Cohere, god damn it
Doesn’t the BBC ever want to puke on itself? Seriously. Doesn’t its gorge ever rise until it can’t stand it any more and it has to shout rude words in a hoarse voice and pour beer over its head and kick the table over? Doesn’t it ever get sick of talking babyish cant?
Secondary schools run by faith groups are better than non-religious schools at building community relations, research in England suggests. A study funded by the Church of England found faith schools were rated higher than others by Ofsted inspectors on what is called “community cohesion”. The church says its schools take all faiths seriously and look for common ground while respecting difference.
What is called by whom ‘community cohesion’? And what’s it supposed to mean? Cohesion of communities, or cohesion between communities? The first makes sense but is a decidedly mixed blessing, the second is ludicrously oxymoronic. Maybe it’s supposed to mean both, without any thought about either one, but just a brainless pious hope that we can all have everything: cohesion and commmunity and tolerance and everybody loves everybody else. Let’s train people to think they all belong to a particular ‘community,’ for preference a religious excuse me I mean ‘faith’ community, but that’s not absolutely required unless of course the people are Muslims in which case it is absolutely required; then when we’ve done that let’s train them to aim at cohesion, without ever quite explaining what we mean by that; then let’s send them all to ‘faith’ schools; then let’s urge them to look for common ground while respecting difference. Let’s give them mixed messages! Let’s make no sense at all and then look around with an air of pleased expectancy at the peaceable kingdom we have created!
The Reverend Janina Ainsworth, chief education officer for the Church of England, says schools with a religious foundation have a particular role “in modelling how faith and belief can be explored and expressed in ways that bring communities together, rather than driving them apart. In Church of England schools that means taking all faith seriously and placing a high premium on dialogue, seeking the common ground as well as understanding and respecting difference.”
Yes take all ‘faith’ seriously because of course it is crucial to take seriously all brands of evidence-free belief, and at the same time do the impossible by squaring common ground with difference. That’s the advantage of people who take faith seriously of course – they don’t have to notice troublesome difficulties of that kind, they can just have ‘faith’ that the impossible can be done. They can talk woolly fluffy feel-good mush, and be pleased with themselves afterwards.
Not surprisingly, Keith Porteous Wood is the one person quoted in the article who makes any sense, by pointing out the obvious –
“The very existence of minority faith schools is a major impediment to cohesion, especially where members tend also to be from ethnic and cultural minorities. Such schools tend to be mono-religious, mono-ethnic and mono-cultural, quite often of children from communities that are already separate from mainstream society.”
Yes but if everyone just keeps saying faith and cohesion and community over and over and over again, it will all work out in the end, surely.
Isn’t this kind of like Wal-Mart commissioning a study on why Wal-Mart is awesome?
Oh you mean because the study was done by the C of E? Oh my, I’m sorry to see a promising young man so cynical.
Funny, I was just having a conversation with a friend about this, who seems to think the dying out of churches is leading to a loss of “community.” The Christian cult I grew up in DID help build each others houses, bring casseroles for people who had newborns, etc. But their sense of community was in large part generated by an “us” against “them” mentality. They were pulling together as the “saved” against the “wordly.” So, on one level there was community, but on another broader level there was a dangerous and damaging division. This division tore families apart, and left people who had been ostracised from the cult (which happened regularly to keep people on their toes) with little support or networks on re-joining the “wordly.”
They say “community,” I say divisive and pernicious clique.
Great post, O.
Something’s been bothering me, and I’ve got to get it off my chest (this crap out of the UK reminded me of it). I don’t mean anything I’m about to write to be insulting or ignorant; I’m hoping some UK citizens can help me understand this.
I’ve noticed, in the Internet fora I haunt, a disturbing tendency of many UK commenters to accept and approve of concepts I find anathema. This is surprising to me, since most of these commenters share my views about politics, atheism, etc. For example:
1. Limits on free speech, often called “hate speech.” I’ve been shocked at how quickly many UK liberals seem to back the suppression of candid criticism of religious or “cultural” practices if they’re perceived as “fomenting hate.”
2. Adherence to the concept of “community cohesion,” without much apparent interrogation of what that means. It sounds hugely sinister to me, and not a goal to be placed above free expression. Surprisingly, I’ve found many liberal Brits don’t agree with me.
3. A surprising willingness to accept, even endorse, widespread CCTV cameras on the basis that they “protect public safety.” There seems to be an alarming lack of suspicion about the potential negative uses to which these can be put, and a surprising amount of benefit-of-the-doubt given to the authorities who use them.
I can’t help suspecting there are some major cultural differences here in the “average psyche” of Brits compared to US residents, having to do with our different political traditions.
Disclaimers:
My sample set is small, and biased. I could be completely wrong. I’m willing to be wrong. I’m hoping to be enlightened by some Brits, even if that means being smacked down for my ignorance.
As the Ofsted inspectors know which schools are faith ones, there could be a confirmation bias, as it’s widely believed that they _are_ better.
Come to think of it, would it not be helpful to look not at individual schools, but at areas which contain a faith school? After all, the faithy ones have a selective admission policy, and in some circumstances they are allowed to take the parents’ religion into account. Therefore it could in principle happen that the existence of the faith school lowers the performance of others.
The quote from Janina Ainsworth sounds like CEO-speak, but in her case the E is for Education!
“if everyone just keeps saying faith and cohesion and community over and over and over again, it will all work out in the end, surely.”
What I tell you three times is true.
One doesn’t have to be a misanthropic bugger to have very reasonable reservations about a constant drumbeat about ‘cohesion’ or about people who seem to be blind to the blindingly obvious fact that ‘community’ necessarily involves increased suspicion (at least) of everyone outside the ‘community.’ One doesn’t have to be a misanthropic bugger to be aware that both ‘cohesion’ and ‘community’ are very fraught, loaded, potentially coercive words and ideas and realities.
I suppose this is part of what I mean about the BBC. It seems to be in love with both words, as well as the third fraught word ‘faith,’ and it keeps surprising me that they’re so mindless and uncritical about such tendentious words.
JoshS: it’s been said of Britain’s current govt that they see ‘1984’ as a blueprint for society instead of a warning.
There is now a lot of concern about the ‘database state’ and hopefully things will change. Ben Goldacre is one person who has been involved in this, also the journalist Henry Porter.
What Patrick says about the UK police is true, but I believe they have far less credibility than before, and a good thing too. There have been a lot of high-profile scandals, in a few cases resulting in the death of bystanders or miscarriages of justice.
You’re absolutely correct that ‘community cohesion’ is ambiguous and undefined. We need to know not only what they take it to be, but also how they think it is to be measured, before we can say with any confidence who is better at it.
But I wondered about something else as well. Supposing we construe ‘community cohesion’ as meaning that (a) there is a discrete and coherent ‘community’ and (b) that students have a sense of belonging to that community. The argument would be that students in religious schools (and their parents, and maybe their neighbours) have more of this sense of community membership, than students in secular schools.
But apart from the fact that this isn’t necessarily an entirely good thing (as already pointed out), it seems to me rather silly not to notice that the reason for the existence of the religious school in question is precisely because a religious community already exists, and is sufficiently cohesive to establish a school. Meaning that a high degree of community cohesion might explain why there are religious schools rather than religious schools explaining why there is community cohesion.
Additionally, even if the schools do produce community cohesion, this is something that is very much easier to do if the ‘community’ consists entirely of People Like Us. Religious schools will almost certainly have less student diversity than secular schools. It’s a much more difficult task to create a sense of community and belonging amongst a highly diverse group of people, than amongst a highly homogenous group of people. So rather than being seen as an achievement of religious schools, ‘community cohesion’ should simply be expected as a matter of course.
Quite.
Except all that flannel in the article about respecting faith and at the same time respecting everyone else’s faith seems to indicate, in a very woolly unclear irritating way, that they may possibly have been looking for ‘community cohesion’ in the sense of…what, not kicking the kids from the comprehensive when you meet them at the bus stop. But one can’t be sure of that, because the article is so stupid and woolly. One can’t even be sure if the people doing the research were aware that the two kinds of ‘cohesion’ are different. So who knows what the hell they measured.
Good points by Jennie Louise.
It never rains but it pours. Today’s Times has an extract from a book that purports to blow the whistle on Ofsted.
Supposedly what Ofsted does has more to do with ticking boxes, checking ideology and making the govt look good than making sure that kids learn. There’s even a paragraph about how they verify “community cohesion”.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article6936090.ece
Another thought that strikes me re-reading the article… As someone who works of the drafting of legislation for a living, I’m really rather baffled as to how a “legal duty to promote community cohesion” works in practice. What on earth does it mean? How does one determine in a court what community cohesion is and whether a school is promoting it?
Thanks for the link, Stephen.
Oh, OK. It’s totally unclear what that’s supposed to involve, then. Or how on earth you’d tell.
I now have in my head a picture of these religious schools getting together to have a “Cultural Cohesion Day,” where the muslim students and the christian students and the hindu students are all bussed to a giant hall where they sit and tolerate one another. And some inspector stands in the doorway, nodding approvingly and making notes on a clipboard.