Back before the last general election I wrote at how opportunities for people who have not been to a public school (i.e. an elite fee-paying school in the UK sense of the term) to have a good career and a decent salary were being closed off: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/08/death-of-opportunity.html I anticipated that if David Cameron came to power then this situation would worsen, which is certainly the case. I also see that I thought that it would be difficult for Cameron to get into power which also proved to be the situation given he was only able to do it as a part of a coalition which was difficult to negotiate. Up until now I have tended to view the decline in the opportunity for ordinary people (the 90% of the population who earn up to £40,000 per year or less; the average yearly income was £38,547 [€45,870; US$59,740] in 2011 which means since I was made redundant in 2010; on £35,000 per year, I have fallen back below average whereas in 2005 I was earning about 50% more than the average) as a rather objective situation. However, with the 10-year old living in my house it has began to impact literally closer to home.
In his first week back at school he received a letter advising his mother about the steps she could take to prepare him for the 11+ examination. This letter went out to all parents no matter what academic ability they have. Until the 1970s the 11+ exam was universal in the UK. It was the examination which pupils took at 10 to determine which school they went to. There were supposed to be three strands along the lines of the German model: the grammar school for academically capable pupils, the secondary modern school for the ordinary pupil with a vocational focus and the technical school for pupils who showed particular technical ability. Typically for Britain the number of technical schools was tiny and many have become technical colleges these days instead offering post-16 education. This system was introduced in 1947 and while it began to disappear from much of the UK in the 1960s and 1970s it was retained in certain counties such as Kent, Buckinghamshire, Lincolnshire and parts of other counties such as Wiltshire, Warwickshire and Merseyside.
The trouble with the so-called Tripartite (read Bipartite) System is what it denied the 75% of pupils who would be sent to a secondary modern school. They would not have a chance to study a foreign language and the school would be poor in science facilities. The secondary modern pupils would not have the ability to study the curriculum for certain qualifications let alone take the examinations. Thus, there would be no chance to go to study in further education (i.e. for 'A' Levels) let alone higher education. You can see why the creation of the Open University in 1969 setting no such hurdles was so radical in this context. At the age of 11 a person was locked into a path which unless they were incredibly lucky or their parents had the money to take them out of the system and pay for a school place, they could not escape.
There was a further challenge. Across England and Wales 25% of pupils went to grammar school but the level at a local level could vary considerably. A mark in the 11+ plus which would have easily got you into a grammar school in one district, say one with an ageing population, would be insufficient to win you a place in another district with more younger families. Some towns had more grammar schools than others. Grammar schools were often single sex so a twin boy and girl could get exactly the same grade in the 11+ and one would get into grammar school and one would not, usually the girl as the mark needed to get into grammar schools was higher for girls than boys both due to provision and girls' abilities at 11. In a country that was trying to develop an educated workforce and provide equal opportunities you can see why the system was unsatisfactory. If you have, as I have done, spoken to teachers who work in secondary schools in the areas where this system persists, you find how demoralised secondary modern school teachers are knowing their pupils are being shut off from a range of opportunities. Similarly talk to parents shifting across the Kent-Sussex border.
In most places in England and Wales schools steadily turned to comprehensive schools which means that they take pupils without any selection by ability, though they may select on the basis of where they live and increasingly on faith as well. As was reported last month, the Church of England will be able to associate itself with schools that have previously been non-faith, despite the fact that only 5% of the UK population attends any denomination of church regularly. When a school becomes a faith school it can discriminate against pupils and staff on the basis of religion and even which church or other religious institution in the case of non-Christian faiths, they attend. Discrimination on the basis of faith is also a covert way to discriminate on the basis of social class and ability, something I have discussed before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/12/ranking-religious-faith.html The woman in my house sent her son to a faith school and he got in on grounds of proximity to the school rather than her particular faith, to the disadvantage of less capable pupils who were regular attenders at the associated church. An additional unsettling fact about the school is how self-righteous its interaction is with parents and how with a faith is supposed to come a subscription to a kind of lifestyle which was going out of date in the 1950s: mother at home all day, able to bake and sew to provide cakes and historic costumes for school events at regular intervals, able to collect a child from school at any time of the school day.
The Blair governments in the 2000s allowed the creation of more faith schools and of new grammar schools, thus beginning to turn back from the comprehensive model which had been promoted by the Labour Party in previous decades. To a great extent this was because Blair's personal agenda was Christian Democrat rather than Socialist, Labourite or even Liberal. We now have a mish-mash system with a mix of faith schools, selective grammar schools and academies which are centrally funded schools often revived failing schools with a particular curriculum focus such as in art, sports or technology. On top of this are the so-called 'free schools' permitted by the coalition government which can be created by groups of parents or other interested bodies. It might appear that this creates wider opportunity through greater variety. However, it becomes an issue of Venn circles. If you are not of a particular faith (or even if you are but attend a different church), if you child cannot pass a particular examination, if you did not have the time to insinuate yourself into a particular circle of parents, if your child's strengths are not in the area of the specialist schools in your district, then you quickly find that your choices have fallen away.
I will turn to the particular example of the selection facing the 10-year old in my house. Those who live in the town, which is in southern England, may detect it from the statistics, but as always I will hold back from naming it due to wanting to protect my identity. In the town precisely 30% of the secondary schools are girls' schools and 30% are boys' schools. This is an unusually high percentage and I wonder what the history is behind this. In the town 20% of the schools are selective grammar schools; 20% are Christian faith schools of different denominations; 20% are specialist schools focusing on two different subject areas. As you will have guessed, there is some overlap between these different categories but I will not outline how many fall into more than one category for fear of giving the town away too easily. Now, only 20% of the schools are co-educational, comprehensive schools. Thus, if you do not mesh against the particular criteria (a number of which are mutually exclusive, i.e. boy/girl, different denominations, different specialisations) you rapidly come down to selecting between only 20% of the school stock in the town and that is entirely ignoring geographical location.
The boy who lives in my house has already been told that he cannot sit the 11+ as his handwriting is insufficiently good. As it is, the guidance provided by his primary school (which though a faith school is comprehensive) is that unless his mother can afford to buy past papers and engage a personal tutor then his chances are low. We are already familiar with income shutting the boy out from certain opportunities as even our combined household budget does not stretch to the £365 needed for him to attend the residential course for Year 6 pupils and so he is shut out from that. We are not a 'poor' 'family' compared to those on benefits and yet even in our kind of average income we cannot access opportunities that would benefit the boy; it will be worse when he reaches secondary school.
It is ironic that he is already written out of the 11+ as he is in the top set for mathematics in his school and his abilities in computing and science have already been recognised; his vocabulary too is extensive and his reading age is about 12 though he is too lazy to read more. Now, the National Curriculum compels all schools to teach a wider curriculum than was the case with secondary modern schools. Even specialist schools ironically have to teach subjects which seem a long way from its specialism. In addition we do not live in an entirely tripartite system area and whilst 60% of the schools select on certain criteria they do not explicitly discriminate in terms of ability.
The trouble with the rum assortment of schools on offer is the attitude. Single sex schools benefit girls much more than boys. However, in an age where the division between sexes is hardening at an alarming rate and is a tendency which promotes sexist behaviour and violence especially from young men, it seems terrible to put so many boys into an environment without girls. Ironically the teaching will still be a more female friendly approach but without the girls to show how this works. It is tougher for the boy from my house as he works so well with girls let alone being popular with them. I can just see him being transformed into one of these thugs that expects girls to serve him sexually and that fighting is a norm. In a town with a grammar school he will know from the age of 10 that he is 'not good enough' to attain that level. What does that do to his aspirations?
Until the mid-2000s Britain was doing pretty well in encouraging people who were 'late developers' in academic study or need to change track in what they had studied. Funding has been shut down for such education and the number of mature students going to university has already fallen by 15%. Thus, as back in the 1950s once you have failed to get into grammar school, later opportunities will be scarce. A 10-year old is amazingly alert to such divisions and the likelihood is that he will be shut off from pupils who might write more neatly and yet not be half as good in science or computing and be made to feel that he is the 'second best'. He may also be shut off from girls as if they were a different species. What is that going to do to his interaction with the opposite sex when inter-gender relationships are becoming dangerous, not only in terms of personal relationships but in the workplace where they need to function well.
I know I am beginning to sound like an embittered middle class parent whose child failed the 11+. However, this is the perspective of the majority in England and Wales. The British schooling system may have faced difficulties but since 1997 there has been a rush to wreck even the good that was there and to adopt so many different fads and to adopt so many criteria on which children can be categorised that we have been left with a bewildering array of schools without an increase in overall quality and which promote mindsets that say putting people into boxes on gender, religion and ability is fine. You cannot sustain a fair and equal society when so many young people are being exposed both to such segregation and for so many a sense that already at the age of 11 they have failed. Are we surprised at the disengagement with our society and the violence that breeds if a child of well-educated (pseudo-)parents of a reasonable income face such disappointment, how much harder must it be for those without such advantages?
Showing posts with label faith schools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label faith schools. Show all posts
Sunday, 5 February 2012
Tuesday, 2 June 2009
School Uniform in 21st Century Britain
This posting is really only going to seem relevant to parents of school-aged children, but I think it also says something about how British society sees itself and, as I have commented on before, how wedded to the past it is. As I have written before, a woman and her 7-year old son live in my house. The boy goes to a local Church of England school which seems to be caught somewhere between the obsession with being sued that is common in the 2000s and attitudes that were going out of fashion in the 1950s. It assumes all families consist of a mother, father and three children and that the mother does not work and is in a position to bake cakes and provide voluntary assistance throughout the year. As it was, many of the nouveau riche, formerly lower middle class parents who tend to send their children to the school (faith schools always draw on a narrow social as well as religious, and often ethnic, basis) are now having to send the mother to work to deal with the recession, especially as so many of the fathers are self-employed and small/medium enterprises (SMEs) are suffering.
Anyway, a declaration has gone out that now the childen must wear Summer uniform. For the girls this is a silly blue-white checked dress of the kind you would have found in small branches of Tescos in 1973 (when Tescos was a down-market general stores rather than the mega-supermarket chain of today). The boys must wear shorts. Again, in my experience shorts went out in the early 1930s. They are humiliating for the children who have to wear them, and given how active boys are, just increase leg gashes and bruises that look terrible. Light summer trousers would be fine. The boy in our house is already embarrassed as other boys say they can see his underpants through the shorts. I also think the clear gender segregation is bad. What would happen if as in the movie 'Ma Vie En Rose' (1997) a young boy decided he wanted to wear a dress? What if one of the girls (or rather her mother) felt it was best for her daughter to match the current fashion among female university students around here, to wear shorts? People have been struggling to break down gender segregation and then a school seeks it to be very visible on the basis of how things were done fifty years ago.
In the late 1970s there was a move to less gender-specific clothing with sweatshirts or plain shirts and trousers. Where I grew up which had a large Muslim population, this overcame the issue with Muslim girls being compelled to wear skirts contrary to the precepts of their faith. Of course, I suppose a Christian school does not have to face that issue, but what about girls and boys with birth marks or scars on their legs? They have no option but to expose this. In the late 1990s parents, especially the middle class, who turned their back on a liberal approach to education, saw the revival of uniform as somehow connected to discipline. Of course, uniform avoids the problem of school becoming a fashion parade and fights over expensive trainers, but that did not mean having to change uniform back to the pre-1976 model. Ties have come back for girls and boys, fortunately now elasticated, though that was forced again by fear of litigation over health and safety rather than practicality. Many schools have the sensible 'French Foreign Legion' style caps with the neck protector, but the school I am talking about has simply revived the old fashioned school cap and stuck it on the head of boys and girls. The boys look like mini-versions of Brian Johnson of heavy metal band AC/DC, not really appropriate for school in the 2000s, more worringly the girls look too much like St. Trinians pupils.
People need to understand that uniform is fine for school children, but a uniform that is suited to the demands of the 2000s not the 1950s. We need to return to the practical style of the 1980s. I am sure some schools do, though none in the cities I visit regularly. To compel children into outfits that segregate them on basis of gender, take no consideration of religious or medial needs and open them up to ridicule, is a bad way to run things and must increase the challenges, already numerous, that teachers face on a daily basis. The ironic thing is, parents in their 30s now were born in the mid-1970s and went to school in the early 1980s and so never wore the kind of uniform they are happy to see foisted on their children. Just because it was seen as suitable for your parents does not mean you should force it on your children. Realise what good education is about, and it is not based on looking like children from an Enid Blyton story.
Anyway, a declaration has gone out that now the childen must wear Summer uniform. For the girls this is a silly blue-white checked dress of the kind you would have found in small branches of Tescos in 1973 (when Tescos was a down-market general stores rather than the mega-supermarket chain of today). The boys must wear shorts. Again, in my experience shorts went out in the early 1930s. They are humiliating for the children who have to wear them, and given how active boys are, just increase leg gashes and bruises that look terrible. Light summer trousers would be fine. The boy in our house is already embarrassed as other boys say they can see his underpants through the shorts. I also think the clear gender segregation is bad. What would happen if as in the movie 'Ma Vie En Rose' (1997) a young boy decided he wanted to wear a dress? What if one of the girls (or rather her mother) felt it was best for her daughter to match the current fashion among female university students around here, to wear shorts? People have been struggling to break down gender segregation and then a school seeks it to be very visible on the basis of how things were done fifty years ago.
In the late 1970s there was a move to less gender-specific clothing with sweatshirts or plain shirts and trousers. Where I grew up which had a large Muslim population, this overcame the issue with Muslim girls being compelled to wear skirts contrary to the precepts of their faith. Of course, I suppose a Christian school does not have to face that issue, but what about girls and boys with birth marks or scars on their legs? They have no option but to expose this. In the late 1990s parents, especially the middle class, who turned their back on a liberal approach to education, saw the revival of uniform as somehow connected to discipline. Of course, uniform avoids the problem of school becoming a fashion parade and fights over expensive trainers, but that did not mean having to change uniform back to the pre-1976 model. Ties have come back for girls and boys, fortunately now elasticated, though that was forced again by fear of litigation over health and safety rather than practicality. Many schools have the sensible 'French Foreign Legion' style caps with the neck protector, but the school I am talking about has simply revived the old fashioned school cap and stuck it on the head of boys and girls. The boys look like mini-versions of Brian Johnson of heavy metal band AC/DC, not really appropriate for school in the 2000s, more worringly the girls look too much like St. Trinians pupils.
People need to understand that uniform is fine for school children, but a uniform that is suited to the demands of the 2000s not the 1950s. We need to return to the practical style of the 1980s. I am sure some schools do, though none in the cities I visit regularly. To compel children into outfits that segregate them on basis of gender, take no consideration of religious or medial needs and open them up to ridicule, is a bad way to run things and must increase the challenges, already numerous, that teachers face on a daily basis. The ironic thing is, parents in their 30s now were born in the mid-1970s and went to school in the early 1980s and so never wore the kind of uniform they are happy to see foisted on their children. Just because it was seen as suitable for your parents does not mean you should force it on your children. Realise what good education is about, and it is not based on looking like children from an Enid Blyton story.
Wednesday, 10 December 2008
Ranking People's Religious Faith
Britain has a long history of pressuring people to behave in a certain way in terms of religion, from the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 until 1656. Fines were introduced in 1559 for anyone who failed to attend church. Until 1793 Catholics were not allowed to vote in Britain and until 1829 could not become members of parliament; a Catholic still cannot become monarch in Britain. Up until 1689 Nonconformists, i.e. Protestants outside the Church of England, could not worship in their own buildings. In the 1944 Education Act the only compulsory subject in British schools was Religious Education and that did not change until the National Curriculum was introduced in 1988.
Now the main area in which we are seeing the segregation of the population in the UK of the 2000s is in terms of education and this stems from the rapid growth of faith schools since Tony Blair first came to power in 1997. Blair had a personal interest in expanding faith schools and he found support among middle class parents who favour segregation in schooling. In the UK faith schools almost died out in 1904 when they ran out of money and it was only state intervention then that allowed any to survive and from this basis to expand rapidly in the 1990s and 2000s. It is correct that all faiths in the UK have the same rights in this field and that the Church of England (4,646 schools in 2006) and the Catholic Church (2,041) no longer have the ability to create faith alone and that Jewish (37), Muslim (8), Hindu (0) and Sikh (2) schools are appearing. However, there are tensions that the increase of faith schools are provoking. The issue for non-Christian schools has been generally on the curriculum and ensuring that it covers what is now expected to be taught in terms of 'citizenship' in the UK. In terms of the Christian schools the biggest issue is admissions.
It soon became apparent to the Christian churches that with the increase in faith schools they had gained a powerful tool. Middle class parents want schools which have selective admissions and faith schools generally are selective. In theory this is on the basis of faith, but as some religious families with children with special needs have learned, that faith is not always enough. There is also a tendency in the UK for certain classes of people to adhere to certain denominations of church and the Church of England congregation is far more middle class in make-up than say the Baptist congregation. British education since the late 1980s has been increasingly divided, the government website on types of schools lists the following types, just in the state sector: Mainstream state schools, Community schools, Foundation schools, Trust schools, Voluntary-aided schools (which includes some faith schools), Voluntary-controlled schools, Specialist schools, Academies, City Technology Colleges, Faith schools, Grammar schools and Maintained boarding schools. In addition their are privately run schools.
By increasing faith schools you have increased the schools which have selective entrance. All schools with selective entrance achieve higher grades and this is something that all parents want. Thus, we have got into the situation in which parents may emphasise their (or adopt a) religion in order to get their child into a local faith school. This has been stimulated by the neglect of the mainstream state schools which have lost out as funds have flown towards all these other types of schools. If most comprehensive schools were better funded then there would be less pressure on these other schools and all that has followed in its wake.
Given the rise in demand the churches have realised they can pressure parents to behave in a more religious manner. This has led to registers being kept at services to make sure that parents are turning up, the implied threat being that if they fail to do so, their child will be removed from the school. There has been very vocal criticism of parents 'faking' their faith in order to get a child into a school and you see clergymen on the television berating parents who do this. However, this approach shows how debased how much of the Church of England and Catholic Church has become in the UK. Unable to win congregations by their arguments or relevance to the modern world, they are now using selective education as both the carrot and the stick to press people into attending church. In addition it is not just any church, but particular parish churches. This has been going on now for almost twenty years. I witnessed it in the town where my parents live where a particular church which sat next to a mainstream comprehensive school over the years filled the board of governors with its members until the time came when they had a majority to suddenly change the school into a faith school, with the priority not simply given to Church of England members but to the parishoners of the particular church. Anyone not a Christian or not attending that particular church suddenly found their child could no longer attend the school. In my home town there are three Church of England churches within walking distance of each other and yet only one is tied to a school which it is in fact not very close to. This church as yet has not started keeping registers, but if it did, you can imagine the impact on attendance at the other two churches. This is not healthy for the community or the Church of England itself.
I do not usually put much store by what David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, says but I did appreciate it when in January 2008 he said he could entirely appreciate parents wanting their best for their children and so 'faking' their faith if that meant gaining access to a particular school. The thing is, in the light of such behaviour, some churches are going even further. The BBC highlighted this week how they are not simply expecting attendance at church services , but if parents do not arrange the flowers in the church or do a reading or take a Sunday school sessioon they are deemed 'not religious enough' with the penalty of their child being excluded from the school. This is madness. There are not enough jobs in a church to allow all parents to do them anyway. Christianity in the past century has not attempted to measure the level of commitment, generally participation has been sufficient, but clearly church zealots are pushing it further. This leads to terrible intolerance. They will not accept parishoners from other districts so are they any less religious? It is not only 'be an Anglican', but 'be an Anglican who attends St. X Church and who reads every Sunday'.
What about children who have parents who are from different denominations? Under such rules they may have one Anglican and one Catholic parent (just like the Tony and Cherie Blair) and be barred from attending either faith school. In addition, there is an all too easy assumption that the faith and level of faith of the parents will be exactly reflected in the child. In my house the 7-year old is the most strongly Christian person in the house in practice as well as thought.
As the Runnymede Trust report this week highlighted, faith schools and their associated churches are leading the way in breeding intolerance and division in our society. Their policies are getting harsher and they are not addressing the fact that people can even follow their faith but without the exact details being required and so are being shut off from the best school in an area. What does that say about the churches involved? There is no 'suffer little children to come unto me', there is 'suffer little children to come unto me, only if their parents are of the same denomination, come every Sunday to this particular church and are involved in a range of duties'. An elitist system is being created. Like Hitler who said 'I decide who is a Jew' many Anglican and Catholic churches are sifting among even the faithful and deciding who is 'worthy' to be permitted into their schools. This may seem like access into Heaven, but if you consider it it is hardly Christian. This whole issue shows the return of religious intolerance on an amazingly parochial basis unmatched in centuries.
British education is in a ridiculous mess. Comprehensive education has effectively been replaced by selective education which cuts off so many people from achieving all that they can. Selection needs to be challenged. I would ban all faith schools as done in France and say that religion stays in the church/chapel/meeting house/synagogue/mosque/temple and education focuses on bringing out the best in all children with an awareness of how humans should behave. To cajole people into attending church and behaving in a particular way in order to win the prize of a decent (not even an excellent) education for their children is too reminiscent of the churches of the 15th century rather than the 21st century. It causes division within denominations even within single towns and particular districts and that is not healthy for any religion.
Now the main area in which we are seeing the segregation of the population in the UK of the 2000s is in terms of education and this stems from the rapid growth of faith schools since Tony Blair first came to power in 1997. Blair had a personal interest in expanding faith schools and he found support among middle class parents who favour segregation in schooling. In the UK faith schools almost died out in 1904 when they ran out of money and it was only state intervention then that allowed any to survive and from this basis to expand rapidly in the 1990s and 2000s. It is correct that all faiths in the UK have the same rights in this field and that the Church of England (4,646 schools in 2006) and the Catholic Church (2,041) no longer have the ability to create faith alone and that Jewish (37), Muslim (8), Hindu (0) and Sikh (2) schools are appearing. However, there are tensions that the increase of faith schools are provoking. The issue for non-Christian schools has been generally on the curriculum and ensuring that it covers what is now expected to be taught in terms of 'citizenship' in the UK. In terms of the Christian schools the biggest issue is admissions.
It soon became apparent to the Christian churches that with the increase in faith schools they had gained a powerful tool. Middle class parents want schools which have selective admissions and faith schools generally are selective. In theory this is on the basis of faith, but as some religious families with children with special needs have learned, that faith is not always enough. There is also a tendency in the UK for certain classes of people to adhere to certain denominations of church and the Church of England congregation is far more middle class in make-up than say the Baptist congregation. British education since the late 1980s has been increasingly divided, the government website on types of schools lists the following types, just in the state sector: Mainstream state schools, Community schools, Foundation schools, Trust schools, Voluntary-aided schools (which includes some faith schools), Voluntary-controlled schools, Specialist schools, Academies, City Technology Colleges, Faith schools, Grammar schools and Maintained boarding schools. In addition their are privately run schools.
By increasing faith schools you have increased the schools which have selective entrance. All schools with selective entrance achieve higher grades and this is something that all parents want. Thus, we have got into the situation in which parents may emphasise their (or adopt a) religion in order to get their child into a local faith school. This has been stimulated by the neglect of the mainstream state schools which have lost out as funds have flown towards all these other types of schools. If most comprehensive schools were better funded then there would be less pressure on these other schools and all that has followed in its wake.
Given the rise in demand the churches have realised they can pressure parents to behave in a more religious manner. This has led to registers being kept at services to make sure that parents are turning up, the implied threat being that if they fail to do so, their child will be removed from the school. There has been very vocal criticism of parents 'faking' their faith in order to get a child into a school and you see clergymen on the television berating parents who do this. However, this approach shows how debased how much of the Church of England and Catholic Church has become in the UK. Unable to win congregations by their arguments or relevance to the modern world, they are now using selective education as both the carrot and the stick to press people into attending church. In addition it is not just any church, but particular parish churches. This has been going on now for almost twenty years. I witnessed it in the town where my parents live where a particular church which sat next to a mainstream comprehensive school over the years filled the board of governors with its members until the time came when they had a majority to suddenly change the school into a faith school, with the priority not simply given to Church of England members but to the parishoners of the particular church. Anyone not a Christian or not attending that particular church suddenly found their child could no longer attend the school. In my home town there are three Church of England churches within walking distance of each other and yet only one is tied to a school which it is in fact not very close to. This church as yet has not started keeping registers, but if it did, you can imagine the impact on attendance at the other two churches. This is not healthy for the community or the Church of England itself.
I do not usually put much store by what David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, says but I did appreciate it when in January 2008 he said he could entirely appreciate parents wanting their best for their children and so 'faking' their faith if that meant gaining access to a particular school. The thing is, in the light of such behaviour, some churches are going even further. The BBC highlighted this week how they are not simply expecting attendance at church services , but if parents do not arrange the flowers in the church or do a reading or take a Sunday school sessioon they are deemed 'not religious enough' with the penalty of their child being excluded from the school. This is madness. There are not enough jobs in a church to allow all parents to do them anyway. Christianity in the past century has not attempted to measure the level of commitment, generally participation has been sufficient, but clearly church zealots are pushing it further. This leads to terrible intolerance. They will not accept parishoners from other districts so are they any less religious? It is not only 'be an Anglican', but 'be an Anglican who attends St. X Church and who reads every Sunday'.
What about children who have parents who are from different denominations? Under such rules they may have one Anglican and one Catholic parent (just like the Tony and Cherie Blair) and be barred from attending either faith school. In addition, there is an all too easy assumption that the faith and level of faith of the parents will be exactly reflected in the child. In my house the 7-year old is the most strongly Christian person in the house in practice as well as thought.
As the Runnymede Trust report this week highlighted, faith schools and their associated churches are leading the way in breeding intolerance and division in our society. Their policies are getting harsher and they are not addressing the fact that people can even follow their faith but without the exact details being required and so are being shut off from the best school in an area. What does that say about the churches involved? There is no 'suffer little children to come unto me', there is 'suffer little children to come unto me, only if their parents are of the same denomination, come every Sunday to this particular church and are involved in a range of duties'. An elitist system is being created. Like Hitler who said 'I decide who is a Jew' many Anglican and Catholic churches are sifting among even the faithful and deciding who is 'worthy' to be permitted into their schools. This may seem like access into Heaven, but if you consider it it is hardly Christian. This whole issue shows the return of religious intolerance on an amazingly parochial basis unmatched in centuries.
British education is in a ridiculous mess. Comprehensive education has effectively been replaced by selective education which cuts off so many people from achieving all that they can. Selection needs to be challenged. I would ban all faith schools as done in France and say that religion stays in the church/chapel/meeting house/synagogue/mosque/temple and education focuses on bringing out the best in all children with an awareness of how humans should behave. To cajole people into attending church and behaving in a particular way in order to win the prize of a decent (not even an excellent) education for their children is too reminiscent of the churches of the 15th century rather than the 21st century. It causes division within denominations even within single towns and particular districts and that is not healthy for any religion.
Sunday, 6 July 2008
Being Ethnically Reclassified in the UK
Many readers will be familiar with the character in many of the Agatha Christie detective novels called Miss Jane Marple. She is an elderly woman who solves crimes by relating them to parallel incidents that she had experienced in her own small village. Authors soon become familiar with the fact that whatever the setting whether it is Ancient Egypt, contemporary Britain or a colony many light years away then people generally behave the same, they have anger, jealously, envy, pomposity, compassion, love and many other factors. Being human even when we write about alien or fantastical species we do it through the vision of being human and we make these characters as human or as anti-human as we choose, but for us we define them on the spectrum. Sorry, back to the point. Anyway, for me, I tend to analyse things less by incidents I have witnessed in real life, I tend to spend a rather reclusive existence, but parallels in fiction whether written or in movies. I access the global village of fiction which of course is based on numerous incidences that the authors and scriptwriters and to some extent actors and directors have experienced themselves.
It is in this context that I am going to turn to an interesting problem which I have seen unfolding over the past few weeks. As regular readers will know I live in a house with a white woman who was from South Africa and is now naturalised British and her six-year old son who attends a local Church of England school. Now, this is where the problem started. Each year the school sends home a list of all the information they have about the children for parents to update, especially as mobile phone numbers for emergency contact change so often. We have moved house twice since the boy started the school as well. The peculiar thing was in the category marked 'ethnicity' they had put 'East European' which in southern England these days is usually taken to mean Polish. Whilst people have been arriving from many states of Eastern Europe which are now in the EU (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria; Greece has been a member since 1982 and was never a Communist state, so I leave it out of this category) the Poles have been most visible with Polish shops appearing and Polish DVDs in rental shops. Around 10% of the population of Southampton is now Polish and cars with Polish registration plates are a common sight on the roads of South of England. I have no problem with immigrants, by arriving they have proven they have 'get up and go' and clearly there is demand for their labour in the UK. Many people forget that vocational training in Eastern Europe is often of a higher standard than in the UK for people such as builders and nurses.
Anyway, the background of the woman in my house is that she was born to a mother of Afrikaaner descent (originally back in the 18th century Huguenot settlers, i.e. Protestant refugees from France) and a father who was of German descent and his birth certificate was issued during the war so shows he is German back generations, certainly not Polish. I suppose this is the closest to Eastern Europe she has come, but German is not usually seen as East European. This is the terrible thing about the school defining the boy's ethnicity, we have all begun to analyse our antecedents on their basis of racial definition and it has terrible overtones of Nazi racial policy. The boy's father was white British with some Dutch connections.
Why did the school redefine the child from British to East European? For a start East European is not an ethnicity (British is even less so), it includes Slavs as the predominant people, but there are others such as the Magyars of Hungary who come from a different context and many people in those countries are also descendants of German medieval settlers. Ethnically most East Europeans are Caucasians (in Syria there are people called Circassians who are of Caucasian descent but presumably in this system would be labelled 'Arab') but as in the UK people can be a range of ethnicities and can come from a country. You can be black British or black Polish. So East European like British is a regional specification not an ethnic one. If you ask the child himself he defines himself as 'White African' and is very proud even at six of coming from Africa even though he has only spent a total of 2 months there in his life.
To some extent I think the school is conscious that its intake is almost exclusively white. When the boy started the only non-white pupil was a single Korean but now, even though the mix has widened to include mixed-race (predominantly White with Afro-Caribbean), Afro-Caribbean, East and South Asian children they are in a complete minority and make up only 1-2 children per class of 30 pupils. Maybe the school thought they could gain some credit by moving some of the White British into the East European 'ethnicity' and thought no-one would notice: they were very wrong. This is where I begin referring to the media because in fact it has unleashed a level of reaction which is quite stunning. If you have ever seen the movie 'Brazil' (1985). In this film set in a dystopian 'Nineteen Eight-Four' type world an insect falls on a typing machine changing the details of the arrest of a revolutionary Archibald Tuttle to that for a Mr. Buttle and much of the movie is about a civil servant trying to rectify this situation as the authorities close in on the wrong man. You will see why I draw a parallel in the moment.
The mother returned the form, corrected, to 'White British' to the school but the information that she was in fact 'East European' seemed to have leaked out. Many parents volunteer in the school and some of the clerical staff are harridans very much like doctors' receptionists and so a parent may have seen it or a member of staff gossiped about it. Teachers often like to bring out children's multi-culturalism. In my youth for some reason people thought I was Scottish and would ask me to talk about my 'home country' when I never actually went to Scotland until I was 36, so a teacher may have asked the boy to say something about Poland and this was reported back. Given the hostility to Poles which is growing in the South of England, it was probably unsurprising that at the school sports day a father of another child came up to the mother and said 'I cannot say what I want to say to you in a school playground' implying it was going to be very offensive and said 'I do not talk to people like you'. He then shepherded other parents away from the woman and spent the event scowling at her, implying that she was somehow soiling the event by being there. He said his son who is friends with her boy would never be permitted to come to our house or socialise with her son.
Now, for someone who grew up in apartheid South Africa and has witnessed racism of a perverted sophistication on a scale that no-one (especially whites) who has lived all their lives in the UK has ever experienced, you can imagine how offensive it was to treat the woman in this way. She left South Africa to get away from such attitudes and found them thrust back at her. She showed immense courage to stand there and stay for the sake of her son. Now, I know racism is a common disease in the UK, but as someone who is a white man, I have rarely experienced (once in West Germany I was told to 'get back on the ferry') so it has brought it home to me. What is bizarre is that this all stemmed from an error on the part of the school office.
I was reminded of the novel by James McClure (1939-2006) called 'The Steam Pig' (1971). McClure wrote crime novels set in apartheid South Africa and this one is about a woman whose father is ethnically redefined when he attends hospital, away from white to mixed race (in South Africa they had a long list of physical characteristics that they used to define people and would sometimes redefine people when characteristics became apparent) and so refused treatment at the whites hospital. The woman 'goes for white' bleaching her hair had wearing blue contact lenses to make herself appear more white so that she can have access to better housing and jobs than her father was pushed into when redefined. As readers know I am always interested in settings in which crimes or particular motives can occur which would not work elsewhere/when and this is a classic, but is chilling in its exploration of the implications of racial classification.
To some extent we are now entering into their game by worrying about how the mother and child have been ethnicall classified and getting this rectified. They should not behave in that way to any parent or child, and especially given they are a specifically Christian school. What sort of lesson does that teach for the future? I heard a headmaster from a school in Birmingham talking back in the early 1990s and he said that often teachers are challenged about why they cannot do more to stem the rise of racist attitudes and he said that 30 hours a week for nine months per year that children spend in school is insufficient to overturn the brainwashing in racism that they get at home. Schools do not give up in challenging such attitudes, but they are often fighting a losing battle.
No-one has pushed flaming rags through our letterbox or written grafitti across our house, things that so many people from ethnic minorities still experience. To some extent inadvertently the woman and child have become a rallying point for some of the mothers from other ethnic groups now that they have been thrust into that category. It does indicate that close beneath the surface of even a prosperous, overtly Christian sub-set of British society racism is very strong and leads people in almost a mundane way to be offensive and through segregating schoolfriends on racial grounds as this father is doing, give such an appalling message to the next generation which should be growing up with different attitudes if multi-cultural Britain is going to have any chance of surviving let alone thriving.
It is in this context that I am going to turn to an interesting problem which I have seen unfolding over the past few weeks. As regular readers will know I live in a house with a white woman who was from South Africa and is now naturalised British and her six-year old son who attends a local Church of England school. Now, this is where the problem started. Each year the school sends home a list of all the information they have about the children for parents to update, especially as mobile phone numbers for emergency contact change so often. We have moved house twice since the boy started the school as well. The peculiar thing was in the category marked 'ethnicity' they had put 'East European' which in southern England these days is usually taken to mean Polish. Whilst people have been arriving from many states of Eastern Europe which are now in the EU (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria; Greece has been a member since 1982 and was never a Communist state, so I leave it out of this category) the Poles have been most visible with Polish shops appearing and Polish DVDs in rental shops. Around 10% of the population of Southampton is now Polish and cars with Polish registration plates are a common sight on the roads of South of England. I have no problem with immigrants, by arriving they have proven they have 'get up and go' and clearly there is demand for their labour in the UK. Many people forget that vocational training in Eastern Europe is often of a higher standard than in the UK for people such as builders and nurses.
Anyway, the background of the woman in my house is that she was born to a mother of Afrikaaner descent (originally back in the 18th century Huguenot settlers, i.e. Protestant refugees from France) and a father who was of German descent and his birth certificate was issued during the war so shows he is German back generations, certainly not Polish. I suppose this is the closest to Eastern Europe she has come, but German is not usually seen as East European. This is the terrible thing about the school defining the boy's ethnicity, we have all begun to analyse our antecedents on their basis of racial definition and it has terrible overtones of Nazi racial policy. The boy's father was white British with some Dutch connections.
Why did the school redefine the child from British to East European? For a start East European is not an ethnicity (British is even less so), it includes Slavs as the predominant people, but there are others such as the Magyars of Hungary who come from a different context and many people in those countries are also descendants of German medieval settlers. Ethnically most East Europeans are Caucasians (in Syria there are people called Circassians who are of Caucasian descent but presumably in this system would be labelled 'Arab') but as in the UK people can be a range of ethnicities and can come from a country. You can be black British or black Polish. So East European like British is a regional specification not an ethnic one. If you ask the child himself he defines himself as 'White African' and is very proud even at six of coming from Africa even though he has only spent a total of 2 months there in his life.
To some extent I think the school is conscious that its intake is almost exclusively white. When the boy started the only non-white pupil was a single Korean but now, even though the mix has widened to include mixed-race (predominantly White with Afro-Caribbean), Afro-Caribbean, East and South Asian children they are in a complete minority and make up only 1-2 children per class of 30 pupils. Maybe the school thought they could gain some credit by moving some of the White British into the East European 'ethnicity' and thought no-one would notice: they were very wrong. This is where I begin referring to the media because in fact it has unleashed a level of reaction which is quite stunning. If you have ever seen the movie 'Brazil' (1985). In this film set in a dystopian 'Nineteen Eight-Four' type world an insect falls on a typing machine changing the details of the arrest of a revolutionary Archibald Tuttle to that for a Mr. Buttle and much of the movie is about a civil servant trying to rectify this situation as the authorities close in on the wrong man. You will see why I draw a parallel in the moment.
The mother returned the form, corrected, to 'White British' to the school but the information that she was in fact 'East European' seemed to have leaked out. Many parents volunteer in the school and some of the clerical staff are harridans very much like doctors' receptionists and so a parent may have seen it or a member of staff gossiped about it. Teachers often like to bring out children's multi-culturalism. In my youth for some reason people thought I was Scottish and would ask me to talk about my 'home country' when I never actually went to Scotland until I was 36, so a teacher may have asked the boy to say something about Poland and this was reported back. Given the hostility to Poles which is growing in the South of England, it was probably unsurprising that at the school sports day a father of another child came up to the mother and said 'I cannot say what I want to say to you in a school playground' implying it was going to be very offensive and said 'I do not talk to people like you'. He then shepherded other parents away from the woman and spent the event scowling at her, implying that she was somehow soiling the event by being there. He said his son who is friends with her boy would never be permitted to come to our house or socialise with her son.
Now, for someone who grew up in apartheid South Africa and has witnessed racism of a perverted sophistication on a scale that no-one (especially whites) who has lived all their lives in the UK has ever experienced, you can imagine how offensive it was to treat the woman in this way. She left South Africa to get away from such attitudes and found them thrust back at her. She showed immense courage to stand there and stay for the sake of her son. Now, I know racism is a common disease in the UK, but as someone who is a white man, I have rarely experienced (once in West Germany I was told to 'get back on the ferry') so it has brought it home to me. What is bizarre is that this all stemmed from an error on the part of the school office.
I was reminded of the novel by James McClure (1939-2006) called 'The Steam Pig' (1971). McClure wrote crime novels set in apartheid South Africa and this one is about a woman whose father is ethnically redefined when he attends hospital, away from white to mixed race (in South Africa they had a long list of physical characteristics that they used to define people and would sometimes redefine people when characteristics became apparent) and so refused treatment at the whites hospital. The woman 'goes for white' bleaching her hair had wearing blue contact lenses to make herself appear more white so that she can have access to better housing and jobs than her father was pushed into when redefined. As readers know I am always interested in settings in which crimes or particular motives can occur which would not work elsewhere/when and this is a classic, but is chilling in its exploration of the implications of racial classification.
To some extent we are now entering into their game by worrying about how the mother and child have been ethnicall classified and getting this rectified. They should not behave in that way to any parent or child, and especially given they are a specifically Christian school. What sort of lesson does that teach for the future? I heard a headmaster from a school in Birmingham talking back in the early 1990s and he said that often teachers are challenged about why they cannot do more to stem the rise of racist attitudes and he said that 30 hours a week for nine months per year that children spend in school is insufficient to overturn the brainwashing in racism that they get at home. Schools do not give up in challenging such attitudes, but they are often fighting a losing battle.
No-one has pushed flaming rags through our letterbox or written grafitti across our house, things that so many people from ethnic minorities still experience. To some extent inadvertently the woman and child have become a rallying point for some of the mothers from other ethnic groups now that they have been thrust into that category. It does indicate that close beneath the surface of even a prosperous, overtly Christian sub-set of British society racism is very strong and leads people in almost a mundane way to be offensive and through segregating schoolfriends on racial grounds as this father is doing, give such an appalling message to the next generation which should be growing up with different attitudes if multi-cultural Britain is going to have any chance of surviving let alone thriving.
Saturday, 19 January 2008
The Normality of Violence in UK Schools
One thing about having a housemate who has a 6-year old child is that you get exposed to some of the goings-on in schools today, away from the distortions of the media. Back in the early 2000s I used to volunteer to read in schools to show children that men actually read (seven of us men used to go from our work once per week as all the staff and governors at the school next to the works were female and schoolboys, many of whom had no fathers at home, saw reading just as something that girls and women did), so was aware at least of the happenings in one school, but nowadays I am dependent for any information on UK education for the various media and other sources such as the child in the house. This latter source is revealing quite startling developments in UK education.
As I have said before, I live in a prosperous suburb where people are obssessed by consumption of cars, electrical goods, houses, etc. I have lived in very much poorer areas, notably in East London and Coventry. The crime rate is not very high, even burglaries seem lower than you would expect maybe because it abuts a very wealthy area with presumably much better pickings. I am giving this context to show that it is not a part of the UK where muggings are daily occurrences and there are drive-by shootings on the weekend. A couple of times a year a young person gets stabbed and once per year a middle-aged person gets kicked to death, but that seems typical of most medium-sized towns I pass through as I drive around the UK and pick up local news. What startled me was revelations about how normalised violence in schools seems to have become even in a prosperous area such as my neighbourhood. The boy in question last month was involved in a gang of seven boys who surrounded a girl in a classroom and proceeded to kick her. The cause seems to have been one of the boys, a very charismatic ringleader it seems, being embarrassed because his parents were friendly with the girl's parents and she was often at his house, something a 6-year old regards as uncool. (The whole incident alarmingly resembled a gang rape). This month, my housemate's son decided for seemingly no reason to start biting another boy he was arguing with about switching off a computer. He sunk his teeth in so deep that marks were still visible hours later.
In the UK the age of criminal responsibility is 10 years old. Which means that if this boy keeps up such behaviour for another four summers he will soon be off to youth court on charges of assault or ABH (Acutual Bodily Harm) and presumably some kind of detention. Now these incidents happened in a school, in fact a Christian faith school and you do ask what were the teachers doing in terms of monitoring what was happening. The school seems to be so fearful of being sued by one parent or another that it appears to be unwilling to admit any responsibility for anything and accuses parents who try to find out what has happened of improper interference. Surely the school has some responsibility for what happens on its grounds? Can someone with legal knowledge tell me if 'loco parentis' has been removed from teachers? This washing of their hands of such incidents (and I assume there are many more going on given this is just one boy from one class, though he may be exceptional, from the previous incident there seem to be at least six others who behave the same). Primary schools usually have their 'golden rules' emblazoned everywhere around the school, but from what I gather this school does not under some assumption that Christian children do not need such explicit rules about not bullying. Even adult Christians need the word of the Bible interpreted for them often, let alone 6-year olds.
Putting aside the school and its unwillingness to face responsibility, what about the behaviour of the child. Surely someone should be communicating that such violent behaviour is not appropriate anywhere let alone in the school. The child had no explanation for why he did it, so it seems that he regards biting deeply as part of the normal arsenal of things he can use when another child annoys him. I know in London bites by humans on people exceeded bites by dogs on people back in the 1990s, so maybe many people consider it somehow 'normal'. Even if in the school they choose not to refer to normal behaviour in society, or the risks in coming years of police action, as a faith school do they not say something about God watching and noting such behaviour?
What is alarming for UK society as a whole is, if there seems to be no way to stop violence which goes beyond horse play or pushing and pinching, among children in their second year at school (and when did it change to the fact that UK children now start school a year earlier than we did, i.e. at 4 rather than 5? - clearly this is related to the Blair/Brown governments' obsession with targets for pre-school and school-aged children, the teachers have to get them in early to get through it all), then what hope is for when they are teenagers and begin to see carrying a knife as normal. This is clearly where the murders of Stephen Lawrence and Damilola Taylor (who was only 10 when he was murdered by other boys) stem from. This is clearly going to be a problem facing the whole UK, wealthy suburbs are not going to exempt. Even religious schools though they are much lauded by the government seem impotent and parents seem to be unable to communicate a sense of how severe such behaviour is. It is alarming at how normal events which should be seen as frightening and unacceptable seem to have become even in a school that seems well-funded and without other major problems.
As I have said before, I live in a prosperous suburb where people are obssessed by consumption of cars, electrical goods, houses, etc. I have lived in very much poorer areas, notably in East London and Coventry. The crime rate is not very high, even burglaries seem lower than you would expect maybe because it abuts a very wealthy area with presumably much better pickings. I am giving this context to show that it is not a part of the UK where muggings are daily occurrences and there are drive-by shootings on the weekend. A couple of times a year a young person gets stabbed and once per year a middle-aged person gets kicked to death, but that seems typical of most medium-sized towns I pass through as I drive around the UK and pick up local news. What startled me was revelations about how normalised violence in schools seems to have become even in a prosperous area such as my neighbourhood. The boy in question last month was involved in a gang of seven boys who surrounded a girl in a classroom and proceeded to kick her. The cause seems to have been one of the boys, a very charismatic ringleader it seems, being embarrassed because his parents were friendly with the girl's parents and she was often at his house, something a 6-year old regards as uncool. (The whole incident alarmingly resembled a gang rape). This month, my housemate's son decided for seemingly no reason to start biting another boy he was arguing with about switching off a computer. He sunk his teeth in so deep that marks were still visible hours later.
In the UK the age of criminal responsibility is 10 years old. Which means that if this boy keeps up such behaviour for another four summers he will soon be off to youth court on charges of assault or ABH (Acutual Bodily Harm) and presumably some kind of detention. Now these incidents happened in a school, in fact a Christian faith school and you do ask what were the teachers doing in terms of monitoring what was happening. The school seems to be so fearful of being sued by one parent or another that it appears to be unwilling to admit any responsibility for anything and accuses parents who try to find out what has happened of improper interference. Surely the school has some responsibility for what happens on its grounds? Can someone with legal knowledge tell me if 'loco parentis' has been removed from teachers? This washing of their hands of such incidents (and I assume there are many more going on given this is just one boy from one class, though he may be exceptional, from the previous incident there seem to be at least six others who behave the same). Primary schools usually have their 'golden rules' emblazoned everywhere around the school, but from what I gather this school does not under some assumption that Christian children do not need such explicit rules about not bullying. Even adult Christians need the word of the Bible interpreted for them often, let alone 6-year olds.
Putting aside the school and its unwillingness to face responsibility, what about the behaviour of the child. Surely someone should be communicating that such violent behaviour is not appropriate anywhere let alone in the school. The child had no explanation for why he did it, so it seems that he regards biting deeply as part of the normal arsenal of things he can use when another child annoys him. I know in London bites by humans on people exceeded bites by dogs on people back in the 1990s, so maybe many people consider it somehow 'normal'. Even if in the school they choose not to refer to normal behaviour in society, or the risks in coming years of police action, as a faith school do they not say something about God watching and noting such behaviour?
What is alarming for UK society as a whole is, if there seems to be no way to stop violence which goes beyond horse play or pushing and pinching, among children in their second year at school (and when did it change to the fact that UK children now start school a year earlier than we did, i.e. at 4 rather than 5? - clearly this is related to the Blair/Brown governments' obsession with targets for pre-school and school-aged children, the teachers have to get them in early to get through it all), then what hope is for when they are teenagers and begin to see carrying a knife as normal. This is clearly where the murders of Stephen Lawrence and Damilola Taylor (who was only 10 when he was murdered by other boys) stem from. This is clearly going to be a problem facing the whole UK, wealthy suburbs are not going to exempt. Even religious schools though they are much lauded by the government seem impotent and parents seem to be unable to communicate a sense of how severe such behaviour is. It is alarming at how normal events which should be seen as frightening and unacceptable seem to have become even in a school that seems well-funded and without other major problems.
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