Education and Society

Lord Sacks Excerpts

Friday 8th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sacks (CB)]

My Lords, I too am grateful to the most reverend Primate for initiating this debate on a subject that is vital to the future flourishing of our children and grandchildren.

Perhaps I may be allowed to speak personally as a Jew. Something about our faith moves me greatly, and it goes to the heart of this debate. At the dawn of our people’s history, Moses assembled the Israelites on the brink of the Exodus. He did not talk about the long walk to freedom; he did not speak about the land flowing with milk and honey; instead, repeatedly, he turned to the far horizon of the future and spoke about the duty of parents to educate their children. He did it again at the end of his life, in those famous words: “You shall teach these things repeatedly to your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk on the way, when you lie down and when you rise up”. Why is there this obsession with education that has stayed with us from that day to this? It is because, to defend a country, you need an army, but to defend a civilisation, you need schools. You need education as the conversation between the generations.

Whatever the society, the culture or the faith, we need to teach our children, and they theirs, what we aspire to and the ideals we were bequeathed by those who came before us. We need to teach them the story of which we and they are a part, and we need to trust them to go further than we did when they come to write their own chapter.

We make a grave mistake if we think of education only in terms of knowledge and skills—what the American writer David Brooks calls the “résumé virtues” as opposed to the “eulogy virtues”. This is not woolly idealism; it is hard-headed pragmatism. Never has the world changed so fast, and it is getting faster every year. We have no idea what patterns of employment will look like two, let alone 20, years from now, what skills will be valued, and what will be done instead by artificially intelligent, preternaturally polite robots.

We need to give our children an internalised moral satellite navigation system so that they can find their way across the undiscovered country called the future. We need to give them the strongest possible sense of collective responsibility for the common good, because we do not know who will be the winners and losers in the lottery of the global economy, and we need to ensure that its blessings are shared. There is too much “I” and too little “we” in our culture, and we need to teach our children to care for others, especially for those who are not like us.

We work for all these things in our Jewish schools. We give our children confidence in who they are so that they can handle change without fear and keep learning through a lifetime. We teach them not just to be proud to be Jewish but to be proud to be English, British, defenders of democratic freedom and active citizens helping those in need. Schools are about more than what we know and what we can do; they are about who we are and what we must do to help others become what they might be. The world that our children will inherit tomorrow is born in the schools we build today.

Anti-Semitism

Lord Sacks Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Sacks (CB)]

My Lords, in 1927 a French intellectual called Julien Benda published a prophetic book called La Trahison des Clercs—the treason of the intellectuals—in which he described the process by which universities that were once known as places for the collaborative pursuit of truth had become homes, in his phrase,

“for the intellectual organization of political hatreds”.

Sadly, that is what some universities in this country have become today. I speak from personal experience.

I was Chief Rabbi for 22 years and during that time I was under constant security protection, but only once in all those years did I feel genuinely afraid. That was when I gave a talk to students at Oxford University. Just before the start of my lecture, a whole group of rather menacing Muslim students came in and occupied the centre of the front row. It was a blatant attempt at intimidation. Luckily, my capacity to be boring at length saved the day and after half an hour they left, but that is increasingly what Jewish students, and indeed Jewish university chaplains, are facing. So threatened do Jewish university students feel that in 2012 they asked me personally to address the annual conference of the National Union of Students. I did. I spoke about academic freedom. I explained that this means that a university is a place where you give a respectful hearing to views with which you disagree. There was a wonderful atmosphere, with people of all ethnicities and faiths. A group of young women Muslim students came up especially to thank me, and I left on a high. That evening, when I had left, the Union of Jewish Students stand was vandalised and threatening messages were left all around.

One of the most frightening books I have read is Ed Husain’s The Islamist. He describes in detail how a mere handful of extremists from Hizb ut-Tahrir were able to dominate and intimidate an entire university. In that case, the primary victims were not Jews but predominantly Muslims, primarily young Muslim women who were not wearing the veil. This is how it begins. The ending of this story is not a happy one—not for Jews, not for Muslims, not for anyone. In this age of extremes, we need to be vigilant in defending academic freedom, which means zero tolerance for intimidation of any group of students. It means insisting that in student debates all sides are given a respectful hearing. It means refusing to allow universities or any other institutions to become homes for the intellectual organisation of political hatreds. If the report in today’s Times is to be believed, that includes Her Majesty’s parliamentary estate. If we do not, this will be the treason of the intellectuals of our time.

Marriage

Lord Sacks Excerpts

Thursday 10th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sacks]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester on initiating this vital debate on the future of marriage in Britain, and I do so for a simple reason. Our children are going to have it very much harder than we did. They are going to find it harder to get a job, harder to buy a home, harder to find security in a world changing almost faster than we can bear. The economy will face ever increasing global challenges. Government expenditure will not be what it was. The competition for almost everything, from university places to jobs, will become ever more intense, and it is almost impossible for us as a society to prepare them in advance for the challenges they are going to face because, in Donald Rumsfeld's phrase, the unknown unknowns are multiplying daily.

There is, though, one thing that we can do. We can try to ensure that as many of our children as possible grow up in strong, stable, supportive families. It is in families that we learn the self-confidence, the trust, the discipline and the resilience that stay with us for the rest of our lives. It is in families that we learn emotional intelligence and the habits of the heart that make for happiness. It is in families that we learn to co-operate with and care for others so that we become responsible shapers of our individual and collective future.

Children lucky enough to be born into strong families are advantaged in almost every area for the rest of their lives: school attendance, educational achievement, getting and keeping a job. They will earn more. They will be healthier. They will be more likely to form strong families of their own. Children who do not have that good fortune will be disadvantaged for the rest their lives.

Strong families—not always, but mostly—need the institution of marriage and only political correctness and the desire to be non-judgmental lead us to deny that fact. It is said that marriage is just a piece of paper. It is not. It is a publicly demonstrated act of commitment. It is said that cohabitation is just as good. It is not. The average cohabiting relationship lasts a mere two years, and even when it leads to marriage, increases the chance of eventual divorce. It is children who pay the price. Britain, which has among the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in the world and one of the world’s highest rates of childbirth outside marriage, was found by UNICEF in 2007 to have the unhappiest children in the western world.

I come from a faith and a people that have survived for 4,000 years, often under difficult circumstances, and that still today contribute disproportionately to almost all facets of British life because they made the family their highest joy, the home their citadel, marriage a sacred covenant and parenthood the highest responsibility. If the Jewish experience has anything to say to Britain today it is: recognise marriage, not just cohabitation, as in the best interests of the child. Do so in the tax system. Do so in the educational system. Do so in relationship support. Otherwise, our children will pay the price—financial, educational, medical and psychological—for generations to come. Without stable marriages we will not have strong families, and without strong families we will not have a big society.