A recent court case in the UK found in favour of a free school, Michaela, whose famously ‘most strict school head in the UK’ was said to have instituted a ‘prayer ban’. The case was brought by a pupil accusing the school of a breach of her human rights.
It’s an interesting case, and an interesting school. Predictably, many are describing the head, Katharine Birbalsingh, of being Islamophobic, though it seems to me she is nothing of the kind. The ban on prayer rituals applies equally to all. Pupils are allowed to wear eg the hijab. What they are not allowed to do is intimidate others, monopolise the playground for their prayer rituals, or cry ‘victim’ when the rules that were made clear to them when they joined the school are enforced. The rules include things like only serving vegetarian meals so that no religious observers are unable to break bread with others. So accommodation is made for individual circumstance where others are not compromised, and no group is privileged. She makes the point that everyone who chooses the school understands the ethos and subscribes to her strictures about individualism needing to cede to the good of the whole community. The school is apparently majority muslim, not that this is the point, and most of them have no issue with the ban on prayer rituals. Private prayer is of course not banned.
I have been reading what various people have said on the subject before and after the verdict and there is food for thought. Birbalsingh wrote ‘if people are not petitioning for a ban on Macbeth they are hypocrites’. This because apparently Jehovah’s Witnesses at the school agree to overcome their prohibition on reading the book. I had to look this up. Indeed, it seems that JW are not allowed to read anything about other religions, or about witchcraft or magic. This was news to me and I was amazed.
Because, hang on: isn’t all of religion – including that of Jehovah’s Witnesses – magic? I’d be the first to admit that I don’t understand religion at all, but I am puzzled by this ‘no magic’ rule.
And although I couldn’t bear to lie to my children when I did so about Father Christmas (I still feel queasy at the thought), I would be very sad indeed if they had not had exposure to stories of magic. When I think back over 15 years or more of reading bedtime stories to my children it seems that most of them contained an element of magic, of things and creatures that fly, of witches and fairies, of wishes coming true, of toys that come to life.
Despite my pathological (but not religious!) zeal for truth-telling, it never ever occurred to me that this obvious make-believe was harmful, was in any way on a par with outright duplicity. I hadn’t heard the supposed quote from Einstein, but I would have approved, I suppose. In the name of literacy and fostering imagination. It’s given me pause for thought: am I being hypocritical here?
Are children harmed by such ‘lies’? I’ve long been convinced that most fairy tales have much to answer for, laying expectations that women will be rescued by princes, and that men will be brave and handsome to win fair maidens who are (usually) sweet and acquiescent. Increasingly, modern writers are tackling some of these traditional tales and giving them a more modern interpretation and I am all for it. For giving fictional little girls greater agency and fictional little boys better emotional intelligence.
Even now I am a great believer in the merit of literature including fable and allegory (and if you told me that this was all that religious texts claimed to be, I might have more sympathy).
Maybe being raised on a diet of fiction including online games and stories with unlikely and violent-suffused plots has contributed to swathes of youths believing that they can change sex if they believe hard enough.
I’m thinking it would be a shame to miss out on Shakespeare. But not all of his writing contains the supernatural. And much other literature manages to be great without recourse to the supernatural. Dickens springs easily to mind, amongst others. Maybe we should do away with stories of magic, but I can’t help feeling the world would be poorer for it.
mybiglifeshift 