Tuesday 8 May 2007

‘Every school - whatever its intake and wherever it is located - is responsible for educating children and young people who will live and work in a country which is diverse in terms of culture, faith, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds.
.. ministers are concerned some schools are still being monopolised by single racial or religious groups, acting as a breeding ground for extremism..
Draft guidance, which is out to consultation before becoming law later this year, recommends field trips with a racial or faith angle, and inviting religious leaders to schools.’

It may come as a surprise to some to learn that I made every effort to control the socio-economic , cultural, and learning environment in which my children grew up. The same can be safely said of my parents regard for me and my siblings, and for my grandparents conscientious undertaking. What other expression can love for children take, in any family ? Children are loved through action not emotion, however strongly felt.

All cultures are the object of my curiosity, some I admire, some I fear, some I dislike with strenuous objection to their values and norms; most, like my own, are curate’s eggs. To know another culture as I know my own is not possible - ask any ethnographer - and the curate ‘s egg aspect of a culture demands intimate understanding so that the bad bits can be shown, warned against, and if possible counteracted when bringing up the children. Though as there are limits to bossing them about, they will reach their own conclusions for their own world, that stretches far ahead of mine.

It is arrant undiluted nonsense to think enforced proximity and standardised school experiences will create anything valuable in social and cultural understanding where there is not a widespread familial similarity of culture, together with neighbourhood and community ties, already. This is not to deny the value, long recognised, of staying in another country to learn its language, its practices, its take on our world; but that is for a poised observer with a secure cultural base.

It is not for school where, it seems, children's familial cultural acquisition is deliberately to be challenged and undermined by state-enforced multiculturalist falsity placed at the same level of truth as teaching in mathematics, langages, or the sciences.

Cultures are not of equal status and to be inducted into some is to be damaged.
Religious beliefs can be as much the carrier of this damage as the carrier of virtues. Religion’s true place is in the wider family where it can be tempered in its admonitions and applications by understanding. Children have to learn to grasp the fluidity of belief , that rules and instructions are developed by circumstance and change, in their own very local cultural worlds; not be confronted with the shocking in the name of integration and expected to cope better than adults.

Parents know this, and we extend our children’s worlds slowly. If this runs against state policy then at least we are united, whatever our particular culture, in knowing and opposing the primitive savagery of multiculturalism.

8 comments:

Newmania said...

Yes I`m a keen fan on mono-culturalism I think you may be overreacting slightly though. I can`t see the harm of it and i assume it is targeted at islamic inner city populations and the like .

Grown up children HG ? Your virtual presence is far to youthful for such accessories.

hatfield girl said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
hatfield girl said...

Not wearing the bottoms of my trousers rolled, N, at least not within sight of the children.

Newmania said...

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.


XX

hatfield girl said...

Nor should anybody think that multiculturalism embraces European or American culture.
Multiculturalists do not want to hear Dante sing. There just isn't time for multicultural culture, it's a poverty stricken, monumentally dull desert.

Newmania said...

Amen

Raedwald said...

Our children grow up in a multicultural environment anyway; our language has admiral, arithmetic and arsenal from the arabic, pyjamas and bungalow from india and hundreds more wonderful words taken from tongues around the world. The notion of zero we got from the arabs, as we did the pointed arch. As I walk through a British city I can see a thousand years of cultural interchange and influence; brickmaking from Flanders, facades from ancient Rome, paints and dyestuffs from Prussia. My traditional English breakfast in the caff has bubble and squeak and fried toms - apart from the cabbage, both from South America. The paper I read is printed on a chinese technology - paper, using a German process - printing.

The point about cultural interchange is that each culture adopts what it finds useful in advancing its own civilisation. And this is a long process.

Maybe the backwardness and introspection of our inner city moslems should just be left to fester and fade away. If they can't change, they'll die out. I see no reason to dilute 2000 years of development of our civilisation - the finest on the globe - to accommodate some numpty juvenile obsession with multiculturalism.

hatfield girl said...

'..to accommodate some numpty juvenile obsession with multiculturalism.'

Yes, R; and there is reason to suspect that this numpty juvenility is just as much disliked and despised by everyone with a culture to despise it with.
I'm not much informed on south Asian culture but Kipling points to extraordinary riches; not do I think the Ashanti would be much impressed with numpty notions of hierarchy and authority.