A s a parent of GCSE children, I now see clearly
that modern education has abolished the summer term. In all the teenage years except the first, there are public exams to be done. These are spread out, beginning in May, and are pretty much finished this week. The run-up to them is dominated by the ever-growing burden of coursework and, naturally, by revision. As soon as the pupils finish their exams they are sent home, since no power on earth can make them stay. For those of us who pay boarding fees, this early departure means that the cost per child of time actually spent on the premises is now £1,000 per week. The wider point, which applies to state and independent sector alike, is that the term which used to be the best for sport, the best for pleasure and the best for friendship has slipped away, and is now half incarceration, half holiday. We shall look back on this period as one in which public policy (very little of this is the fault of individual schools) lowered educational standards and attacked all those aspects of learning — the best bits — which cannot be quantified.
Everyone agrees in theory that moderate Muslims should be encouraged and extremists isolated, but does this happen in practice? This week the Sunday Times had an interesting piece about a mosque in Brighton. An undercover reporter had attended the mosque. In conversation, Abubaker Deghayes, who runs the mosque, told him that Tony Blair was a ‘legitimate target’ for terrorists, and he prayed to Allah to support men who carried out such attacks. What is particularly depressing about the Abubaker story is that he won. He came to Britain from Libya, helped, for humanitarian reasons, by Imam Abduljalil Sajid, who set up the mosque. Dr Sajid is a genuine moderate. His mosque was the first in Britain to admit women, and he preached there in English. He was a magistrate for 22 years, and does ecumenical work with Jews and Christians (through which I have met him) and strives to keep politics out of worship. As a sort of reward, he was the only person, apart from the Queen, to have a speaking part in her Christmas broadcast of 2004. Yet he lost. In the 1990s Abubaker turned on his patron and accused him, because he was a magistrate, of enforcing corrupt man-made laws instead of the laws of God. Because he had attended a church, Dr Sajid was accused of converting to Christianity. Radicals besieged his mosque and he was physically attacked on several occasions, losing control of the building in 1997. All the authorities were extremely reluctant to help, the police saying it was a private dispute, the council refusing to act against breaches of planning permission (for example, the setting-up of an unauthorised school on the site), the Charity Commission — even to this day — failing to withdraw the mosque’s charitable status though it is operating ‘in breach of legal requirements’. Dr Sajid fought all this for years, but although he did get a court injunction against Abubaker, whom the court described as a liar, he lost his battle for the mosque and now concentrates on international work and no longer worships in Brighton. If you translate all this into church terms, it is as if IRA supporters were free to take over a Catholic church, put in a proterrorist ‘priest’, use the premises to promote their cause, and still be treated as a charity. So fearful are the authorities of doing anything which could be seen as anti-Muslim that they do nothing effective to rein in the extreme and defend the decent. If this sort of thing can happen in mosques, isn’t it time for them all to come under a state register which defines what a mosque is?
Donald Rumsfeld was much mocked for talking about the difference between ‘known unknowns’, ‘unknown unknowns’ and so on, but his distinctions actually meant something. Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke on similar lines when he came to the parish church of Burwash, just down the road from us, to give the address for the annual commemoration of Rudyard Kipling earlier this year. Dr Williams’s theme was that ‘All great artists know more than they know that they know’, and they cannot necessarily explain themselves: they can only create. Kipling, he said, drew much of his inspiration from what was, in the poet’s own words, ‘half devil and half child’, from ‘dark and difficult places in the psyche, and from the extraordinary, varied, tragic experience of children’, including his own. ‘Kipling,’ said the Archbishop, whose words are reprinted in the June edition of the Ripling Journal, ‘knew more than he knew that he knew, and ... he knew that he knew more than he knew that he knew.’ And now that I know that Kipling knew all that, I think the better of him.
The organisation Fathers4Justice tried to disrupt the Sovereign’s Parade on Saturday but failed to get over the barriers. Of course it is a good thing for society to remember the feelings of fathers, but once fathering becomes fashionable it starts to be subject to the competitive instincts that lurk within the male sex. Both Gordon Brown and David Cameron believe that, in order to be prime minister, they must display fatherly credentials in public, and so each now tries to outdo the other in the political equivalent of the parents’ race at school speech day (Cameron is winning, I’d say). Perhaps there should be an organisation called Fathers4No.10.
There is a growing habit of accepting invitations to parties and not turning up. This doesn’t matter, perhaps, if it is just a drinks party, but the custom has spread to dinners. Last week I went to the Samuel Johnson Prize dinner at the Savoy. There was a seating plan, and we were all put on tables of ten. At our table, four of the places were empty. This was rude. It made it awkward for people with no one on one side of them (poor Helena Kennedy had only me) and it cost the hosts a good deal of wasted money. I think a policy of name and shame is in order. The absent four on our table were Sir John Maddox, Jacqui Hughes, Jamie Byng and his wife, whose name, I’m afraid, I never got and therefore cannot fully shame. Apologies if any of these was ill, bereaved or stuck in traffic at the last minute. I see from the Court and Social page of the Daily Telegraph that Sir John managed to turn up to chair a dinner debate at the Athenaeum a few days later, on the subject ‘Liberalism has gone too far’. In the matter of manners, it has.
Earlier this week I had a perfect midsummer experience. Walking home at midnight, I found our front doorstep obligingly lit by a solitary glow-worm.
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