Inter-faith dialogue; compulsory mixing of schoolchildren to promote better race relations ….
There seems currently no end to the number of straws to which Labour ministers and prime ministers are not unwilling to cling in a desperate bid to salvage the country from the parlous state into which ten years of their hopelessly misguided immigration and multicultural policies have brought it.
We should not feel afraid, however, of saying that, at present, only one recently settled minority is proving hard to integrate adequately in Britain -- its Muslim one. The reasons why this is so are many and complex and not to be addressed fully here.
What can and should be said, however, is that neither the compulsory mixing of all the country’s school children by twinning schools, nor inter-faith dialogue between the members of its different faith communities, either on their own or together, are at all likely to solve the most acute problem the country currently faces regarding social cohesion. This is that of preventing its young Muslim citizens becoming so alienated from mainstream British society and life as to be susceptibile to radicalisation by extremists intent on turning them into terrorists.
Education has, I believe, a crucial role to play here in promoting social cohesion, but only if educational policy takes a very different course from what is currently being proposed for it by the government.
Education can be made to serve the end of greater social cohesion only when a vital truth about what social cohesion involves is grasped. This is that it requires each new generation of society’s members acquire a common social identity that facilitates their mutual identification with each other as societal members as well as a shared sense of pride and gratitude in being such.
Whether formal or informal, the education children receive in a society will always be play a decisive role in determining whether such a form of common identity succeeds in developing within them, or whether it is prevented from developing.
As a nation-state, Britain has until very recently been, comparatively speaking, one of the most successful states ever to have existed in terms of having been able to manufacture such a sense of common social identity in its citizens. Part of the secret of its success has been the ability of its educational system to transmit to each successive generation of members such knowledge and understanding of the country, and its history and culture, as to have been able to evoke within them towards their a common love and an allegiance, combined with amity towards all who share that same knowledge and affection, no matter however different from their own their other attributes might be.
To acquire such a sense of British identity, it has been neither necessary nor sufficient that a person be of Anglo-Saxon or pre-Anglo-Saxon native stock, although being such certainly doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, hinder the process. Plenty of WASPS , who have received the most traditional and privileged of upbringings, have been prepared to betray their country, having fallen victim to spurious ideologies (think: Anthony Blunt). Likewise, there have been even more completely loyal and patriotic British citizens who have not been WASPS (think: Benjamin Disraeli).
The formation of the requisite social identity that is needed for social cohesion, however, does requires that those in whom it is to be formed have undergone an education which has privileged British culture above all others. This does not mean that, for its production, it is necessary that all British-born children undergo induction into the Church of England on pain of otherwise being unable to be granted full citizenship. It does mean, however, that they should all have learned something about why and how this particular church came into being and what role it played in the creation of the diverse, tolerant and plural society Britain has become.
Above all, it involves initiation into a peculiarly British way of thinking that only deep and full immersion in Britain’s history, literature, poetry, art, landscape, thought, theatre, and custom can bring.
The only viable role education can play in promoting social cohesion, therefore, is not that of acquainting all British schoolchildren with the diverse native traditions of whichever parts of the world their families may have come from and to which they may still remain attached. Its true role is to privilege the teaching to them of British culture so that they all acquire a common British identity, no matter their different respective faiths, creeds, or colours.
This should hardly need stating. But so estranged and frightened of stating the obvious has our educational and political establishment of late become that a reminder of what should in fact be obvious might be no bad thing.
In reading about the current nostrums for making education serve the end of greater social cohesion, I could not help but be put in mind of something Thomas Macaulay wrote when he was in India in the mid 1830’s as president of the Committee of Public Instruction for Bengal, with effective responsibility for educational policy that affected 250 million Indians.
At the time of his arrival there in 1834, his fellow committee members were divided over whether, in the institutions of higher education in receipt of East India Company funding, instruction in Sanksrit and Arabic should be at all fostered, or only, or at least principally, instruction in English. Macaulay was in no doubt that, given in his view India’s destiny was about to become inextricably linked with that of Britain, English should be privileged.
In 1834, he wrote a famous ‘Minute of Education’ whose recommendations soon became official government policy. In it , he remarked that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’. This is something it would be difficult to think of a British civil servant being able to write today in an official minute, however true he or she might privately consider it to be.
However, this remark of Macaulay’s was not the one of which I was put in mind by recent statements about what role education can and should be made to play in promoting social cohesion. It was rather something else he wrote at the same time in a letter to his father, shortly after his preferred educational policies had become official policy and when a generation of Bengalis had begun to receive instruction in English in the then only college receiving East India Company funding.
In this letter, Macaulay divulged a second reason why he was glad they were being taught in English, apart from the greater utility of literacy in it rather than literacy in Sanskrit or Arabic. As paraphrased by Arthur Bryant in his biography of the great Whig historian, his second reason was that ‘no Hindu boy who received an English education could ever remain sincerely attached to his own religion’. Macaulay expressed his belief and pleasure at the prospect that, only provided his policies were stuck to, in thirty years time, there would not remain a single idolater among Bengal’s respectable classes.
Macaulay here falls victim to a certain crudity of thought and expression that betrays the very impoverished sense of what religion is about from which he always suffered.
However, his general point holds true and is highly relevant to the issue of social cohesion. Receipt of a British education should leave its recipient no longer able to believe what he or she would or could have done had they not been in receipt of it, and such change should be for the better in the sense of having effected in its recipient a certain degree of enlightenment that will have freed them from superstition and credulity.
Unless and until such a form of education once again is restored to our schools, so that none leave them without their having acquired a common enlightened outlook that will have rendered them both knowledgeable and appreciative of their country and its culture, regadless of their particular religious faith or lack of faith, no amount of compulsory twinning of schools or inter-faith dialogue can succeed in creating a socially cohesive nation here, and we can only anticipate greater and greater disunity, segregation, mutual suspicion, and rancour.