Edyukayshun: How not to be topp

Here’s how John Abbott of the 21st Century Learning Initiative sees the story of English Education —
An uncertain and fast-changing world calls for new heights of creativity, lateral thinking, hard work and ability to reinvent ourselves.
Fortunately, adolescents are bursting with these things — programmed by evolution itself to want to make their mark, explore, acquire fresh insight and work hard in common causes.

Unfortunately, Abbot says, the English have spent the past twenty years turning their adolescents into superior battery chickens. Every school is now a crammer’s. Personally I can say that a fifteen year old complained to me recently about his geography teacher. What was wrong with her? I asked.The reply, quick as a flash, “she wastes our time by trying to teach us things that won't come up in the exam.” This is a fifteen year old, with a growing brain and a world before him, transformed by what we call education into a checkbox automaton. Abbott points out that our adolescents check the boxes they have been trained to check, but God, are they bored! He sees this as a disgusting betrayal of our young and, indeed, our own future. Jesus valued the child above all. The system treats ours as mascots and commodities.

Tony Blair sailed into Downing Street with priorities of “Education, Education, Education.” What have we to show for it? John Abbott’s Over-schooled but Undereducated is a scathing indictment of contemporary English educational dogma — not students and teachers, or even schools, who often work heroically to buck the system, but the centralized, top-down, target driven farrago of lost opportunity upon which billions of pounds has been showered since 1997.

In 2007 UNICEF published Report Card 7, examining the health and wellbeing of children in leading Industrialized nations. It studied 40 indicators and the UK result, in the fifth richest country in the world, was stunningly poor. British children came bottom for family relationships, sexual and substance abuse, happiness and mental health. They came top for bullying, depression and suicide. They scored high for ignorance, too, in comparison with their peers abroad. After 4 years of the Every Child Matters initiative, reading attainment slumped from seventh to seventeenth place, mathematics from twelfth to twenty-fourth.

Abbott examines the whole sorry tale since John Milton wrote:

I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man [this was 1644!] to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously, all the offices both public and private, of peace and war.

Judged by this standard Abbott tells the story of a skilful, ingenious and progressive people, with points of real excellence, but one tragic flaw — an obsession with class. Attempts to provide the kind of through schooling to age 16 that other European nations developed in the 1870’s came to grief in England because of a desire by the governing classes to ensure that the lower orders would be trained to know, above all, their place. Thus the great divide between grammar schools and the rest since 1879, reinforced in 1902.

The 1944 Education Act added to this error the now entirely discredited scientism of Cyril Burt who suggested intelligence was somehow objective and fixed by the age of 11. Everything we now know of brain science indicates that this notion is pernicious rubbish. Selective education parked the majority of English children in schools with pockets of genuine idealism, but a general culture based on containment rather than growth, where they were bored and switched off as often as inspired and equipped.

This was not entirely disastrous, especially for males, as long as they went on to appreticeships, where higher socialisation and education for life could still happen. The abandonment since the seventies of apprenticeships has been accompanied by bureaucratization, centralization, and the fatuous notion of performability — that you can somehow leverage human flourishing by standard targets, pulling the cabbages up towards the stars on elastic, rather than growing them organically by humanity, passion and compassion.

Many primary schools strive nobly, in spite of, incredible to report, lower per capita expenditure than secondaries, teaching the child not the subject. They also have to backfill a kindergarten experience that is impoverished by Northern European standards, against an increasngly ravenous desire by politicians since the eighties to dig up the cabbages every week to check that they are still growing. This activity, of course, inhibits their growth.

Add to these operational follies vacuous liberal utilitarianism which reduces the human being to an isolated production / consumption unit, and the assault of successive British governments since the seventies on the family and institutions of value, and it’s hardly surprising the whole system is lost at sea.

Abbott writes a fluent philippic. His longer term perspective is vital for those who act as though
“English education began in Nineteen Eighty-eight, with the innovation of Baker days and Section 28.” It didn’t, and the long-term results of the muddled and sometimes conflicting heritage of the past two hundred years in our schools are compounded by the larger forces of social disintegration in our own day, to indicate a need for real re-thinking all round. I’m not sure about all of Dr Abbott’s remedies, but it feels as though he has diagnosed a big disease with painful and unerring accuracy.

God Not Englishman: Official

Cole Moreton’s Is God still an Englishman? How we lost our Faith is a brilliant, compelling journalistic romp through the past thirty years of goings-on in the Church of England by a disillusioned Charismatic Evangelical. It’s the low-church version, so he doesn’t really do Gary Bennett or Brian Brindley, but his vignettes of various Evangelical attempts to call down fire from heaven and defibrillate the old girl are painfully acute. His marvellous eye for detail and crisp, open style make this a real page-turner, although it is stitched together from various pieces penned nearer the time.

It sounds a loud death knell for the C of E as the all-pervasive National Trust for Morals presided over by Almighty Gawd himself. Cosmo Gordon Lang invented this role for it in the 1920’s. It reached its apogee under the Headmasterly eye of Geoffrey Fisher, and suffered its inevtable Oz-like deflation in the days of Robert Runcie. Attempts by George Carey to transmute this vision of Church into a new model C of E plc are seen as a dying flick of the tail. Cole Morton sincerely bought this Kool-Aid at a time he was very impressionable, swilled it, relished it, gargled it for the best part of twenty years, and is now, with relief I would think, spitting it out.

On the way he provides a fascinating and at times painfully acute critique of the various crankdoms and nostrums that were going to save the C of E through the eighties and nineties. None of them, surprise surprise, turn out to have been all they were cracked up to be. All the various Evangelical Body-building schemes seem to have built some muscles, but in funny places. This book should, therefore, be compulsory reading for all Ecclesiastical Don Quixotes.

What is less secure is in the book’s grasp of the longer sweep of history. It takes the Cosmo Lang/ Fisher fantasy as sober absolute truth, rather as Fisher and Lang did, then projects it back in a monolithic way that, if true, would, for example, have made the Civil War impossible. But the book isn’t, and doesn’t pretend to be historical. It’s a most excellent topical romp through the stories that made the Church trade press, seasoned by hindsight.

And when, in W. H. Auden’s poem, the lovers they were gone, the deep river ran on. It is this deep river that the book attempts to plumb for its view of where all this leaves the English. It’s very hard to put flesh and bood on that kind of Englishness without sounding like a folkloric fetishist, but the book does land, in the end, on Peter Owen-Jones, a Sussex Non-Stipendiary Vicar, who relates in sincere, compassionate, subtle and creative way to the community he serves in what can only be described as the very best traditions of the Church of England.

Whilst young Cole was getting slain in the Spirit and lancing himself till the metaphorical blood ran, there were thousands of vicars all over England, of all Ecclesiastical stripes, doing an Owen-Jones type Job. Thank God, there still are. I was burying the dead of Reading myself, and learnt from the thousands in whose front rooms I sat a mass of information they don’t teach you at college. Many of the people I served, Churchgoing or not, were far wiser, more loving, courageous human beings than I’ll ever be, and their general spiritual instinct to prioritise the Good Samaritan over Boanergic indoor Churchy games, was, in the main, sounder than any of us knew at the time.

This book chronicles someone struggling his way, using Church, through Fowler’s stages of faith development from stage 2 to early stage 4 (Mythic-Literal to Synthetic-Convetional to early Individuative-reflective). Therefore there’s much good to come. Ahead lie the increasingly sunlit uplands of stage 5 — that’s where the crock of gold, if there is one, lies. It probably always did.

What kind of Unity? and of Church?

Rowan Williams’ lecture in Rome marks an interesting reframing of ecumenical futures. There is, of course, the conventional RC model. The Church achieves the Unity for which Jesus prayed when every Christian in the world submits to it as a Divinely sanctioned Imperium. Or try the Protestant version. Structural and organisational convergence will somehow produce a complex multiplanar hybrid. Everyone trades in their old but coherent structural and accountability models to the shining new one. Unity remains a future goal, and we all have to make it happen.

Those two notions have their finer points. The retro-RC one has the virtue of coherence and vertical accountabioity lines, allbeit a coherence that many of its own followers ignore. It does actually exist. The Liberal Protestant one respects the value of every strand and models mutuality, consent and fellowship but, here comes the twist, it doesn’t exist. Furthermore, like its Roman colleague, it has a tendency to homogenise everything into what it wants them to be, rather than taking the trouble to understand the particularities which make up any Church. Surely these amount to more than simply a ghastly mistake on God’s part.

What the last thirty years has revealed, however, is that a simple binary unity based on Imperium or Liberal democracy raise questions as well as answering them. The great ecclesiologists of Vatican II have established a great deal of common ground theologically, but considerable divergence organisationally and politically. At which point, enter Cardinal Kasper with a model I think is fundamental to what we are trying to do in England today. In a vitally important address delivered in St Albans in 2002, Cardinal Kasper suggested we accept the old Structural/bureaucratic ecumenical quest had gone as far as it could in its own terms, and it was time for fresh thinking. He suggested what he called Receptive Ecumenism. This means that everyone lays gently on one side the dream of Homogenised unity, and concentrates on seeing how they can be a gift to the whole company of Christ’s faithful people. Equally tellingly, we try to develop attitudes and practice in receiving the others as gift not threat. Do that for a bit, and see where it gets us. So out go big merger schemes based on fudge, and quests for imperial hegemony. In come processes of Appreciative Inquiry and clarity.

How is Rowan sharpening up these questions? He’s asking what the great degree of theological convergence revealed by the work of the past thirty years amounts to. He’s diagnosing two principles inherent in the life of the baptized — a Conciliar horizontal plane, and an ordained vertical line of accountability. He’s asking how these integrate in the actual lives Churches and Christians live, as well as the notional sructures within which they find themselves. Catholic is both a macro-concept, but also an inherent dimension of local, micro Christian life. Playing one off against the other is foolish, wherever you’re coming from.

Catholic Unity isn’t something humans create by obiterating others. God created it on Good Friday, and it’s inherent in the Unity of Christ. Is Christ divided? When Jesus prayed for Unity, did God say “no?” or did God decide that the effectiveness of the whole enterprise depends on ecclesiastical politics come right? Or did he say yes, create a spiritual unity by the death and resurrection of Jesus, clothe Jesus’ followers in it by baptism, and ask them to make sense of Unity, not as a goal on the distant horizon to be achieved by diplomacy or conquest, but a resource to be realised in an emergent way by faithfulness in a multiplanar reality we call “communion.” The submission required is necessary but mutual, not one-way. The obedience is primarily to God in Scripture, mediated through the whole life of all the baptised...

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All I have been attempting to say here is that the ecumenical glass is genuinely half-full – and then to ask about the character of the unfinished business between us. For many of us who are not Roman Catholics, the question we want to put, in a grateful and fraternal spirit, is whether this unfinished business is as fundamentally church-dividing as our Roman Catholic friends generally assume and maintain. And if it isn’t, can we all allow ourselves to be challenged to address the outstanding issues with the same methodological assumptions and the same overall spiritual and sacramental vision that has brought us thus far?

Now that April’s here...

St George’s Day Flags are out around Great Missenden; including on the Church, where I knew it was going up because Lucy is tower captain, and got the call as usual last week. The whole effect was, well, as the Roald Dahl Centre proclaimed, Flushbunkingly Gloriumptious.

The English Church has done St George in style ever since he came onshore to England during the Crusades.

About 600 years ago, for example, an unknown artist painted this gentleman on the walls at Little Kemble — one of my favourite medieval small Churches around here, where I had the great honour of reading the passion on Good Friday, and sometimes snicker out and take a Prayer Book 8.00 servce.

In American movies the English make good conmen, toffs, idiots and butlers. Here at home, if you get the flags out, it conjures up lager louts, flags in cars during the World Cup, Reliant Robin drivers in pork pie hats, old maids cycling to early communion through the mist, and warm beer. You could add fondness for animal charities, language and literature, poor customer service and toy plumbing.

There’s also Fleet Street patriotism — essentially unhistorical, churned out by the yard and presided over by sleazy old hypocrites who bang on about patriotism whilst pretending to live abroad so that the country itself can run on everyone else’s taxes.

I hope people also think being English is something to do with fairness, scientific curiousity, a quirky passion for personal freedom, amateurism, tolerance, justice for the underdog, tradition and evolution, pragmatism, and creativity.
Attempts to define England in racist terms are ludicrous, because the basic fact about this island is that its culture and languauge have been made, and are still being made, by wave on wave of foreign immigrants — Romans, Germans, French, Jews, Dutch, French, Russians, Chinese, Afro-Caribbeans and Asians to name but a few of the most obvious and prominent since 54BC.

We are all what Draco Malfoy would call Mudbloods. I speak as a Hungarian Scot with only a mere dash of English: This qualifies me to be be fervently patriotic about this country in a way others may aspire to, but only Hungarians, and perhaps Ugandans, actually achieve. I was brought up on George Mikes (“Continentals have sex: the English have hot water bottles....”). It’s surely a good thing to feel rooted and confident about who you are, especially if that gives a platform upon which to be generous, just and creative. If opportunity presents, I may be able to ask the children I’m seeing in a Bucks school later today what it means to them...

Vicarage Allsorts: Clergy Supply

A House of Bishops paper from the Ministry Division explores issues of clergy quantity and quality. TA story here and Dave Walker’s roundup of blog reactions here. It began life as an attempt to scope issues arising from Synod pensions debates. The paper gathered no evidence about working clergy — just crude stats and a straw poll among diocesan bishops. So you won’t find any juicy stories about what bishops think of vicars; in fact you won’t find any juicy stories at all. It’s just a roundup of very basic supply figures, and a very brief snapshot based on a round robin of bishops about medium term training requirements.

I’ll comment on quality in the next day or so, but today, demographic facts — all in the public domain, but collected here for their Lordships contemplation — comparative figures about numbers of clergy and licensed ministers to 1959/60. Why 1959/60? I don’t know, but that was the height of the postwar ecclesiastical boom and the youngest deacon ordained in 1959 is now 76 and can thus be assumed to have had a full career, or not, in the system.
These are crude and dirty statistics. Active vicars are comparatively easy to count but many lay ministers, like youth and families workers, don’t have formal LLM licences. These are just conventional “robed and up front” figures.

After 30 years of designer angst about clergy shortages I am amazed that this should be so, but the simple fact is that there are actually more active C of E collars on the streets of England in 2005 than in 1959. I don’t know about you, but this surprised me. It also strikes me as the kind of raw figure that won’t be of any interest to Fleet Street, because it neither provokes fear and anguish, nor validates their prejudices and fantasies about the C of E.

The distribution, however has entirely changed. The preponderance is distributed more, I would guess, according to population. The bad story then was rural/urban. Now I would anticipate it to be North/West as against South/East. There are far fewer full time collars of the conventional sort, but far more retired active and self supporting. Looking ahead this means their shelf life and deployability is far lower. People in the 1960’s complained that vicars were too young and inexperienced about the rest of life. Now they complain that they’re all on second careers. You can’t have it both ways! Or can you? Training needs, however are radically different.

The variety of backgrounds I would reckon is greater than in 1959, though diversity is still not as high as it should be. I would also hazard a guess these figures hide a significant shortage of young clergy, and that the general volatility of people in the world of work, combined with today’s much shorter/ fragmented career patterns mean that supply is in a far more volatile position than these figures might otherwise imply.

Ministry in many areas is highly dependent on retired clergy — cherish and honour them; not only as devoted temps, but as the statesmen and elders of our enterprise, holding a vital part of its corporate memory. Some have done 40 years+ in the trenches, and that deserves profound respect. In 1959 a fair number of parish clergy were over retirement age; which didn’t come in for clergy until 1971. Therefore the 1959/60 figures conceal many clergy over today’s retirement age. As we all live longer, there is, of course, a fascinating discussion to be had about future retirement trends.

Finally, Pay. The bad story in 1959, apart from its lowness was that the Church was almost entirely dependent on dead people to pay the staff. Living giving was pathetic. Now inherited resource goes into pensions, and these figures reveal exactly a characteristic UK demographic about retired numbers. The Church turned turtle financially in the 1990’s, and now pay and future pensions (8K a head a year) are pretty much funded by living giving. It’s healthier, you may say, but more precarious, also. I hazard a guess that UK Pay rises in the past 50 years have run way ahead of general inflation. The stipend has, I would reckon, fallen seriously behind as source of income.

There is a theoretical question in my mind, however. What exactly is it we pay ministers for, when we pay them? If we could be clearer about that, the mix between self supporting and paid could be scoped far more strategically, and aligned with our values. But this leads onto what you may think is the more interesting bit of this paper, perhaps; some thoughts about quality... watch this space.