Education and Society: Welby rattles National Secularist Society.

On 9^th December 2017 the National Secularist Society (“NSS”) tweeted  “In attacking secular schools over their ‘lack of values’ yesterday, it appears the Archbishop of Canterbury was channelling Hitler!”.

This suggests: (a) that the NSS has no regard for historic accuracy and (b) that the Archbishop’s speech to the House of Lords has touched a raw nerve. Here is the heart of it:-

“A major obstacle, though, to our education system is a lack of clear internal and commonly held values. We live in a country where an overarching story which is the framework for explaining life has more or less disappeared. We have a world of unguided and competing narratives, where the only common factor is the inviolability of personal choice. This means that, for schools that are not of a religious character, confidence in any personal sense of ultimate values has diminished. Utilitarianism rules, and skills move from being talents held for the common good, which we are entrusted with as benefits for all, to being personal possessions for our own advantage. …”

This succinctly captures what has happened, not just in education, but to our society as a whole. The Christian religion is being shepherded into a more hidden space, behind closed doors and restricted to being a matter of private belief. The public sphere is being left to be occupied by unconstrained utilitarianism where ‘the inviolability of personal choice’ has become a ‘trump card’. The results are ugly and are all around us. It is a brave person who calls it as it is—Welby is brave.

Welby gives a brief summary of history to demonstrate that a universal system of education, free for all, was pioneered by Christians through the “National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Establish Church in England and Wales”. Welby then offers an alternative to the rule of utilitarianism:-

“At its most basic, for the past two centuries the Church of England has looked to promote an education that allows children, young people and adults to live out Jesus’s promise of life in all its fullness. That means enabling every person not only to grow in wisdom and to learn skills but to develop character and the spiritual, intellectual and emotional resources needed to live a good life, as an individual but also in a community….

The aim of the founders of the National Society was to be universalist, unapologetically Christian in the nature of their vocation and service and committed to the relief of disadvantage and deprivation wherever it was found. Ours must be the same. Two hundred years on, the role of the Church of England in education can be to encourage and support excellence and to provide a values-based education for all, with a laser-like focus on the poorest and most deprived. That means a renewed vision that focuses as much on deprivation of spirit and poverty of aspiration as did our forebears on material poverty and inequality.

What follows from that is a clear move towards schools that not only deliver academic excellence but have the boldness and vision to do so outside the boundaries of a selective system. The Church of England’s educational offer to our nation is church schools that are, in its own words, “deeply Christian”, nurturing the whole child—spiritually, emotionally, mentally as well as academically—yet welcoming the whole community. I pay tribute to the immense hard work of heads, teachers, leadership teams, governors and parents associations who make so many church and other schools the successes that they are. With the strong Christian commitment of heads and leadership teams, the ethos and values of Church of England schools, which make them so appealing to families of all faiths and none, will be guarded and will continue.”

That the Archbishop of Canterbury should prefer Christian values to utilitarianism is hardly surprising: so why was this speech sufficient to make the NSS howl? Could it be that secularists have become so used to the unchallenged dominance of their own voice that it has come as a shock to hear a voice advocating ‘unapologetically Christian’ values as a public good?

It is a long time since any mainstream politician or parliamentarian publicly successfully challenged the supremacy of utilitarianism by pointing to Jesus Christ. No wonder that the NSS do not like it. It is not often that we are reminded of the Christian heritage that formed the foundation of so many public services. I doubt the NSS enjoyed that much either.   Nor will they have relished the insights brought by the former Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks’ speech:- 

“. … At the dawn of our people’s history, Moses assembled the Israelites on the brink of the Exodus. He did not talk about the long walk to freedom; he did not speak about the land flowing with milk and honey; instead, repeatedly, he turned to the far horizon of the future and spoke about the duty of parents to educate their children. He did it again at the end of his life, in those famous words: “You shall teach these things repeatedly to your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk on the way, when you lie down and when you rise up”. Why is there this obsession with education that has stayed with us from that day to this? It is because, to defend a country, you need an army, but to defend a civilisation, you need schools. You need education as the conversation between the generations.

Whatever the society, the culture or the faith, we need to teach our children, and they theirs, what we aspire to and the ideals we were bequeathed by those who came before us. We need to teach them the story of which we and they are a part, and we need to trust them to go further than we did when they come to write their own chapter.

Weighed and found wanting

We make a grave mistake if we think of education only in terms of knowledge and skills—what the American writer David Brooks calls the “résumé virtues” as opposed to the “eulogy virtues”. This is not woolly idealism; it is hard-headed pragmatism. Never has the world changed so fast, and it is getting faster every year. We have no idea what patterns of employment will look like in two, let alone 20, years from now, what skills will be valued, and what will be done instead by artificially intelligent, preternaturally polite robots.

We need to give our children an internalised moral satellite navigation system so that they can find their way across the undiscovered country called the future. We need to give them the strongest possible sense of collective responsibility for the common good, because we do not know who will be the winners and losers in the lottery of the global economy, and we need to ensure that its blessings are shared. There is too much “I” and too little “we” in our culture, and we need to teach our children to care for others, especially for those who are not like us.

… The world that our children will inherit tomorrow is born in the schools we build today.”

Welby is right when he points out that we live in a country of competing narratives. I am glad our country allow narratives to compete. I am also glad that people of no religion and people of all religions are equally welcome and equally free to express their views.  Little by little and bit by bit it, however, the voice of the secularist has been drowning out the voice of the person of faith. The voice of the Christian has been driven from the public space – an unintended consequence of a well-meant quest for tolerance and equality. The law is busy getting itself into a muddle as it seeks to use the concepts of equality and non-discrimination to mould a tolerant society. It won’t work because these concepts are an insufficient basis for building community. Anti-discrimination legislation may restrain behaviour that would otherwise destroy society but it will not inspire behaviour that builds up society and bridges gaps between communities.

It is especially good to hear a clear Christian voice from Parliament because we are becoming a society which allows people to hold private religious views but denies people the freedom to express their religious beliefs in the way they live. (Consider for example the Ashers Baking Company case and the closing of Catholic adoption agencies for the sole reason that they refused to place children with same sex couples). There is little point in having bishops in the House of Lords unless they are willing to tell us what difference following Christ makes to the matter under debate.

Unconstrained utilitarianism (promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number^[1]) is a seductive philosophy. It sounds so reasonable. It commends itself to our times because it appears to provide a way of living that is not divisive: it can be applied without reference to any particular religion. Yet experience shows that unconstrained utilitarianism provides only a very shaky foundation for society. Consider these examples:-

1. Utilitarianism turns it back upon the vulnerable other. When faced with helpless refugees the utilitarian test has been re-defined so as to permit their exclusion. It now promotes ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number of us’. ‘Us’ typically being defined by reference to the citizens of a National State. By contrast the biblical faiths commands us to love our neighbour as ourselves (irrespective of colour, country of origin etc).

2. Utilitarianism won’t answer the “If I don’t do it someone else will” dilemma. When tempted to act dishonestly or otherwise against one’s better judgement, utilitarianism provides no restraint. The argument that ‘it won’t make any difference because someone else will do it anyway’ has no effective utilitarian counter. By contrast the bible teaches that God is all-knowing and that we will be answerable for our actions upon a day of judgment.  We live to serve Him and our entire lives are played out to an audience of One.  The story of Job demonstrates this and Jesus teaches this by His example as well as by His words

3. Utilitarianism can disguise self-interest as if it were a public good. Is it coincidence that we have an ever widening inequality and ever more grotesque excessive pay? This week it was reported that the top three executives at Persimmon are to receive more than £200m between them and up to £800m is to be received by the companies’ top 150 managers. Excessive pay of this order is not in the interests of society as a whole. The huge disparity between the national average remuneration and the pay of the top 1% is divisive and a de-motivator. Unrestrained utilitarianism does not seem capable of restraining shameless greed.

So a big THANK YOU to Justin Welby for reminding us of the unique contribution made by Christians to the education system and for pointing us to the life-giving quality of the teaching of Jesus. A small ‘thank you’ goes to the NSS for their gratuitously offensive tweet, without which Welby’s message would not have reached as many people as it has.

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1. I acknowledge that this is an inadequate and crude summary of utilitarianism. ↑