Archbishop of
A Culture of Hope? Priorities and Vision in
Church Schools
The Association of
annual conference,
‘There was convincing evidence to suggest that schools tended to be more successful when they have strong internal bonding – structurally, organizationally, culturally. Hence the evidence that church schools, for example, have particular strengths; for binding traditions help create common languages and develop common points of view. The teachers in such cultures work better as teams, draw adults and children together in (often) unstated attitudes and behaviours, and seem to care more about each other as members of the school organization. They are more civil.’ (David Winkley, Handsworth Revolution. The Odyssey of a School, London 2002, p.307).
This paragraph from Sir David Winkley’s vivid and exciting book on the regeneration of a
Educational institutions in fact can’t be neutral about this. If you think you are being neutral about the moral or spiritual ethos of a school, you are in fact generating an ethos of individualism, functionalism and ultimately fragmentation. You are undermining ‘civility’, to pick up Winkley’s word. And while you may assume that something other than school is going to deal with this, that very assumption sends a profoundly damaging message: civility, common life, is not something in which the public agencies of society want to invest much. It is as if, where there are already resources in people’s lives and communities that shape their behaviour and thinking, they must be ignored in the processes of statutory education as irrelevant or even harmful. But that is anything but a neutral message. Where you are dealing with people who already have communities and convictions, it can be harmful to organise education as if it were something that could make no use of these things. The message given can be destructive. It is the same kind of thinking that imagines you can encourage intense competitiveness in certain areas of life without reinforcing habits of insensitivity in relations between persons generally. And all this is of intense practical concern not only to Christians but to followers of minority faiths, who experience such an attitude as hostile rather than neutral, and, as we all know, will often prefer a school of a religious tradition other than their own to one that has no such link.
A school whose ethos is grounded in religious faith is, from the perspective of the broad public agenda, simply one that has a clear rationale for the habits it is trying to foster. It takes for granted that a good school is one that educates by creating a common experience, a culture. Despite the pervasiveness of the functional philosophy I’ve sketched, this is still a residual belief with most educators whose concern is with persons rather than abstract possessors of skills. But the faith-based school goes rather further in taking for granted that the culture that needs developing has to include what many would call the single most definitive factor in all human cultural history up to and even including modernity: the beliefs and practices that express human relation to something more than the individual and more than the sum of contemporary individual experience, relation to what is holy, creative and unsurpassable. If asked why we should bother with forming a shared culture – and children ask that question often enough, if not quite in those words, by actions and attitudes as well – the faith-related school is able to say, ‘Because your human experience will be a nonsense in the eyes of your maker if it does not include developing and learning a sense of common good. Because of God, in short.’ And, to correct a bit what I said a moment ago, it is less a matter of ‘including’ the religious perspective than letting educational work and all involved in it be included in that greater perspective which is opened by religious commitment – so that teachers and students are both aware of being participants together in something bigger than a single institution.
The Christian school in particular is bound to have in mind what Christians believe is the optimal state of human society – the Body of Christ, in which there is no isolated suffering or joy, no insulation from the experience of others, and an immeasurable possibility of receiving gifts from each other’s skills. It isn’t that a Christian school has to reinforce this with explicit theology every hour of the day; its habits and rhythms should say it. It will be a place where corporate loyalty makes sense.
Loyalty is a tricky word. It will evoke vague and partly comic memories of appeals to school spirit, uniforms, school songs, tribal sports events. But if we try to clear our minds of caricature and satire, it should be obvious that loyalty is not a luxury – and also that it works when my sense of what makes me worthwhile is in some degree connected with the worthwhileness of the community I belong to, so that commitment to others becomes part of how I understand what is good and life-giving for me. It’s certainly true these days that loyalty has to be earned as never before; it can’t just be appealed to as a thing that can be demanded without challenge. But that doesn’t mean it has lost its significance as a corporate virtue in an institution. If we want to define the strengths of a faith-related school, one of the first things we should be able to point to is that they offer a positive basis for loyalty: they assume that they will be able to persuade their staff and students that the value of their work hangs on the quality and seriousness of their life together.
One thing this in turn implies is that there is also a rationale for a certain openness to each other’s particularity, to the distinctive experience of someone with a different story. I think this is importantly distinct from that quality of tolerance which is regarded in some quarters as the one vital moral principle to be inculcated in education. This latter priority is all too successful in lots of schools. I don’t think I’m the only person to have struggled with groups of teenagers, trying to get them to articulate values that really matter to them, to discover that practically the only thing they will agree in voicing is the importance of tolerance – usually seen as an incurious co-existence, even a bland acceptance of mutual ignorance and non-understanding, in the name of not passing judgement. It’s worth looking at Frank Field’s new book, Neighbours from Hell. The Politics of Behaviour, for an interesting sidelight on this: he argues that there is a widespread loss among many school students of any respect for truth in its own right. This may or not be fair, but it rings enough bells to be worth pondering in relation to what I have called ‘incurious co-existence’. Openness, in contrast, is a willingness to be curious, to argue, even, yes, to judge, in the sense of trying to assess another’s experience in the light of your own values and decide how deeply it challenges you and how deeply you want to challenge it. It has everything to do with truthfulness at many levels.
A religious school claims that the culture which nourishes loyalty and openness, and which thus makes people question narrow individualism, smug ignorance and indifference to truth, is not simply the invention of whoever happens to be running the institution. This is not at all a trivial matter. In a wider cultural climate where the passive tolerance I’ve described is common coin, it isn’t easy to defend another sort of culture simply on the grounds that it has been decided on by the management, or even that it has been thought to be more useful than not. That is asking for trouble – asking, that is, for the culture to be challenged by anyone who wants to resist the management (an ‘anyone’ that would cover a fair percentage of adolescents). The religious school says, in contrast, ‘We live this culture not just because the people in charge of your education have decided it’s a good thing. This is a culture in which student and teacher alike are seen to belong in a far wider context than school. This is a place where we learn how to be human beings in a way that potentially shapes all our understanding and response to the world’.
I’m not naďve enough to think that this of itself cuts any more ice with the average teenager than any other rationale that might be offered. But I am perfectly serious in suggesting that unless there is an answer to the question, ‘Why should I accept or value the culture of this institution?’ the imposition of an ethos in the educational institution can reduce to a mere act of will by leadership and management. It will look and feel arbitrary. But the religious basis of a school displays ‘the management’ as itself answerable to a wider world of moral reference; part – a crucial part – of the task of leadership in a religious school is to underline and develop that answerability and connectedness. If the strength of a faith school is that it locates its whole operation in the context of a bigger social and moral tradition, someone has to put some energy into making that context a practical and imaginative reality for students. When government talks of the ‘extended school’ as a pattern for the future, a school with numerous lines of connection with the whole social environment, the church school can reasonably say that it has some experience, skill and vision in this area.
So far, then, I’m arguing that if good education is absolutely bound up with ‘binding tradition’ and common language in the way David Winkley claims, the faith school offers something extremely important and distinctive; it proposes to root this tradition and language in a tradition, a language, that is powerful and transformative in the wider social context – the language of religious faith. In so doing, it offers to the concrete school community a set of resources – human resources as well as theoretical ones – to sustain what is always the difficult and vulnerable business of creating an ethos in a school. One of the things which I believe church schools and local churches need to be working at harder than ever is just how those resources are best set to work. More is needed than clergy visits, carol services in the nearest parish church and so on, excellent as all this is. Are local congregations able to offer befriending to students on a thought-out basis? The teenager often responds with enthusiasm to the chance of a listening ear outside the home. Even babysitting rotas can be used creatively in this context by a church congregation as a way of building bridges. And when I was a teenager myself, I remember a local clergyman inviting a group of us to sit in the church during our lunch hour for a few days while an exhibition was being held, to help with both welcome and security – an invitation which helped to generate a long-lived informal youth group. Again, how do church schools relate to the international links that a deanery or diocese is involved in? Technology can make international contact in the school context a crucially important channel for local churches – I have seen how e-mail links between a church school and a school in the West Bank could give local congregations detailed news of crises and problems in the Holy Land well ahead of the media. But at least as important is the question of how churches manage systematic prayer for teachers and students; how many churches with church schools nearby have a programme of prayer class by class?
Well, we can discuss details; the main thing is, though, that the faith school in general and the church school in particular not only aims at a culture of loyalty and openness but offers resources for its sustenance that go well beyond the educational institution itself and well beyond what secular ‘public life’ provides. The nurture of loyalty introduces a principle that allows everyone to question their purely individual aims; the nurture of openness means that loyalty becomes something more than just blind partisanship. The rationale of this kind of educational society is, for the church school, the image of the Body of Christ (as, for the Muslim school, it would be the umma, the egalitarian community of true believers). It would be complete nonsense to say that the faith school alone nourishes these virtues. But, as any consideration of the basis of political virtue in general will confirm, the problem of the foundation of any appeal to human solidarity is a serious one, to which post-Enlightenment thought has never given a fully satisfactory answer. If social participation as well as individual skill is part of what education looks to, the faith school has a sharply significant role – not least in reminding the educational establishment of unfinished business when it drifts towards the narrowest kinds of functionalism. It is true, as I have said, that involvement with statutory provision obliges religious communities to get their act together, to think through their priorities in terms that can relate to broader social needs and intellectual methods; but the challenge runs both ways, and the faith school has a more important role than ever in keeping on the agenda the awkward questions we have been thinking about, questions of what corporate experience a school can give in forming socially active and responsible persons. It is obviously not the case that religious schools alone do this; but what I am arguing is that they have formidable reasons for defending such a vision and a clearer rationale than many other institutions.
I hope that to set faith schools in this
context begins to answer some of the anxieties that have been around on the
subject. When the Dearing Group first reported, the general reception was
sympathetic; the contribution of church schools to governmental targets and
ideals seemed clear, and there was a good following wind. But by the end of
2001, things had changed. A good many whose support for faith-based education
had always been a bit grudging were understandably alarmed by a summer which
saw racial violence in northern cities and the disgraceful incidents around
Holy Cross school in
It has been said often enough in this debate that church schools are not necessarily exclusive, in the sense of applying strict confessional tests; and government representatives have stressed that their support for church school initiatives depends on our being able to show a certain kind of inclusivity. The point is well taken; but we need some clarification. For quite a long time, there was a prevailing feel that inclusivity must mean a reduction of links with actual ‘confessional’ religious life to the slenderest of threads. The Dearing Report made a conscious effort to change such a perception; but it was also careful not to suggest that this meant a retreat from inclusion. It would be more accurate to say that it placed centre stage a different model of inclusion, one which relates to all that has just been said about the critical engagement of a school with prevailing social questions.
A faith-based school on the Dearing model does not first and foremost ask for uniformity of belief or practice among students and staff. But it does assume in those who direct its work a commitment to a specific pattern of shared life and labour explicitly dependent on a religious conviction about human nature, about the ‘end of man’, in the old and politically incorrect phrase. Furthermore it assumes that its common life will be visibly marked by signs of this commitment and by the willingness to explain and defend it. I want to return to these ‘signs of commitment’ in a moment. This is not in order to indoctrinate the unwilling; but there is a clear mission for the church school which might be expressed by saying: ‘You may or may not share these convictions; but you will at least have seen what a community looks like that works with these convictions, and you will have experienced some of the results. This should encourage you at least to ask the question of what basis you want to defend for common life, loyalty and openness.’ I don’t need to underline the priority of this critical and hopeful element in the life of schools that work in areas of deprivation and low expectation.
Once again, this takes for granted that a school ought to be prodding away at these issues rather than just transmitting items of knowledge or variegated skills. To quote from an address to the Governing Body of the Church in Wales eighteen months ago, it takes for granted that the experience of learning ‘isn’t always just a matter of learning to function within a society successfully enough to survive; it opens doors to the sort of experience that changes what is possible in a society for the individual and for the whole group’. This is education as the forming of a constructively critical mindset. And in this sense, the school should be reproducing in miniature what a religious community as a whole does in society. The inclusivity that matters is precisely not a vagueness about relations with specific religious communities but a willingness to ‘include’ all in a conversation, a debate about fundamental resources for life together. I don’t think this is any less inclusive, in the sense that it attempts to address the widest possible social audience. What it offers the uncommitted or less committed student or parent is not a programme of theological brainwashing but the possibility of asking deeper and harder questions of self and society.
And this leads on to a further point that has been a good deal discussed in the last couple of years, a point of interest to the churches more than to government. This is the idea of the church school as itself a kind of church. There are many ways of misunderstanding this, but let me try again to clarify. If we are to speak as Dearing did of the church school as having a central role in mission, it ought to be obvious that its common religious life is of first importance – since there is no mission worth the name that is not rooted in shared life, involving an invitation to others to share it. The fact is that very many students in a church school will have their primary exposure to shared religious activity in school. They and their families will not regularly and invariably be part of a worshipping group, whatever motions may have been gone through by parents to win places. What the school does corporately as a Christian body will be, to all intents and purposes, how these parents and students will experience the reality of Church.
What exactly does this mean? We need to hold in our minds a definition of ‘church’ that allows us to say that the word signifies what happens when the presence of Jesus Christ holds people together in a mutual relationship that is not simply chosen by the people involved, and which constantly changes how that relationship works and what is possible within it. Church is a phenomenon where people come to view each other differently, to have a new understanding of what they can do for each other (forgiveness, for example). But of course it is above all an environment where there is deliberate effort to become more open not just to each other but to God, in worship and in silence.
Spiritual education is much discussed these days; often, though, it amounts to little more than the cultivating of empathy and a loose sense of the mysteriousness of the world. The church school has to be concerned about a great deal more than that. I’ve already suggested in a lecture a few years ago that the pace of life reflected in a school timetable, the diet in the canteen and the priority given to arts and sport will tell you more about the ‘spirituality’ of a school than many curricular accounts of spiritual education, because these things will encode a sense of what matters in human growing. If a church school becomes completely indistinguishable from others in these respects, it has a problem. If it does not ask about the needs of its staff for retreat, reflection, pastoral support for its staff, it has a problem. There is not much point in being a school that assumes the importance of belief if you don’t allow room for personal growth in this area among staff. But it equally has a problem when the ‘routine’ life of the church is not reflected: in however careful articulated a way, a church school – especially, though not exclusively, a church secondary school – that is not manifestly rooted in eucharistic community is less than it might be.
This doesn’t mean that there is a pattern of eucharistic worship that sets up divisions between communicants and non-communicants in a malign way; simply that without a core of eucharistic worship, there is something lacking in the way a school expresses (and intensifies) its commitment. There are many ways of realising this, on smaller and larger scale – and there are some very bad examples of school eucharists, I hasten to add, where no-one has thought much about how to say what is being said for this community, people of this age and experience. But done with conviction, it says something essential for the institution – and I have seen it proving a powerful form of evangelism for half-committed or uncommitted families.
There is a logical consequence which may pose some harder questions (where we might look for help from our Roman Catholic colleagues). What are the possibilities of offering Confirmation preparation in connection with the school’s life? If your initiation into the eucharistic community ought to be done in some sense by that community, there is at least a case for looking at this – quite apart from the pragmatic point that cohorts of teenagers have a slightly better chance of holding on to their practice than solitary individuals in parishes. Obviously there are issues around professional boundaries and timetables here, but this simply poses a challenge as to how the bonds, the common culture, of a school can be used to strengthen links with wider church life. And there are other practical challenges here for clergy training and teacher training, as well as very general questions about how to resource the work of spiritual development in schools in ways that don’t simply double the burden on teachers. How do we as a church resource proper professional liaison and nurture in this context? If we are serious, though, about the priority of church schools in our mission, these nettles will need to be grasped. The Youth Evangelism initiative being discussed in the Church of England at the moment will, I hope, give an occasion for all these matters to be ventilated afresh.
So the fully-functioning church school is not only a place that identifies and uses the ‘social capital’ of the local religious communities with which it is linked. That is important, important for students and for families, as opening their horizons and their possible cross-generational relationships, but it is not everything. This school is also itself a religious community, one in which different sorts of behaviour are followed and nurtured: where, above all, it is assumed that what is of consuming and urgent interest is not just a set of individual goals for teacher or student, nor the meeting of targets imposed by management, significant as these may be, but a range of concerns about common humanity, expressed in actions and relations and worship; where the culture takes it for granted that there should be argument and involvement – in the most ‘inclusive’ way – about the needs of neighbours and of strangers, and space for stillness and thought and growth. The church school undoubtedly has social capital to offer, and the argument in defence of these institutions in the wider political context will need to be robust about this, and robust in insisting on taking entirely seriously the school’s connections with all other resources for meaning and empathy, setting shared goals and understanding common good. But I want equally to emphasise for the sake of the Church that the church school’s ‘culture’, of which I have been making so much, can provide a crucial experience of what the Body of Christ means, for those, adults and young people, who would not otherwise see it.
The demanding and (I hope) sometimes exhilarating calling of the head in this context is one of translating the theology of the Body of Christ into daily details of priority and discipline and management. The head is the point where the cultures of church, society and specific institution intersect, and that sort of position is never comfortable. That is why I hope this gathering will help reinforce the confidence you need for this calling. You know better than anyone that there is nothing to apologise for in the existence of our schools; that the resource they offer is something of enormous quality and depth; that they have things of vital importance to say to society and church alike. I hope too that those who share and support your work know how much encouragement you need, and how essential it is that you have time and space to develop this vision in your locality. Don’t be afraid of letting the church know your needs; remember that you minister in a (highly eccentric!) ‘congregation of Christ’s people’, and so have the right to call on the church for nourishment. In the pressured and sometimes exhausted environment of modern education, take what you need from the church’s life and imagination to go on asking awkward questions of the educational establishment, witnessing to the possibility of loyalty, openness, the living and lively culture of God’s children.
© Rowan Williams 2003
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