Faith in Britain

The values transmitted at home and in the school are crucial to personal formation.

Values are important because the world is meaningless and bewildering without a sense of right and wrong; and life is difficult without a sense of purpose and a confidence in oneself. Education is not just a means to a job; it is a preparation for life. Of course, if life is only about hedonism and material advancement then young people will see education as only being about obtaining qualifications to secure high-paying jobs.

Educational objectives and control of universities has become increasingly an arm of industrial policy. One member of staff at Liverpool University recently told me that provided a student brought private sponsorship and tuition fees for a project, space was available for that research. Yet, the majority of proposed Alpha-rated scientific research programmes are being denied public funding. Private money with near-market concerns will not necessarily nourish pure research; it is even less likely to nourish the arts. Should ICI, or discretionary ministerial powers rather than personal development and intellectual liberty, determine the shape of the educational opportunities available to our young people?

This dirigiste educational policy, which sees universities, colleges and schools as instruments of economic growth, has effectively nationalised education. Previously autonomous institutions are now under the thumb of Ministers who have arrogated huge powers to themselves.

Educationalists will find it increasingly difficult to encourage students to challenge preconceived ideas, to foster the ability to question and to recognise controversy, and to develop imagination. Ministerial directives and orientation towards market forces will be an impediment in the teaching of values.

Of course, Ministers would argue that theirs is a reaction against the emphasis placed by many educationalists on Marxist values. Certainly the reading lists and courses offered by some history, sociology and politics departments are ideologically slanted. Marx and Engels definitely would not have included in their view of education any emphasis on the value of the family and community. In The Communist Manifesto they bitterly criticised 'the bourgeois clap trap about the family and education, about the hallowed relation of parent and child'.9 More recently, David Cooper put a more contemporary Marxist view: 'The bourgeois nuclear family (which in this context I shall henceforth refer to as "the family") is the principal mediating device that the capitalist ruling class uses to condition the individual, through primary socialization, to fit into some role complex that suits the system.'10 The situation ethics and false liberation pedalled under the guise of Marxism and secularism has done as much damage to the family as consumerism.

So what is to be done?