I almost certainly would have been expelled from the Michaela Community School within a week. Like most of my so-called “boomer” generation, attending school I had my suspicions about “the beaks” – as teachers were called in the Beano comic – I excelled at “projects” and flunked tests, chattered incessantly on the back seats and was more likely to have my eyes on the appeals or fascinations of other wayward pupils than on the domineering pedagogue at the front of the class.
All the same, who can deny aspects of the philosophy of the Michaela school’s headmistress, Katharine Birbalsingh, nor the success of its application in practice? Children indeed require structures, rituals and restrictions; and where those are absent at home, there is a good case for their stronger reinforcement at school. Such reinforcement definitely does breed security and success.
Equally, schools should be developing character and a culture of respect and harmony – else a little learning is more than a dangerous thing. We can generously salute Birbalsingh for wishing to re-combine formation with instruction.
Yet despite the success and popularity of her famous school, it has now run into perhaps serious trouble that will not readily be halted. The parents or agitator supporters of a group of dissident Muslim children have appealed to the High Court over Birbalsingh’s non-allowance of a prayer-room, and in particular her more or less discouragement of prayer during the school day.
Again, one can be considerably in sympathetic agreement with her. The school is holding out against bullying by stricter Muslim children of their less strict Muslim schoolmates – notably, the less strict girls. It is admirable that it does not want to dilute its encouragement of inter-cultural mixing, which one accepts in its special circumstances must be more deliberately engineered than elsewhere.
And yet, to a degree, the new and bitter dispute gives the lie to the seamlessness of the Birbalsingh philosophy. Is its creed actually an over-correction to perhaps exaggerated social circumstances? In particular, is it not in reality but an extreme discipline-and-punish version of a recognisably late modern liberalism?
One can claim this in two respects. First, just like bourgeois modern parenting, it seems to allow little space for the natural operation of that childhood culture that goes from child generation to child generation, bypassing adulthood – as celebrated by Peter and Iona Opie, authors of The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, the once extremely famous and classic anthropological work on this topic.
It is only half true that children must be less free than adults in order to be responsibly free later. It is equally true that children have traditionally enjoyed more Arcadian freedom than adults (running wild in the woods and fields) in order that they may later be freely responsible.
In this context it is not genuinely “conservative” to over-protect children from all forms of pressure that can amount to bullying: learning to deal with that prepares them for the more anarchic and less ordered aspect of the adult world. By squeezing out this dimension it could be that Michaela has fomented more rumbling discontent than has been apparent and that this is now seeing the light of day.
Second, and still more seriously, there is an ambivalence at the core of Birbalsingh’s project. She encourages a “vowing to thee my country” while suppressing the truth that these espousals were made in the name of the Christian God.
She rightly wants a “thicker” account of Britishness to which people of colour belong as much as white people, but evades the point that this thickness has to include a specific religious legacy, and cannot seriously (or indeed legally?) mean assemblies without prayers or genuinely religious hymns.
The risk then, as with France, is that a strictly secular culture also tends to nurture a dangerous nationalism, whereas older religiously imbued patriotism was inherently connected to a more universal civilisation. Even if this danger is averted, then secular pedagogy alternatively lapses back into the formal liberal culture of mere rights and the outright privatisation of religion – against religion’s natural public character.
And the problem with that is that it requires children and parents to “sacrifice” the sacred itself to a civil religion – surely in defiance of a deeper and older liberalism of mutual tolerance and a certain limited but shared common culture. Thus at Michaela, Christian children find themselves having to attend revision sessions at school on Sunday and Hindu children have to accept what for them are dietary violations at lunch.
This sacrifice is unacceptable, and it is not credible for Birbalsingh to say that she cannot allow internal prayer spaces without destroying the entire ethos of her school. Indeed, if it involves some modification of this ethos then that might coincide with a little more allowance of child-to-child space as advocated above.
Instead of a pure and alien laicité, or a mere multiculturalism based on group-rights, religiously or loosely humanist-based schools are indeed able to allow things like Islamic prayer because they can see serious analogies between their own worldview and that of an ancient, very serious and very fruitful faith, while not themselves as an institution sharing its entire outlook.
This mode of cultural pluralism is important not just for ethos but for the process of education itself. Given the dominance of religion in forming public values in the past, it has to remain an open and debated question as to whether a very novel and very recent culture founded in secular agnosticism is really capable of doing that. Many would argue that its track record since 1789 is actually not very good.
What is more, a marginalising of religion could have an even more detrimental effect upon Christianity than on Islam, because its less legal, relatively looser and yet more collective modes of liturgical and social practice arguably depend for their flourishing more upon loose boundaries between the sacred and the secular than does an adapted and modern “liberal” mode of Muslim practice.
Once again, the likely upshot of the strict removal of religion from education would be the promotion of a secular and incipiently atavistic mode of secular nationalism: a dubious Britishness without traditional British mystique.
Equally, at a theoretical level, the question of ultimate reality, or of “God”, and of the possible disclosure of this ultimacy through myth, historical event and individual inspiration, needs also to remain institutionally open. For it is clear that arguments about all these things are perennial and also that the sceptical attitude with respect to them is of relatively recent and local provenance.
It is far too early in the historical day for this sort of scepticism and subversion of religious inquiry and practise to constitute a legitimate public consensus and too soon to say that it ever will. Therefore, any rigorous institutional commitment to a purely secular bracketing of religious and openly metaphysical questions amounts to a form of gross social tyranny.
It will also tend to remove from public influence the huge ethical, artistic and scientific creativity of the religious inheritance, which even agnostic philosophers, like Jūrgen Habermas, fully concede. In organisational terms, this implies that a diversity of religious educational foundations is a good thing and that they naturally tend to sustain the kind of tolerance “by analogy” that I have described.
When it comes to secular foundations, they should indeed encourage inter-cultural mingling, but they must not confuse religion with race, nor demand a sacrifice of the perceived ultimate to merely pedagogic or ersatz solidarity. For that begs the question of substantive truth whose erotic pursuit – as in the Platonic sense that is closely linked to knowledge as wisdom – alone transcends liberal and utilitarian functionalism.
On its own, that type of functionalism is all too likely to take a “Maoist” course, one which regards glittering success in exams, already debased by new rote learning, as an unquestionable sign of success.
Photo: Michaela Community School in the Brent area of London, England, 23 January 2024. The school caters to students from a variety of families, including children from lower income and deprived backgrounds. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.)
John Millbank is a theologian, philosopher, poet and political theorist.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.