‘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Draft guidance, which is out to consultation before becoming law later this year, recommends field trips with a racial or faith angle, and inviting religious leaders to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.