Education: Personal, Social and Health Education

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lady Massey of Darwen for securing this debate and introducing it so well. I want to bring a slightly different dimension to our debate and talk about the social and political context in which education needs to be seen and located. After all, we are asking what new skills and knowledge are needed in order that people can grow up in our society as sane human beings. Our society has changed profoundly over the past few decades and it is going to change even more. That will present the citizens of the future with new challenges. I want to look in particular at three of these new challenges which have not yet been noted in our debate.

First, there is the challenge caused by globalisation. We are an integral part of an interdependent world. The rest of the world is not beyond our boundaries; in fact, the expression “the rest of the world” does not make sense because it is already here in our midst, shaping us in a profound way. That is so not only in the form of immigrants, but also in the form of new cultures and new modes of ideas. The very idea of a border becomes in a sense problematical. Because we are constantly being exposed to new currents of thought and new ideas, there is inevitably a sense of panic. What is going to happen to us? There is a sense of disorientation and the loss of a sense of belonging. Our children, from a very young age, are faced with the problems of, “Who am I? Where do I belong? How do I retain a sense of continuity while at the same time coping with change?”. The first basic survival skill that they are going to need will be how to maintain a sense of identity that is not frozen. It must be able to cope with change, but at the same time it should not be like a set of clothes which can be discarded in favour of another set. We will have to teach them reflective skills from a young age.

The second profound change our society is undergoing is that we are increasingly multicultural. This is not only because of outsiders but because of choices that our own people are making, such as gay marriage, cohabitation and lots of other things. If we are going to live at peace with ourselves and others in this kind of society, we will require certain multicultural competences and sensibilities. We should learn to appreciate differences, feel at ease in their presence, and also develop an imaginative sympathy. Right from the age of two or three, children should be able to recognise that people can be of different colours and have different ways of life, and feel at ease with them and learn to cope with them. That skill is absolutely crucial as children grow up if we are going to maintain any degree of social cohesion and social harmony.

The third skill that I think is just as important has to do with something that one or two of your Lordships have already mentioned. There is a pervasive culture of indifference to others. We have seen severe cuts to people’s livelihoods brought about by the banking crisis, which I thought would have provoked an enormous sense of injustice and anger. It did not do anything of the kind. Bankers seem to be shameless; what are the rest of us doing? We who failed to mount sufficient pressure on the Government to bring about a regulatory regime are complicit in and partly responsible for the consequences of our deeds. Therefore, these cuts are not happening behind our backs; they are happening because of us.

It is this culture of indifference—“I have nothing to do with it, it is all the Government over there taking decisions”—that has to be countered. That involves a sense of compassion, concern for others and, going a little further, what some philosophers have called the ethical care of the self—a certain sense of pride in oneself, a sense of responsibility for oneself, so that one should be able say, with regard to health education, sex education, or whatever, “I am not that kind of person. I value myself too highly to become pregnant as a teenager or to engage in certain abominable practices”. If one had that kind of pride in oneself, which is more than self-respect and different from self-esteem, one would not dream of doing certain things. Can we instil that culture of care of the self in our children? If we do, we will have solved many of our problems without having recourse to technology or bureaucratic regulation.