Benedictine perspectives on integration (2): The Michaela prayer ban case

There has been a great deal written over the recent high court decision to side with Katherine Birbalsingh’s ruling as headteacher of Michaela school in Brent, that a child could not take time for prayer within the school day. The court obviously did not rule on whether prayer in schools was wrong, but upon Michaela’s right to decide as they did. The key arguments on each side are listed helpfully here in this article by Schoolsweek. Those humanists and secularists proclaiming this a victory for all schools have failed to see that this is an issue of what schools are for, and what education is for, rather than the narrow obsession they have that ‘religion has no place in schools’ as though they do not hold their (religious) position with (religious) fervour.

But fundamentally Michaela has made the ban on the grounds of ‘inclusion’ and wanting to maintain harmonious relationships. Birbalsingh is quoted in the Guardian as saying her policy was necessary to ‘maintain a successful learning environment where children of all races and religion can thrive.’ They are saying (and have for a long time) that what is offered here is schooling plain and simple. They teach well, have high standards of conduct that many other schools would secretly give their eye teeth for, and have an interesting curriculum. The purpose of being at Michaela is to learn, and to learn what they have to teach. Why do I say that their laudable efforts are foolish?

For one thing, what this ban does is to say that, you as a child belong here, you can be included, you can learn here, except for the part that is most fundamental to you, your faith and your community. People of faith have faced this forever, and I have experienced it in workplaces that assume that secularism (or liberal democracy) is a neutral, rather than a religious, position, and that those with religious faith belong elsewhere, not here. The child in the case said exactly that – ‘like somebody saying they don’t feel like I properly belong here.’

Secondly, it fails to recognise the uniquely ritual nature of Islam. If they tried to do this with a Christian, firstly the right would be up in arms, but secondly, how would they know? We tend to pray quietly, in the day to day work of a school, occasionally voicing it in the staffroom with another believer, or meeting in a time convenient to the school. None of this does Islam allow. It is a faith of observance, and observance needs time slots, even if they can be rearranged (as a lecturer, with our Muslim students, we have to do this from time to time). The school would be wiser to say this openly as policy and as an act of welcome and appreciation, and make a space and time available in consultation with senior Muslim students and staff.

Thirdly, it fails to notice that giving expression to one’s faith in public life is to a large degree a human right, protected by various conventions (I can’t see the court’s reasoning very clearly on this point). In accepting the reality of Islam as a significant faith in Britain today, it allows young children growing up at home to have their faith life affirmed as part of their education and celebrated as part of school life. Education, as Comenius, Augustine and al-Ghazali would all agree, is integral to faith and integrates faith into the educative process. This article by Nadeine Asbali can help us think clearly on this one.

Fourthly, it reduces the humanity of each child by separating out the religious (and hence communal) reality of a child from all the other realities that that child experiences. It does the work of the Enlightenment in privileging reason above other aspects. This brings us back to the quote in my last post from the museum of the Melk Benedictine Monastery in Austria, abbreviated for the present purpose:

One-sidedness, in this case the emphasis on human reason, was to start processes which were intended to separate something integral. There are so many aspects to human beings that all are important….living faith fulfils the heart and the reason of man…the whole human being is more important than individual aspects. The whole person in his ups and downs lives from faith, fulfils his duties, is culturally effective and sees his economic and social relationships flourish.

As well as being pertinent to how Christians learn to position themselves so as to live from faith, it is important for school leaders, who are seeking (or should be seeking) to create whole people with the tools at their disposal. My worry about English education generally, and some aspects of what Michaela have been (successfully!) trying to do, is the isolating out of the teachable bits of a child and saying that schools serve those teachable bits. This is patent nonsense, and actually may not be what they are seeking. But it does seem to be what they have ended up with. Schooling, to quote my Ed.D. supervisor Julian Stern is ‘care and curiosity in community‘ – and even then there is the temptation to say that the ‘community’ is the ‘school community’ and not the larger polity that each school serves. The nature of schooling is awry in Britain, so it is of course not beyond the bounds of possibility that school leaders do things that are awry.

Faith belongs firmly within education, and can be welcomed and challenged legitimately within education. Separating out this key aspect of a person’s life from the 12 years that they are at school serves nobody.