sheer ferocity of the attack, in which a Stanley knife, an iron rod and a block of cement were used, and which left Smith with a fractured skull and a permanently scarred face.

Maybe I was taken aback by the unexceptional nature of what this ordinary schoolteacher did to arouse such naked violence. It’s not entirely clear precisely what Azad Hussain, Akmol Hussein, Simon Alam and Sheikh Rashid found objectionable about Smith’s teaching: whether it was the fact that he presumed to talk about Islam when he’s not himself a Muslim, or that he was teaching religion in an open-minded way rather than in the form of indoctrination (one of the accused railed against him for ‘putting thoughts in people’s minds’), or simply that he was exposing young women to the same kind of curriculum that’s available to young men. Whichever it was, none of these things is unusual in the British education system, and Gary Smith was only doing what thousands of teachers up and down the country do every day.

Maybe it’s that sense of familiarity, the feeling that Gary Smith was viciously assaulted for doing the kind of things that I’ve done myself – that sickening sense that it could have been me – that’s got to me. After all, I used to work in the East End - not in schools, but in colleges and community education projects, with young men and women from a diversity of religious and ethnic backgrounds. Back then (in the ‘80s), it never occurred to me to censor what I taught for ‘religious’ reasons, or out of fear of some kind of jihadist blowback.

I felt another kind of familiarity, too, as I read the shocking reports of the attack on Gary Smith. The thugs who were convicted of the assault came from places - Shadwell, Mile End, Wapping, Whitechapel - that have a deep resonance for me. These were the places where my Georgian and Victorian ancestors lived, where they were born, baptised, married, and worked – as shoemakers, carpenters, labourers, clerks. Indeed, one of my great great grandfathers had a boot and shoe shop in Burdett Road, Mile End, where the attack took place. Many of my forebears were members of a religious minority, too – they were Baptists and Methodists, drawn to these London suburbs because they were tolerant of Dissenters – but I can’t imagine them beating up those who disagreed with their particular versions of Christianity.

Then again, perhaps this event stood out because of its striking similarity with another story that I read this week - about the murder by the Taliban of an Afghan headmaster, simply because he had the effrontery to teach girls in his school. The two accounts had much in common: there was the same warped sense of religious self-righteousness, the same absolute denial of equal rights to women and girls, the same murderous violence in the name of religion.  Suddenly those Daily Mail scare stories about the ‘London Taliban’ didn’t seem so off the wall.

Finally, I suppose I was left perplexed about what would – and should – be the response of liberals to this kind of incident. I imagine if there’d been an attack of similar ferocity by four EDL or BNP thugs, against a local imam or mosque instructor, say, then we would have seen (quite rightly) liberals and anti-racists mobilising and marching through the area in solidarity. Maybe I haven’t been paying attention, but I don’t think we’ve seen anything of the kind in support of Gary Smith. Where is the outcry from the teaching unions against this assault on one of their number, simply for doing his job? Has anyone planned a march through Tower Hamlets in support of freedom of expression or the educational rights of young women?

Perhaps I’m expecting too much, and maybe I’m getting overly emotional about a rare and isolated incident. But then I read that, in the same part of east London, religiously-inspired anti-gay posters and threats against homosexuals are on the rise, as are the pressures on young women to ‘cover up’, and advertising hoardings have been routinely vandalised. I don’t live in the area, and I can no longer claim to know it well, and for all I know most teachers, gays, and women in Tower Hamlets still feel safe to go about their normal business, express their sexuality, and wear what they want, without fear of what happened to Gary Smith.

But if not, then it’s something the left ought to take seriously. It’s a good thing that liberals and anti-fascists line up with ordinary Muslims to protest against the intolerance of the EDL. But we shouldn’t forget that one of the reasons the EDL is able to gain traction is because of what people perceive, maybe unfairly, as the silence and habit of looking-the-other-way from the liberal establishment in the face of militant Islam. Let’s not forget that those who tried to silence Gary Smith, and those who threaten others because of their ideas, their gender or their sexuality, are fascists too - clerical fascists - and anti-fascists should as vehement and determined in condemning and campaigning against them as we are in opposing the EDL and the BNP.

Footnote:


This article is of related interest, though I don't agree with the author that it's all the fault of Labour, or that it's a symptom of the decline of Christianity.

Lusolinguistica

I've been brushing up my rusty and extremely rudimentary Portuguese, in anticipation of a visit this summer. My dedication to the task wavers, as I swing back and forth between fascination with and aversion from this most unfamiliar of European Romance languages. I keep myself motivated by the dream that one day I might be able to make sense of the volume of Pessoa's poetry that I bought when we were in Lisbon a few years ago (until then, I shall continue to rely on Richard Zenith's excellent translations) - or, failing that, at least order a drink without making a fool of myself.

Someone once described Portuguese as sounding like Spanish spoken by Sean Connery. Not only is this insulting to the Portuguese, who deeply resent such comparisons with their former colonisers, but also completely misleading. In fact, spoken Portuguese sounds nothing like Spanish. There's a closer aural resemblance with Russian, particularly in the way 'l' is pronounced, and in the ubiquitous 'sh' sounds. Not to mention the echoes of French, especially in the frequent nasal vowels ('bon', 'mim'). Then there are the dipthongs, such as 'ao' and 'oes', which are uniquely Portuguese and for which it's difficult to find equivalents in other languages. Finally, after years of learning to unflatten my southern English 'a' when trying to speak French, German or Italian, it's disarming to come across a European language in which (for example) the words 'para' and 'banca' sound like they're being spoken by a Cockney rather than by a Scot.

I started off with the BBC's lively little Talk Portuguese book and CD: all chirpy voices and annoying jingles, but it leaves you with a good grasp of the basics. I've now moved on to Teach Yourself Portuguese, which pleases me by interspersing the dialogues with grammatical explanations: something that BBC language courses, in hock to a spurious pedagogic pseudo-progressivism, seem to have spurned (as I argued here, this kind of withholding of the academic tools of the trade is actually patronising rather than empowering).

I only have two criticisms of the Teach Yourself course. One is the execrable quality of the CD (at least on the version I own), which seems to have been recorded in a cupboard and which features actors with less-than-crystal-clear enunciation (grasping spoken Portuguese, with all those 'shushy' consonants and swallowed vowels, is difficult enough for beginners). The other is the decision to teach European and Brazilian Portuguese together, which is as misguided as the BBC's attempt to combine European and Latin American Spanish in its Suenos course. The pronunciation and even the vocabulary used in Portugual and Brazil are often very different, and listening to the CD it can be difficult to make out which country the speaker comes from, and therefore which form would be appropriate in which location.

The compensation for all of these frustrations is being able to understand just a little of what my favourite Portuguese and Cape Verdean artists are singing about. Here's Mayra Andrade, providing the perfect accompaniment to a sunny spring afternoon:

A swift half with Martin Luther

My car journey this morning coincided with Radio 4's In Our Time. I'm always glad to be driving somewhere on a Thursday morning, as Melvyn Bragg's roundtable discussion programme passes the time in a pleasant and often stimulating way. (On the other hand, I dread having to go places on Wednesdays: Libby Purves' turgid Midweek can make the journey seem twice as long.)

Today's dissection of the ideas of John Calvin sounded promising. But I groaned when Melvyn introduced religious historian Diarmaid McCulloch as one of the guests. McCulloch is one of those academics who seems to be consciously remodelling himself as a celebrity intellectual, complete with a sing-song 'isn't this exciting' tone of voice and a tendency towards vacuous populism. Whereas Bragg's other guest experts did what they were supposed to, serving up detailed information about Calvin's life and thought that was genuinely enlightening, McCulloch responded with bland generalities whose aim appeared to be to get listeners to 'relate' to or 'empathise' with the past. So Luther became the kind of person you might want to go down the pub with, and Calvin someone you wouldn't want on the other side in a crisis. 'Media classicist' Mary Beard has a tendency to do the same kind of thing, often served up with a patronising use of Estuarian (though this is, of course, the least of Beard's offences). So devoid of content were McCulloch's answers to his questions, that Bragg often had to repeat them, in a vain bid to get the historian to say something substantial and informative.

I find this approach at once deeply patronising, in that it assumes that listeners couldn't possibly grasp complex ideas if delivered 'straight', and anti-educational, as it's founded on the notion that it's more important to have a 'feeling' about a topic than to know something concrete about it. Presenting itself as populist, it is in fact elitist, since it involves experts keeping their hoard of knowledge to themselves.

Yes, I know all about Lev Vygotsky and the need for knowledge to be 'scaffolded' by teachers. But what faux-populists like McCulloch do is withhold understanding, rather than guide others towards it. By contrast, one of the joys of a programme like In Our Time (usually) is listening to specialists, often in areas with which one is totally unfamiliar, do their specialist stuff - speak their expert discourse, if you want to be technical. It's in the struggle to understand, the grasping of nuggets of new and surprising knowledge mediated by those 'in the know', that understanding dawns and learning takes place. Not in the shallow attempt to imagine having a swift half with Martin Luther.

Frank talk about education

Here's Rafael Behr recalling a visit to a school in the Midlands:

A few years ago, I visited a school in Leicester that inspectors had declared to be outstanding in the provision of classes in "citizenship". This was a subject only recently invented by government in response to nagging national anxiety over "social cohesion". No one seemed to have any idea how, pedagogically speaking, to make citizens. Except, apparently, in the Midlands.

I was told how the citizenship "agenda" was woven through the rest of the curriculum – sequins of political liberalism sewn on to the fabric of other subjects. One history teacher explained to me how she had met her citizenship obligations by placing al-Qaida terrorism in the context of CIA support for Afghan mujahideen during the cold war. A 14-year-old pupil proved he had internalised this long view by explaining that, while the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist attacks were bad, they were also, in a sense, "payback". A statutory duty to inculcate civic mindedness had somehow equipped British teenagers with a pseudo-jihadi notion of terrorist murder as historical quid pro quo.

The anecdote is by way of an introduction to Behr's review of Frank Furedi's new book on education which 'devotes several pages to the ill-conceived citizenship agenda, but as just one example of the way our classrooms have become inadvertent laboratories in queasy liberal social engineering.' It's not that Furedi necessarily disagrees with the liberal values being thus inculcated: 'His core argument is that the aspiration to fashion children's souls according to political criteria is not really education at all; at least, not as he thinks that word should be understood.'

I haven't had a chance to read Furedi's book, but if Behr's summary of its argument is at all accurate, then it echoes some of the themes I was banging on about in these posts. This paragraph from the review goes to the heart of it:

The curriculum, in Furedi's analysis, has come to be seen by policymakers as an easy tool for the correction of wider cultural and behavioural problems. Obesity epidemic? Teach children about healthy eating. Too much teenage pregnancy? More sex education. By extension, teachers have become mediators in a process of socialisation – policing "values" rather than directing thoughts; a secular political clergy with the education secretary as pope. Pedagogy, meanwhile, has come to look more like therapy, with motivational and psychological techniques coming to the fore, along with a fashionable horror of allowing children to get bored. Everything must be "relevant".

Of course, those who advocate this kind of utilitarian, therapeutised form of education claim that they are being 'progressive' and that the defenders of a subject-based curriculum are reactionary and elitist, when in fact the opposite is true:

Furedi admits it is a small "c" conservative view, but he rejects the charge that it is elitist. If, in the past, only the elite had such an education, the policy challenge is how to extend it to all, not how to make it seem worthless by denouncing it as irrelevant in order to teach something easier instead.

Incidentally, one of the best books on education that I've ever read (as I've mentioned before) is Harold Entwistle's study of Gramsci's pedagogy, which is subtitled 'Conservative Schooling for Radical Politics'. Behr ends with this:

None of that solves the problem of how to turn children into citizens. But then, perhaps, if they have a good enough education, they can work it out for themselves.

Precisely. Moreover, being introduced to, and made to feel participants in, the history, culture and knowledge of our society is what prepares children to be citizens of that society (not being encouraged to empathise with jihadists). In the past, it's what made working-class men and women into radicals and (who knows) if we had a truly democratic education system, rather than elite knowledge for those at private schools and skills and therapy for the rest, it might do so again.

Spirit of inquiry

The government's partial climbdown over whether to hold the Iraq war inquiry in public adds an impression of muddle and incompetence to the appearance of political cynicism that surrounded the original decision. This new move reinforces the sense that the decision was rushed through for no other reason than to appease unruly backbenchers and dampen down the 'Gordon must go' campaign. At a time when the reputation of politicians is at an all-time low, how can making important national decisions for blatantly self-serving reasons, rather than basing them on principle, do anything but make matters worse? (Mind you, the Tories are no better: for the party that, when last in power, burdened teachers and pupils with a raft of testing and inspection to declare its belated opposition to SATS was an act of pure political hypocrisy and cynical vote-chasing).

As for the Iraq inquiry itself, although I'm not opposed in principle, I wonder exactly what purpose it will serve. Those who have been most vociferous in calling for it appear to be an uneasy alliance of two groups. On the one hand are the trenchant 'stoppers' of the Lose The War Coalition who won't be happy with anything less than a full-scale condemnation of the decision to topple Saddam. The other group is made up of those who have lost relatives in the conflict and demand to know why their loved ones died. But public enquiries don't exist to provide vindication for the opponents of government policy, or (hard though it may be to accept it) therapeutic closure for the bereaved. I suspect neither group will be satisfied, whatever the outcome.

(Cross-posted at Common Endeavour)

Rant for the day

I just heard an educational 'expert' on 5 Live claiming that most parents would prefer their children to go to a school that was safe and well-ordered, rather than one that had high academic standards. 

Since when were these mutually exclusive? It's like saying that most people would prefer a hospital that was comfortable rather than one that cured you, or a restaurant that was clean to one that served nice food. 

For a school, being safe and well-ordered shouldn't be an option: it should go without saying. It's not the job of a school to provide a safe environment for children, any more than providing clean tables is the primary function of a restaurant. The job of a school is to educate all children to the highest possible standards. 

I wouldn't get so worked up by the opinion of a lone expert if it wasn't typical of a worrying trend. I wrote in this post about the tendency of some government advisors to set up a false dichotomy between an emphasis on 'wellbeing' and a focus on attainment (and to prefer the former). And as I wrote here, I predict that the result will be state education becoming reduced to therapy and 'skills' for the working class, while private schools carry on providing middle class kids with the knowledge they need to reproduce their social advantages.

And just in case it's not clear: this is not a reactionary call for a return to 'traditional' education, but a lament for the loss of a radical socialist vision of education as personal and social transformation, and of high aspirations for all.

Rant over.

New Labour losing its way on education (again)

Today's front page Guardian headline - 'Pupils to study Twitter and blogs in primary shake-up' - is the kind of thing we've come to expect from the Daily Mail, rather than the 'serious' broadsheet press. As is the story below it, based as it is on leaked government 'plans' for the school curriculum. 

The real story (if there is one) is about proposals to allow teachers greater flexibility in deciding, within a broad framework, what they're going to teach - which should mark a refreshing change from two decades of ministerial prescription. 

The stuff about Twitter is a bit of a worry, though, and (if true) is further evidence of the tendency of the Brown administration to latch on to the latest trend (appointing celebrity chefs and TV psychologists as advisers is another example) in a vain attempt to court fading popularity. The Guardian claims the plans would ensure that children 'leave primary school familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of communication'. But children don't need to be 'taught' these things: increasingly they know more about them than their teachers. And Wikipedia? If our children's schools are anything to go by, teachers already encourage an over-reliance on dubious internet sources for homework, rarely trusting their pupils to take home an actual book (now I'm beginning to sound like the Mail...)

I'm not too worked up about plans to let teachers choose which periods of history they focus on, which could mean (as the Guardian puts it, in shock-horror terms) that schools wouldn't be 'required' to teach the Victorians or the Second World War. But our offspring are fed up to the teeth with these topics, having returned them repeatedly throughout their primary and early secondary years. ('We haven't got to interview Grandma about her war work again, have we?')

I'm more concerned about the planned focus on 'health and well-being', which will apparently include lessons on diet and teaching children 'how to negotiate in their relationships'. More evidence of governmental paternalism and the therapeutic turn in education....

As John Bangs, head of education at the NUT, has said, this rag-bag of proposals looks like an uneasy mixture of responding to passing trends on the one hand and giving into political pressure on the other. Not much sign of a coherent plan to prepare children for informed, democratic citizenship in changing times....

 

Last chance to vote for change at UCU

If you're a member of the University and College Union, you've only got a few days left in which to register your vote in the election for members of the National Executive Committee. Once again, if you want to end the dominance of the pro-boycott far left, and see genuine representation of the membership in the formation of policy, then please give your support to the candidates recommended here.

If you're in the South, you might want to consider voting for Dennis Hayes, founder of Academics for Academic Freedom, campaigner for free expression and outspoken opponent of the proposed boycott of Israeli universities. Dennis has also written about the 'therapeutic turn' in education, which I discussed here.

Any doubts about the need for a change in direction at UCU can be laid to rest by visiting its campaigns page. Naturally, there are some worthy and uncontentious names among the organisations supported by the union. But supporters of academic freedom might wonder how a higher education union, which ought to be fighting for freedom and pluralism in education, can endorse the pro-Castro Cuba Solidarity Campaign, or Hands Off Venezuela, which gives 'full support' to the Bolivarian revolution of demagogue Hugo Chavez. The UCU is also affiliated to the mis-named Stop the War Coalition, which recently sent a delegate to a pro-Hezbollah 'anti-imperialist' conference in Beirut.

To borrow a phrase: not in my name.

Lessons in terror

'Now children, for today's lesson on the Holocaust, I'd like you to put yourself in the position of a Nazi concentration camp guard and imagine his feelings as he sets off for another day's work in the gas chambers...'

Unthinkable? In the worst possible taste? I made it up, of course: but it's not much different from this, reported in today's Guardian:

Pupils are being asked to put themselves inside the minds of the 7/7 bombers to understand the motives of terrorists.

A government-endorsed teaching pack suggests the secondary schools ask pupils to do a presentation on the 7 July London terror attacks from the bombers' perspective.

The teaching pack, put together by the borough of Calderdale in West Yorkshire and displayed on the website of the Department for Children, Schools and Families, has now been withdrawn, thankfully. But what were they thinking?

Of course schools should encourage students to examine why historical events occur, but this exercise assumes that the 7/7 terrorists had motives that are susceptible to rational analysis. It seems designed to lead to the conclusion that there were 'understandable' reasons - whether poverty, discrimination or British foreign policy - behind their actions. It makes no allowance for the influence of irrational elements, such as fanatical devotion to a fundamentalist faith, or personal pathology, which will be outside the knowledge and understanding of most pupils.

The best response to being asked to 'understand' the feelings of fascists and terrorists remains that of air stewardess Gabriele von Lutzau (whom I quoted here), when asked if she would like to meet one of her former Baader-Meinhof captors:

I'm not interested in the background, in her history or in understanding her. This woman acted without a single moment of humanity. Her attitude was 'we are better than you. We're going the righteous way against Western imperialism.' Her distorted view of reality is not one I ever want to face again.

UCU elections

If you're a member of the UCU, and you're fed up with the pro-boycott SWP 'left' dominating the union, then follow this link and consider voting for the candidates on the list in the NEC election. We want change...

Freedom of assembly

A primary school headteacher in Sheffield has resigned, following parental protests at her decision to end separate assemblies for Muslim children (or rather, following Richard Dawkins, perhaps we should say 'children of Muslim parents'). Apparently Julia Robinson believed that holding a single assembly for all pupils was a better way to achieve integration and cohesion within the school.

The law requires schools in England to hold a daily act of worship that is 'wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character'. Parents of other faiths or none have the right to withdraw their children from these events, but not to demand that the school provides an alternative tailored to their own beliefs. Clearly, the school should not have conceded so much to Muslim parents in the first place: Ms. Robinson was simply correcting a mistake that should never have been made.

Discussing the affair on the World at One this lunchtime, a teaching union spokesperson argued that the legal requirement for a broadly Christian act of worship is in conflict with other measures aimed at achieving social cohesion, and urged the government to review the policy as a matter of urgency. Talk to most teachers in state (non-faith) schools and they will tell you the same thing: the current law, which requires mostly non-believing teachers to lead mostly non-believing pupils in an act of religious worship is a farce, and in most schools produces a dishonest fudge. 

Also interviewed on the programme was the Labour MP for the constituency, Meg Munn, who indulged in a fair amount of fudging herself. Clearly anxious not to offend any of the parties to the affair, she argued that decisions about separate assemblies should be left to schools. But she did make the extraordinary claim that it was part of the school's business to introduce children to faith - and she didn't mean in an objective, RE kind of way. In this, she is plainly wrong. If Muslim parents, or parents of any other religion, want their children to be initiated into their beliefs, they should do it themselves, or send their offspring to a faith school. The mission of a state school should be to expose children to a wide range of beliefs, and to familiarise them with the common values that are shared across society, not to provide facilities for them to be indoctrinated exclusively in the beliefs of one group or sect. 

Just as there is no place for Muslim assemblies in state schools, so there is no longer any justification for Christian worship, however much it's hedged around with qualifying adverbs like 'broadly' or 'mainly'. Julia Robinson was right, and it's a shame she's had to resign her post.

Update

Seems there may be more to this story than meets the eye. Edmund Standing quotes the Sheffield Telegraph report which reveals that Julia Robinson was accused of racism by some parents after her attempts to foster inclusiveness at the school. Remember that her proposal was to offer a single assembly that embraced all faiths - does that sound like racism to you? Although Ms Robinson's resignation wasn't explicitly linked to this episode, other teachers say that she was under pressure because of the affair and was 'absent through ill health' for most of last year.

Attenborough on Darwin

I've just taken Oliver's advice and watched David Attenborough's film about Darwin, which I missed at the weekend, via the BBC iPlayer. It's a great piece of television, culminating in an explanation of the theory of evolution that even scientific ignoramuses like me can understand. 

Like Oliver, I've been frustrated by the way that arguments about 'intelligent design' have dominated coverage of the Darwin anniversary. I heard Attenborough interviewed twice on BBC radio about the programme, and on both occasions the interviewer seemed more concerned with his (lack of) religious beliefs than with the content of the film. Taken together with recent suggestions that schools should teach creationism alongside evolution, it makes you wonder how far we've really progressed in the 150 years since The Origin of Species was published...

Noises, colours, shapes, feelings and flavours

A propos of this post, this made me chuckle. (Via)

Education as therapy

My internal alarm bells were set ringing and personal hackles made to rise by this news item:

Traditional lessons in history, geography and science should be removed from the primary curriculum and children taught their essential content through cross-curricular themes classes, the biggest enquiry into primary schooling in a generation will report today.

It seems that Sir Jim Rose, the government's chief advisor on primary education, wants to remove 'rigid subject areas' and replace them with project work that encompasses a range of skills. 

My blood pressure lowered a little as I read on, and saw that the six 'areas of understanding' which Rose wants to introduce are more or less the present range of subjects grouped under different headings. So perhaps there was nothing to worry about after all.

But then I saw that Rose wants government to impose a 'central requirement on teachers to encourage children's social and emotional well-being in an explicit recognition that schools must help cure some of the 'social ills' facing society'. Oh dear, here we go again.

So while private schools continue to impart the knowledge and understanding that will enable middle-class children to rise effortlessly to the top of the pile, state education is increasingly reduced to therapy for working-class kids, to compensate for rather than eradicate social divisions. The bright vision of radical and socialist educators down the years - of liberating children through knowledge, and giving all children a share in our common cultural heritage - seems to have got lost along the way.

Some disconnected (?) thoughts on education

1.
The Fat Man links to a scathing article by John Holford about the British government's utilitarian approach to higher education, evidenced in their appointment of an HE 'user consultation group' dominated by employers and with no representation from either academia or the trade unions. As Holford says, the attitude of the current administration is a betrayal of the 'generous, human and liberal' vision of education advanced by Labour luminary R.H.Tawney. Key quote from Holford:

No 'user' will speak for local communities; none for schools or hospitals; none for the old; none for charities or the voluntary sector; none for social movements; none for ethnic minorities; none for ordinary working people; none even for local authorities.


All this is, I regret, in keeping with recent government approaches to the role of higher education. Universities must not just play a part in 'driving up' skills: serving the economy is now their raison d'etre.


2.
Yesterday's You and Yours on Radio 4 had a phone-in discussion on access to higher education. There was much talk about the 'value' of a degree, in which the general assumption seemed to be that going to university was solely about improving your job prospects. Many of the calls were from parents, who (partly as a result of changed funding arrangements) seem increasingly to view themselves as the consumers of higher education. Along with this new consumerism goes a growing demand for value for money: many of the callers were irate about the (low) number of hours of direct tuition received by their offspring, and no amount of fine talk about education being as much about learning as teaching, or about the autonomous learner, was going to satisfy them.


3.
Finally, last week I attended a briefing about the government's new Children's Plan. There seemed to be a shift towards viewing the task of the school as promoting children's 'wellbeing', and a general downplaying of the emphasis on standards and attainment. I felt a bit conflicted about this. While I agree that schools should be concerned with the welfare of the whole person, I worry about any dilution of their primary focus on learning. There was also a lot of emphasis on learning having to be 'fun', which is all very well, but students also need to discover that understanding often comes about as the result of hard work and struggle. As with the 'happiness' agenda, to which it's linked, I tend to think that a sense of 'wellbeing' is one of the by-products of the insight, understanding and skills that education brings, not its direct aim.


There's probably a connection between these thoughts, but I don't have the time or energy to join the dots right now...

Update
I've just come across this piece on the politics of 'wellbeing' by Pat Kane, from back in February 2007, in which he joins up the dots between the Gradgrindian 'appplied Presbyterianism' of Gordon Brown, evidenced in the government's vision of work as the solution to all social ills, and the paternalism of the 'happiness' agenda pushed by 'bureaucrat of bliss' Lord Layard. Couple of nice slogans from Kane: 'support our autonomy, don't prescribe our happiness', and 'get your hands off my soul'.

Bunting and Odone on faith schools

After last week's launch of a new campaign to outlaw educational segregation by faith and its vigorous welcome by Polly Toynbee, her Guardian colleague Madeleine Bunting responded yesterday with a lengthy defence of the 'strong ethos' provided by religious schools. Bunting's article was more even-handed and considered than many of her past outpourings, though it was shot through with her usual disillusionment with the modern world, as she bemoaned the 'desperate dearth of alternative narratives of transformation' in contemporary secular society.

Bunting's advocacy of faith schools clearly wasn't full-throated enough for her fellow liberal-Catholic-turned-Islamophile Cristina Odone, whose letter in today's paper contends that Bunting 'overlooks the impact these schools have on the Muslim community and in particular on Muslim girls'. Drawing on research appearing to show that state-sponsored faith schools 'increase the chances that low-income Muslim parents keep their daughters in schools', Odone argues that the alternative is parents withdrawing girls 'once they reach puberty, from what they regard as the dangerous playground culture of sex and violence found in secular state schools'. 

This is the kind of argument that looks conclusive on a first reading, but on reflection demands some serious unpacking. You'd need to look at the original research report to confirm whether these are the reasons that Muslim parents are actually giving for taking their teenage daughters out of school (rather than Odone's colourful interpretation of them). And even if this is the case, you'd need to ask whether their stated reasons correspond to their real reasons, or act as a convenient cover for them. Isn't it possible that there are other reasons (the kind you wouldn't necessarily share with a researcher), such as a belief in the segregation of the sexes at puberty, or a cultural prejudice against providing equal educational opportunities for girls? And if so, should the state bow to those beliefs and prejudices by funding religiously segregated schooling? Moreover, shouldn't the state both challenge misinformed generalisations about a 'dangerous playground culture' in state schools, and at the same time work to transform that culture so as to make it welcoming to all cultural groups, rather than simply giving in and accepting their self-exclusion?

Odone goes on to suggest that 'for young people who cherish Islam, the secular culture they experience in state schools can prove profoundly alienating.' But like it or not, it's a secular culture (meaning plural, multi-faith, open to a range of ideas) that we live in, and school is a key site for learning to flourish within it. And the roots of alienation may lie as much in the attitudes to secular society being inculcated at home or mosque as in the experience of school. Being schooled only with people from your own faith will surely increase rather than overcome that sense of alienation. 

Scotland, sectarianism and faith schools

The autumn issue of Democratiya is now out. Among the many articles worth reading is this worrying piece by Tom Gallagher, on the growing links between Nationalism and Islamism in Scotland. According to Gallagher, Alex Salmond's SNP is actively encouraging ethnic and religious communalism in the hope of garnering Catholic and Muslim votes. (Incidentally, Gallagher's analysis of the reasons for Labour's decline in Scotland is similar to James Macmillan's, as reported in this post.)

Apparently the SNP 'have mobilised not just autocratic Catholic prelates but radical Islamic politicians in the hope that by offering them group rights they will deliver an ethnic block vote to the party. This raises the spectre, in some eyes, that in a Scotland fully under SNP control, individual citizenship will count for little and the party will rule through a large bureaucracy which franchises control of education, policy, and other policy areas to mobilised factions inside and outside ethnic minorities'.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the Nationalists' backing for state-financed Muslim schools and their support for the Scottish Islamic Foundation, whose chief executive Omar Saeed manages to square membership of the SNP with calls for the restoration of the caliphate. Amanullah de Sondy, a lecturer in Islamic studies at Glasgow University, believes that such schools will 'leave young Muslims vulnerable to extremist pressures', while Gallagher is concerned that 'there are no strong voices pointing out that young people could be pushed towards introspection and even religious militancy through the insistence that Muslims combine a Scottish allegiance with an active search for their religious roots'.

Coincidentally, today also sees the launch of Accord, a new campaign that opposes the educational segregation of children by faith. The campaign is supported by a diverse coalition of humanists and liberal religious groups, and is warmly welcomed by Polly Toynbee in an article in today's Guardian:

Accord wants faith schools to abide by the same admissions criteria as other state schools, with no selection by belief. Teachers should be employed for their skills, not their faith. It opposes Labour's new rules for faith schools, which came into law yesterday, allowing them to keep all jobs for the faithful. Teaching assistants, dinner ladies and caretakers may need to get on their knees to keep their jobs from now on.

But the National Secular Society doesn't think the campaign goes far enough.

Primary proms and classroom homophobia

From today's Education Guardian:

It is prom night and the young people are dressed to the nines, the girls in elegant dresses, make-up and heels, the boys in tuxedos. As they step out of the stretch limos and Humvees their parents have hired, it is obvious that they are ready to leave school...

But these kids are leaving primary school - and their average age is 11. Apparently, the pre-teen prom is becoming an inescapable rite of passage across the UK. The article goes on: 'Boys in kilts and girls in diamante evening gowns are already dancing to the music of time north of the border, where term ends a month earlier than in England.'

The popularity among pre-teens of US movies, such as the ubiquitous High School Musical, seems to be partly to blame. But I think it's also a symptom of the increasing emotionalisation of everyday life (other signs include roadside shrines, crowds weeping at funerals of dead royals). One Scottish parent quoted in the piece says 'I am not sure where the hysteria starts, but when it does it spreads very easily and it is difficult to stop.' 

I can tell you where the hysteria started at our children's primary school: with the teachers. At the end of every year, they set up the Year 6 leavers' assembly so that it would turn into an inevitable weep-fest. Teachers, themselves often dabbing their eyes, gave emotional speeches about 'the best class I've ever taught', and the event wasn't considered a success if it didn't end with gaggles of girls in floods of tears. To watching parents, it often seemed as though it was the staff's separation anxieties, and not the children's, that were being dramatised, and imposing them on impressionable 11 year olds often felt like a form of mild emotional abuse.

I don't want to turn this post into a bout of teacher-bashing, but there's another good piece in the education supplement about combating homophobia in schools. There are some excellent ideas to help teachers deal with issues of sexuality in the classroom, but the assumption throughout is that prejudice against gays and lesbians is part of 'playground culture'. No reference is made to the fact that teachers might themselves exhibit signs of homophobia towards their pupils, and how this might be dealt with. Again, at my son's secondary school (and here's where blogger anonymity comes in useful), the only reports we've heard of homophobic language have been about a teacher who makes repeated remarks about what he perceives to be the effeminacy of certain boys' appearance and behaviour. This is something that was rife at my boys' grammar school in the '60s and early '70s (when even our left-leaning Liverpudlian politics teacher had a habit of referring to a particular pupil as a 'big girl's blouse'), but I had kind of hoped those days were over.

One more item to recommend in the Education Guardian: an interview with one of my favourite historians, Mark Mazower, which oddly omits to mention his bestselling book Salonica, City of Ghosts, which I wrote about here.

LRB: faith restored (for now)

Reading the London Review of Books can be a bit like reading the Guardian: just when you decide you've had enough and have resolved to cancel your subscription, along comes something to restore your faith - at least, until the next time (see this post). So after gritting my teeth through recent issues featuring (inter alia) Gareth Pierce on the 'war' on British Muslims and Patrick Cockburn on the Iraqi 'resistance', the latest issue includes a couple of articles that make you think your £3.20 was money well spent.

I don't usually have much time for Ross McKibbin, but his in-depth piece on New Labour education policy, and particularly the city academies, is one the best things I've read on the topic, and has a good sense of historical perspective. I think he's absolutely right to say that, in the aftermath of comprehensivisation, 'the Labour Party had only the vaguest notion of what might constitute a democratic educational system.' His position on the academies is a pretty reasonable one: yes, they've achieved some successes, but why on earth do they need business sponsorship (which he describes as 'increasingly preposterous and socially regressive'), and what would be wrong with making all secondary schools quasi-academies: 'schools which possessed much of the academies' autonomy and their academic culture'? (see this post.)

I also enjoyed Eliot Weinberger's retrospective on the Obama v. Clinton contest. If you want a catalogue of reasons why Barack won and Hillary lost, then look no further. And he's quite amusing too. Listing Clinton's campaign errors, he describes her self-reinvention in Pennsylvania 'as a Woman of the People, waxing eloquent on her hunting days with Grandpa and downing shots in working-class bars, as she derided Obama - the son of a single mother on welfare - as an elitist, out of touch with the regular people she'd presumably been hanging out with all these years at Yale Law School, the Arkansas governor's mansion, the White House and the Senate'. Weinberger concludes on a note that spells hope for the Democrats in November: 'I have yet to meet anyone under forty who is not an Obamamaniac'.