The end of a tyrant

It's been an interesting year. A tyrant ruler, who originally came to power because he was a soldier, holds on to power for an entire generation, dies in misery and degradation. He leaves a legacy of state-of-the-art glistening buildings, places of worship, military installations, megastructures to boost trade, opulent palaces for his own personal use complete with underground bunkers. He also leaves a legacy of hatred among his subjects. In his final days he uses foreign mercenary soldiers, to carry out massacres of innocent people, in a vain attempt to cling to power. I could be talking about Colonel Gaddafi, but equally I could be talking about Herod the Great, the ruler of Palestine when Jesus was born.

The stories of Jesus' birth are full of characters, Mary and Joseph, innkeepers, shepherds, wise men, King Herod, a donkey, camels, assorted farm animals, and a supporting cast of angels, soldiers, villagers, and those, like Mary's cousin Elizabeth, who were simply and quietly waiting for God to act. But the colourfulness and drama of the stories should not distract or cushion us from the real events they tell us about.

'Long time ago in Bethlehem' is in some ways a very misleading lyric. Cavemen were a long time ago; dinosaurs were a long time ago; the beginning of planet earth was a long time ago. But Jesus' birth was, as it were, yesterday, in comparison with those events. And the very similar stories of Herod and of Gaddafi are a reminder that human nature does not change in a few hundred years. These events didn't happen that long ago at all.

Nor was it a long way away. Even in Roman times goods could pass through Palestine, to Britain in the West and China in the East, and today we have constant reminders we are all part of one world. Nor was the place of Jesus' birth a quiet backwater where nothing happened. For a start it was right in the middle of the trade routes I've just mentioned. It was also a place of political ferment and revolution. The year of Jesus' birth was probably the one when Roman security forces, fed up with constant Jewish rebellions, swept down from Syria, brutally suppressing rebellion - and emphasising their point by crucifying 2000 of the inhabitants of Jerusalem.

A generation after Jesus' death the four gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John recorded the most important life in History, and set about trying to explain it. Only two of them describe Jesus' actual birth. Matthew writes about Jesus' Jewish heritage, about King Herod but mainly about the Kingdom of Heaven, as well as telling us about the visit of the Wise Men. Luke begins his account by introducing us to the Jewish people like Zechariah who were faithful to God's promises and were waiting patiently and expectantly to see what God would do; and then he begins his account of Jesus' birth by referring to the Roman Emperor Augustus, who was was himself being hailed, or hailing himself, as the Saviour of the world. Mark, perhaps because he's well aware people know the nativity story already, doesn't write about Jesus' birth at all, but goes straight into what Jesus did as a man – healing people, teaching, performing miracles - and dying on the cross. And John, writing years later, begins his gospel by making absolutely clear that the man Jesus who came into the world was also the son of God who made the universe, died for the world, rose from the dead, and even now rules over us, with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Let's enjoy the story of Christmas, and move on from the magic of the story to what it means; and always remember it's part of a much bigger story. 

Daily Telegraph article about 'Exam Board Cheating'

For some reason my comment to the Daily Telegraph article and Leader didn't 'take'.  So I wrote a comment in 'The Guardian' instead:
The issue here is the fairness. Pupils shouldn't be given an unfair advantage. In the bad old days this was ensured by Exam boards not giving any detailed information about what their questions would be about and the way they needed to be answered. Examination syllabuses fitted on one page of A4. The 'best' teachers, from the point of view of getting pupils through exams, were the ones who could predict what questions would come up. It was unfair on thousands of pupils, and wasteful in terms of not producing educated young people.
'Specifications', as they are now called, are A4 booklets of a hundred pages or so. They are very complicated, and, to make matters worse, change far too often, i.e. when the government gets a new idea into its head. However, at least the details are now transparent, as a result of which you don't have to have special, privileged, knowledge of the Examination system in order to prepare your pupils for the examination.
Seminars are therefore a vital means, though not the only one, whereby teachers can get a more accurate view of what the examinations will be like. They used to be arranged by local authorities, and the commercialisation of schools and the examination system is largely to blame for the present system's examples of unfairness. However, moral outrage at 'The Daily Telegraph's' 'shock revelations' doesn't really help.

Human Rights in Africa

Nigeria has just passed legislation making homosexual marriage illegal.  However, Nigerians are aware this doesn't go down well in the West.  Hence this article by Willie-Nwobu in 'Leadership', a magazine published in Abuja, attacking David Cameron's threat to cut aid to countries which do not respect human rights: 

http://allafrica.com/stories/201112010518.html 

This was my reply to the article:

I understand your outrage at the British Prime Minister's insensitive attitude at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. Britons often display a patronising attitude towards Africa, which will probably continue until Africa attains greater political and economic strength. However, this in turn depends upon African nations developing a more science-based society. This also applies to attitudes regarding sexuality, where prejudice unfortunately carries more weight than what your own scientists and medical researchers have to say on the subject: to the best of my knowledge none of them are telling you that on the basis of their research homosexuality is evil. Nor do ours - rather what they tell us is that human sexuality, like intelligence and many other human phenomena such as how we perform in examinations, can be seen as a bell curve. This means that while most people might agree with what you are saying, from their own experience, a minority will not. This is where human rights come in, and the ability of a society to tolerate minority views. You don't have to agree with homosexuality: but it is highly important in modern society to allow rights to those with whom you disagree. There is a good deal of evidence that social and economic progress go hand-in-hand with how tolerant a society is: with most European countries this is axiomatic, and this may explain David Cameron's apparent insensitivity (and, perhaps ironically, a lack of tolerance to a widely held African belief.)

Referring to the Bible to underpin anti-homosexuality legislation is highly questionable. Taking the Bible as a whole as our authority it now seems that our ideas about slavery and about the status of women were wrong in the light of freedom in Christ. Many bible experts are telling us that we may be wrong in judging homosexuality as evil.

A Bible in every school from Michael Gove

Derek Wilson, in his recent book about the Authorised Version '"The people's bible: the remarkable story of the King James Version", makes clear that as far as James l was concerned the production of an Authorised Version was an exercise in religious and political repression. The whole idea was that all the other versions, such as the Geneva Bible used by Shakespeare, would be replaced by an authorised version which had no nasty marginal glosses attacking his bishops, and would have lots of Latinised words making it suitable for worship. Surprisingly, it actually took about a century for the Authorised Version to drive the others off the market. Could Gove be the wisest fool in Christendom? 

The argument about teaching History

'Dr David Starkey rarely disappoints as a controversialist, so it is no surprise he thinks most of Britain is a white monoculture – "unmitigatingly white", he told a conference this week in London. The debate had been about the national curriculum, which Starkey said needed a "serious focus on our own culture". '
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/18/ian-jack-teaching-history-british-empire?

The debate about the national curriculum is based, in my opinion, on a false premise - that there is something seriously wrong with the teaching of History in our schools. In the summer of last year Michael Gove looked under the bonnet of National Curriculum History, shook his head, gave a low whistle, and announced that a simple service would not do and that we needed an entirely new vehicle. As every car manufacturer knows, it's the dream rather than the vehicle that needs selling, so he immediately approached three highly successful manufacturers for ideas, Ferguson, Schama, and Starkey. Gove chose Schama, who on the surface seemed to offer the same kind of flashy red sports model as the other two, but who then surprised everybody by going out and talking to both the technicians who produce the vehicles, and, even more surprisingly, consumers themselves [i.e. children, and, for all I know, parents.]

It is interesting that there have been very few contributions from History teachers to these comments on Ian Jack's excellent article. The reason for this is that they are far too busy dealing with an ever increasing pace of change, such as recent changes in the examination system which have wrecked modular courses they have spent so long preparing. (Incidentally modular courses, for instance at AS, are the very 'vehicles' which allow young adults to engage with the more sophisticated arguments to be found in some of the comments above. They are also much more like the real problems we have to think about and research in the workplace.)

But going back to Mr Gove's concern, voiced at a Conservative Party Conference and then at a book fair last year, that our children were being short-changed with regard to their (English) historical heriatage: the concern is simply misplaced. There is nothing wrong with the History National Curriculum originally set up by Mrs Thatcher's government, or at any rate by the committee of educationalists and teachers the government appointed. It provides a good framework, allowing teachers to devise their own schemes of work and lessons.

If there is a problem it is simply that the curriculum time available for History has been relentlessly and progressively squeezed, both in Primary and Secondary Schools.

The presentation of a coherent narrative of British History probably dropped out of schools some years ago, but recent trends, such as skipping a year of Key Stage 3 in order to prepare for GCSEs, have suddenly made things worse.

Ironically Academies do less History – an 'unintended consequence' perhaps.

Reflections from my living room

The word 'reflections' can suggest not just thinking, but thinking deeply about things. Thinking, and thinking deeply, can be two very different activities, the one involving, say, solving a crossword puzzle, the other involving thinking about the universe, which, as someone once pointed out, is very big indeed! Some people deliberately try to avoid thinking too much, for example by not watching or listening to the News.

But just sitting in our own living room minding our own business can itself raise ethical questions. Did the materials inside your mobile phone or flatscreen television come from reputable suppliers, or was it dug out by viciously exploited workers in darkest Africa? Has your buying fairtrade coffee made the problem of exploited coffee farmers go away? What about the leather in your sofa, cheap cashmere sweaters, cotton goods or laptops produced by child labour, or children's toys packaged courtesy of virgin wood from Sumatra? If we shie away from thinking about issues like these, we've probably given up also on the bigger issues – like too many people in the world, too few resources (even simple ones, like water), and climate change.

Pessimism, or even cynicism, has become a way of thinking, perhaps even a way of life. Any teacher will tell you that conveying an optimistic view of life to children and young people often goes against the grain of what society as a whole thinks. It is all too easy to believe that family life is disintegrating, communities are becoming uncaring, bullying is rife in the workplace, and those of whom we expect high standards, such as bankers, politicians, and journalists, are all in it just for the money.

I recently read a university magazine article by a leading industrialist predicting that the present world (probably receiving its 7 billionth inhabitant this year) will collapse by the end of the century. However, he assured his readers that the few who survived (apparently his dinner-party guests) would be able to live a wonderfully fullfilling life, with a life-span extended hundreds of years by ever-improving science and technology! (I'm not making this up – he even had a 'Sir' in front of his name.) The gentleman (or should that be 'knight' if he's a 'sir') seemed to have forgotten the founding Christian principles of his own university and the society it serves.

As Christians we are realistic about whose world this is (Psalm 24 v.1) and our own place in it (John 3 v.16). Our salvation covers the past, the present, and the future. We also believe in a God who loves all of us (Luke 12 v.6 above). This gives us a profound optimism that as long as we stay in partnership with the God who made us we can look forward to a better world for everyone. 

[My thanks to 'The Guardian' for the specific examples of unethical household objects]

What shall we tell the children about evolution?

An article in 'Christianity Today' http://www.christiantoday.com/article/evangelical.school.gets.the.go.ahead.in.nottingham/28446.htm invites us to get excited about creeping creationism: an Academy is planning as part of its Christian ethos to commend Creationism. However, the school's version of what's happening is different: http://www.eccnewark.org.uk/ It suggests that, if this was the plan, the school's managers have had a rethink. Actually the school concerned - 'Everyday Champions Academy'- appears to be under siege by parents, government inspectors, and Humanist lobbyists before it's even opened its doors, which is a pity.

But as the initial article got me excited, I'll share my opinion on the wider issues anyway. A good book to read on this is Denis Alexander's 'Creation or Evolution' - and not just because I knew him at University. He is at pains to point out, alongside his own convictions as a Christian and a scientist, that there are a number of different points of view on Evolution and on the Bible's account of creation, and how they might relate to each other.

There is, at the very least, a distinction between 'Creationsim' and 'Intelligent Design'. Basically Creationism appears to many so absurd that it is difficult to take it seriously. A few years ago some maths materials appeared which included a reference to the creation '6000 years ago' - a young earth indeed! Having said that, I have tried to point out, to a Christian who has a further degree in mathematics, the mismatch with History, Geology and Astronomy this produces - but to no avail. The arguments for Intelligent Design are more subtle: they appear absurd to most scientists, but not necessarily to the rest of us. My own rejection of it is not based on the scientific arguments - whose details I don't understand - but on the fact that most scientists reject it.

Personally, I was converted to 'Evolution' (from a previous position of not-having-thought-about-it-much) when at about the age of 10 my mum took me to the Natural History Museum. However, the pamphlet I came away with puzzled me, specifically its maps, which showed the continents in different geological eras, including, for example, an unbelievably vast Gondwanaland that included the South Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, as well as the continents of South America and Africa. Some years later 'the theory' of continental drift mysteriously became 'scientific fact', and I realised that the map was wrong, and that the areas marked as 'Land in Cambrian, but now Sea' were never land.

How should Evolution and Creationism be presented to children and young people in schools. The resignation of Michael Reiss 3 years ago - http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/sep/17/evolution.controversiesinscience

- shows how fraught this discussion has become. But the idea that young people should be excluded from this debate strikes me as dangerous. Better to give give Creationism and I.D. a mention at some point in the curriculum, and allow young people a chance to discuss them.