Teaching Sin

Governments throughout the Unfree World continue to urge the corruption of the young by the inculcation of anti-Judaeo-Christian ethical assumptions. A few weeks ago I heard on the wireless the suggestion that our own admirably resolute Haredi community should be prevented from educating their own children because of an apprehension, I'm sure, correct, that they might not be teaching them the evil, unethical claptrap urged nowadays by evil people. More recently, there has been governmental and Media 'concern' about 'ultra-Orthodox' Jewish and Islamic 'schools'.

But who (I hear you say) bothers about an eccentric Jewish group like the Haredi? To which I reply: They came for the Haredi, but I did nothing because I am not Haredi ... etc.. You know, I am sure, the rest of the incantation.


I shall be surprised if there is not a focussed onslaught, even during my lifetime, on Home Education in this already cruelly illiberal country.

When I was teaching the young, there was already a de facto expectation that one must bow to the zeitgeist in the cases of abortion and gender and suchlike shibboleths. I came to feel that there were advantages in it. I used to tell the pupils: "Some people think ...", and then give them as passionate an advocacy as I could manage of the 'liberal' line - cliches, false logic, spurious rhetoric, factual misrepresntation, you name it, I threw myself into it all with relish. Then I said: "But other people think ...", and gave them the Christian view. When they said "But what do you think, Father?", I allowed them to pester me into revealing to them why the 'liberal' view I had so convincingly put forward was, in my own view, such rubbish. This, I hoped, might have the advantage that when they later heard (as they were undoubtedly destined to) the 'liberal' orthodoxies, they might already, even if only to a tiny degree, be inoculated against them.

I also obeyed to the letter the fashion for teaching ethics in a "balanced and non-judgemental" way by giving the arguments both for and against Racial Discrimination, Gender Prejudice, Bullying, etc.. Liberal colleagues used to find it strikingly difficult to explain to me why I was wrong to do this ... without conceding that they themselves were up to their totalitarian ears in brainwashing the young; giving them unbalanced and judgmental teaching in moral and social matters. "But Racial Discrimination [or Bullying or whatever] is just wrong" they would naively bleat. I found the fun of it all really rather exhilarating.

I don't suppose I'd get away with it now.