Theos report on Faith Schools
Hat Tip: Church Mouse
It should strike us as extraordinary that the institution that has sponsored and nurtured education the longest (even more than any government or monarch) should be required to make the case for why it should be involved in public education today. Long before the first universities in the West, the Church through its cathedral schools was the progenitor of education and schooling. There was no England or Europe until languages were given a script and until oral histories were written down; in a word, until schools began.
The Church was at the centre of that cultural formation not because, as secularists assume, the church wished only to proselytise but because at the heart of Christian faith is the holy text and this text from its original Greek and Hebrew scripts was translated into the languages and the dialects of ordinary people. The cultural impact of Wycliffe’s and Tyndale’s work of translating the Bible into English was as seminal and revolutionary as the impact that Luther’s translating the Bible into a dialect of German had in forming the German nation.
Illiterate priests were taught Latin so that they could read the Scriptures which in turn fostered so much of the early medieval cultural renewal of what was to become Western Europe. The steeples on our cathedrals, therefore, are not merely a symbol of the religious moorings of Western European culture; they are also symbols of how Europe came to be civilised.
With our society afflicted by historical myopia, church schools, for example, have had in the last twenty years to justify why they should exist. What culturally should be self evident has now to be restated since many of those who form the media and academic elites seem unaware of their history or are hell-bent on creating a brave new world ‘in their own image’ – children themselves of a fragmented, individualistic society that
emerged after the world wars with its rejection of authority including religion. That this attitude has led to numerous social and educational problems with which we daily struggle seems not to have affected that determination. (This was the thinking in the sixties and seventies that replaced many Victorian buildings with ambitious structures in mortar and aluminium but which today are eye-sores on our city landscapes needing to be pulled down barely thirty years later.)
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