The Prime Minister celebrating Diwali inside No. 10 Downing Street last week brought back fond memories of my own family. My beautiful and only granddaughter of three years old was filmed telling her father about the meaning of Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Light. It was incredibly sweet, and to some extent, it could be viewed as a triumph for our educational system that nursery children are being taught the rudiments of comparative religion, if only they had something with which to compare it.
I remember the oldest of her two brothers celebrating Chinese New Year to make the Chinese children at the school feel valued, and dropping me in it by telling his teacher I could speak Chinese. I can’t, but I used to visit China regularly and he had visions of me coming to his class, rattling off a few words of Mandarin. As it was, he had to make do with a few coloured trinkets I had been given in China to take along to show and tell. I don’t think the school goes as far as starving our kids between sunrise and sunset during Ramadan, but you can bet your boots they know all about it.
So far so good, and I’d fully support it if only they knew anything about their Judaeo-Christian heritage which forms the basis of our civilisation, punctuates and provides the name of our Gregorian calendar and provides the rhythm to our years and our lives. But no. Christmas is all about presents and Easter is all about eggs. I know because I have asked them. Their parents, and this applies to all their siblings, don’t bring them up in the ways of Christianity, mainly due to my abject failure to enforce Christianity at home (maybe it was the ‘enforcing’ that was the problem) and to set a good example as a Christian father. The nearest they get to anything remotely related to the Christian story is a Nativity play at nursery or early primary school, but this is as likely to feature Gandalf, Hobbits and Harry Potter characters as shepherds and angels.
I am aware, as a Christian and a Catholic that not everyone shares my beliefs. But I regularly hear atheists and even non-Christians expressing gratitude for the values that Christianity has afforded our country and our culture and who would have no objections to Christianity having a more prominent place in the school curriculum. Witness the number of Muslim children taking places at Catholic schools.
The primary educators of children are their parents, and it is to be presumed that if children of cultures other than our own attend our schools that they will learn about their own cultures at home. It is not at all objectionable that children should learn about other cultures, but the context must be one that places those within our own culture, and first provides them with an educational foundation which emphasises that. At the very least our children should leave primary school understanding why we have Christmas, Easter and other Christian celebrations, know the words to our National Anthem and who won the World Wars.
Therefore, far from seeing the above as shining examples of inclusivity and open mindedness, which is undoubtedly how they are marketed, they are glaring examples of cultural hypersensitivity and the product of the problem of multiculturalism that we have created for ourselves. In creating a multicultural society, we have only succeeded in emphasising other cultures while downplaying our own. Unfortunately, and perhaps inevitably, multiculturalism is turning out to be a zero-sum game.
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
