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SECTION IX
MATTERS OF NECESSITY
(Part Two)
SOCIETY - SO VERY
NECESSARY
A Balancing Act
Now we come to 'the necessity of maintaining social unity within diversity which the public education authority has an undoubted responsibility to observe in framing policy.' (Emphasis added.) From attenuated parental liberty with a weak, residual voice, we come to a social necessity. This is a good way of providing the assertions which are aptly synthesisable towards the attainment of the preferred end. It Is little else.
Why is it necessary? Communal authenticity? What is that? Authentic to whom, in what, in terms of what ideology, god? Necessary for whom? Necessary for survival?* 39 How? Why? What does survival matter? Why does it matter? In any case, survival of what? Will he who saves his (here social) life, then lose it?*40 How is all this known? Clearly by presupposition, that over fecund source for this Report, irrational as abundantly illustrated, at its base level. Even a tadpole might have something to teach the survival-of-what-we-are groups.
Again, to maintain unity, what unity shall we choose? The unity of individual families; of persons; of those not forced into ideological corners by officious educators who wish to draft churches and clubs to the point of direction wherever they have contact. whilst taking enormous liberties with their specific religious fields in the schools? To secure such unity. It might as well be argued, the Report should drop its unifying dream, and leave to those interested outside the secular dimensions of the educative State, the business of interpreting and modifying religious differences and their impact.
Who hired the State to draft our religion, and this on the slight and trivial excuse of helping our children reach a survival-oriented community consciousness wherein no god may thunder at another, and of course, wherein God may not speak (cf. The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, SMR, Ch.10); to indoctrinate them with the anti-absolutist dogmas, the irrational propagandas of their preference, the lees of agnostic, relativist, obsessive humanism or other 'necessary' ideological items (cf. SMR pp. 126-127, 1008-1111)? Is it not obsessive to insist so on drafting from such a base? What is more agnostic than our analysed symbolism with its unification of contradictories at the base level - the ground of being level, without terrain, in concrete blocks of constructed substitutes for the source of reality, made out of imagination, and with appalling cracks evidenced by logical analysis?
Whatever, however, the precise ideological preoccupation, we find here more presuppositions created for viewing. Here then is one more necessity, a social one which helps to interpret the others; just as they help to interpret this. None of them, alas, receives help from anywhere else.
Following on in the Report's course of flow, we touch on academic freedom with a little stricture about licence, but without any visible involvement in advance through systematic logical concatenation. From this 'brief visitation', as it is called, we turn to confer reciprocal regard on parent's rights.' Here - 'It will also be apparent that they are not necessarily absolute, and must he balanced by due regard for the rights and responsibilities of the other parties to the enterprise of public education, in particular the public education authority and the teaching profession.'
It is, however, not apparent. It is not at all clear that someone offering to educate someone else has rights in determining what is to happen to the fellow. It is rather than many offer, and many need, and some make agreements suitable to both; and that when the State is concerned, which some may forget is to serve the people, not least with sound logic and careful courtesy, it is one of those who offer, so that it will seek to offer what is desired by many, and this in a way which is not an offence to logic or a substitution of a created god, for God Almighty, on the ground that there are difficulties (cf. SMR Ch.1).
While the State often has its power go to its head, as in Rome when Caesar had a more direct desire to be worshipped, or concerning worship, than some mere thought of creating religions and directing ministers of religion (a horrendous thoughts cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms 7), and indeed often has removed heads which do not agree with this religious aspiration, it is not intrinsically necessary for it to act in this way. Behemoth is not the only animal, and a zoo of ferocious aspirations is not the only place to visit in the sociological scenario. Civilisation is, after all, possible, as is reason.
Like Galileo, facing the authoritarian force of the times, one feels rather like noting - 'And yet it moves.' The flavour of this literary method (it is not discernibly a logical method, unless a very subtle and wholly unbinding one dealing with the 'logic' - 'the inner logic'? - of psychology or some such thing), the flavour is strong. We look at this briefly, touch that lightly, note a few dicta of those who engage in their production, and then we find - IT IS APPARENT. Others have obiter dicta, but these are not appropriate. When in Victorian England did the 'appropriate' EVER raise with such plumage, its unsubdued head!
But there is no logical ground.
Now it is true that if there be parties to an enterprise, one component is not necessarily absolute (A). That much could have been obtained by that one sentence however. It in the rest of the sentence quoted which is of concern, and for which, apparently, the foregoing (A) is to serve as a warrant. As to that: Must rights of parents be balanced? or merely limited? The difference is vital,
As a parent, I might allow the school to choose bus or train for an expedition; but there is no question of balance per se, and in some a priori sense, It depends on what the constitution is, on the one hand; and in the case of real or implicit tyranny, it would depend on the commands of God, relative to a Christian, and on whatever ideology, if any, others had.
Thus as a matter of established power, these statements might be made; but as a matter of establishing a case for power, the conclusion absolutely transcends the premises, which are - in addition - diffuse, embellished with swelling presumptions and aggrandising assumptions, while inadequately concatenated. A mere comparison with the structure of Mill (supra) for example, whatever we may think of his validity, would be quite devastating in form.
The rights of the public educators are, then. 'established' as a balancing agent for parental rule of their children; and teachers share in this (p.120). The parent is adroitly, but in fact merely by presupposition, presented as a suppliant at the bar of this public authority which is to serve him: 'It will always be necessary to weigh private or sectional claims for special treatment with the manifest obligations of public education authority.'
We find the weighty processes of established authority dealing with the hopeful individual in the trifling area ... of the education of his children - religion thrown in, and of course we are told that theirs is very good for us, even if it be abomination and blasphemy in some equally adroit combination. (Is that category' not 'the supra-rational' anyway? they are pleading. In fact, of course, in the way they are treating it, as has been adequately exposed in detail above, it is sub-rational and as such, is inept for any reasoned application whatever.)
Selected and stylised by the State, is the material so cast into the public pot for what in - as we shall see ~ near to compulsory feeding. Then loom the correlates of inevitable exposure and pressurised participation, our old acquaintances from the earlier hinterland of the Report Religion.
We have not at
length made their acquaintance, in order to forget them so soon.
Beatific Balance
The said authority is wrestling with his very manifests ... or manifestoes, for there in an apocalyptic air to this arrogation of absoluteness. It becomes altogether conceivable that the absolute abhorrence of the absolutism approach is just this: that it is competitive with the desired absolutism of the State. If so, it is not at all unusual. Caesar and Christ were involved in the crucifixion the first time.
Indeed, it does suggest a competitive ground for the detestations of (other) absolutes. This could be explained, though not defended, if Report Religionists are deemed oblivious of their own assumed (State) crown. It is alas all too correlative with the large gap left in the area from which an absolute and articulate God was adjectivally evicted, symbolism and unity having swollen to allow no further room. War however must be conducted with more than words, and logic with more than mutually self-contradictory presuppositions. It is also better declared - dare we say it, 'more appropriate'!
This move then, towards arrogation of final power in the State over an area of the vital fields of religion, in the child's upbringing, makes much more sense, and the blindness betokened by the assumptions conveyed by mere assertions is for less incredible, when we consider our earlier findings on the Report Religion. If we take seriously what we have previously seen, when analysing the Report religion's dismissal of matrix, indivisible authority and express communication objectively from God, then we should indeed expect some absoluteness in that authority which does these great things.
When, the gap, is putatively there, and when the State waxes numerous and is seeking to survive (as we see and shall shortly see further), and indeed to provide a unity which God, the objective God (cf. That Magnificent Rock, Ch. 5, and Barbs, Arrows and Balms 7), might once have provided before His official demise at such hands, so handsomely: will it leave it unfilled?
On the Report Religion scenario, it is the State via its public authority which is the entrant - filling with all fulness. What shall we say? or sing? 'Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors for the State of glory has come in'? There is nothing very glorious however about the state of the oppression which shouts at us over the imperial bull-horn, from these Report pages.
However, in form we anticipate, for as yet (though we will extend) there is no question of a hymnody for the new absolute. Let us merely, then, indicate that it is here exposed as the State, which seeks to secure assent to what really in a proposal: that
It all coheres; it fits with
the precision of ancient Egyptian blocks in the State pyramids of their own
time - and as we know, these too were not always to be obtained without a great
deal of effort, and perhaps... some regimentation of those superlatively
blessed, in being, shall we say permitted? to build
them. Why even those of
What is virtually incredible, to the unsophisticated at least, in terms of arrant and most available Report presuppositionalism, now becomes readily all too readily comprehensible. Evacuation precedes resettlement. (True, it is no more valid for that reason! but they are marking out their new settlement as supra-rational, where you do not, apparently, concede the need to be reasonable. ) All this tends of course to confirm consecutively prior analysis and to constitute the sort of verification of which the case is susceptible at this level.
It is now that we come to something which, of its kind, is almost a masterpiece. It occurs at the bottom of p.120. First the ponderous language may need re-reading, if we are to remain at all precise. Let us try it:
Thus, in sum, public authority can be duly presidential over parents by two steps. These are balance and social unity. Rarely has so much been accomplished so readily by so little from so many. However, the Report Religion is only in its formative stage; and it may yet fail to accomplish in practice what it proposes in its exalted mode, on paper. Our concern of course is the paper.
There is in this simple accomplishment for the 'social' milieu as defined by presupposition, perhaps an implicit reference to relative sizes such as some transport drivers may imply for drivers of saloon cars, as a prelude to the suppliancy of the latter, before the uninhibited progress of the transport behemoth. Such steps, then, now being duly taken, its work, the public education authority's great work, can advance.
But what is this? At once it must establish the subjects deemed crucial for whatever social unity is defined to be. "No 'exemptions' permitted, 0 suppliants!" Note how the terminology continues to develop the case, phrase-wise. It is an interesting method, however unconscious it may be, and unworthy of reward.
By the foot of p.124, we find this: 'If, then, the parent's right to withdraw his child from courses of study he finds objectionable cannot validly (sic) be maintained in disregard of the indefeasible rights and responsibilities of the public education authority and the teaching profession, what is its relative status?' (Italics added).
The expression 'in disregard of' already suggests a sort of lèse-majesté to 'authentic community' or its political power base; 'indefeasible rights' have an ancient, a sovereign and especially a high legal sound suggestive of fanfare and grandeur (and perhaps, for some, the suitability of bowing the head, the knee or the pen, touching the forelock or engaging in even more profound obeisance). All this carries the day, in terms of sonority and euphony against the little word 'objectionable'. This is sandwiched ingloriously between these awesome powers and weighty matters, as if it did well to receive any acknowledgment at all, before so high a court. Thus the force of the fact that it IS objectionable is swallowed up - but in what?
The engulfment technique seems to comprise two unwarranted steps, as already noted: a systematic increment of portentousness of phraseology, including the deft use of two negatives; and the exhibition of increasingly ponderous expressions of force, assumed to have been achieved, in the first instance. This must be some sort of process; but it would be difficult to call it reasoning. What it is, one would prefer not to characterise.
Now the result is admittedly quite fascinatingly making this one of the most interesting exhibits in the Report and of its Religion. The parents are by some distilling process now definitely defeated (it reminds one of some of the computerised football 'games', or of commentators or captains before the Saturday event, engaging or indulging in what is untechnically termed 'hype'). Thus the parents, they are nothing but suppliants. (Indeed, in the sort of sense shown, you could simply say 'by definition', in obeisance before the Princely Presuppositions: surely, after this, no one need maintain that the study of the English language is of no practical consequence.). They are crushed between the State's Jaws chomping away with their 'indefeasibly' delicacies, committed to the oral cavity of the State, with its servitors, all to be duly COMMITTED to the process as if exhibited from the Report, like teeth within the jaw.
Teachers or parents of any conviction, it seems, are a thing of the past. There are these terrible forces, like death-rays, which indefeasibly requite any alleged deterrent to the take-over. All is still before the Princely Presuppositions, and of course, those - are they really mere mortals - who WIELD THEM!
It remains for the Report to deliver them, in measure, from pure abjectness and utter desolation. The matter is, then, despatched somewhat summarily as befits a victory. The parents - and let us remind you, the Report nudges (may we personify? thank you) that 'it cannot ... be a prior right' that parents have. People are simply not allowed to be people, but must conform as State things. The ideah! It is clear, oh so very clear! What wonders what Emperor was more stately; but equally, one wonders how on earth people could pretend to be free who vote for this majesty of mouthing.
Nevertheless, to
pursue the thorn, parents, they have some
rights? Yes. They have leave either
i) after all rights of other parties have been
examined, as in their discretion no doubt they would be ... examined, to have a
right of 'last resort' which perhaps could be fittingly re-phrased in view of
their smallness, least resort; or
ii) to have a conditional right,
a matter of appeal when all other parties have been given their due
thought. The 'last resort' is also characterised
as 'residual'. The 'appeal' sufficiently validates our thought of suppliancy. So the residual, of last resort, the
conditional, may look with longing eyes, relegated to the rear, at the aweful authority of the State and its managed minions: such
seems the hue of the hills of State, before the waters of majesty.
Beatific Belligerency
Next the Report makes a very nice, but highly inappropriate attempt to remove the right of parental withdrawal (pp.126-7). The earlier mode of education. we learn, was didactic. Now it is more empirical or inductive. Perhaps this befits better the wonderfully meek ignorance of those who really do not know, and so must tell us all about it, so that we can follow them in their ignorance, with due submission.
Thus, in this meekness, we find it is more accommodating now, education. One would not have noticed this, had it not been so divulged. It is more 'hospitable' to divergent views. Apparently there has been a volte-face which even the writers did not notice.
But let us proceed with these verbal liberties, for what they are worth. Is something then to be gained?
Hence, we read, there is this remarkable thing. It Is called 'inverisimilitude' It relates to 'the notion of a statutory right of withdrawal' from a course in this, our tolerant age. (It is of course negatively related.)
In view of the foregoing, this toleration claim is good enough for a Dickensian character. We have studied in some detail, the appearance of ruthless authoritarianism which is so often found in those discounting authority, while they set up a new one*41 . Soviet Russia is a classic case, as even Krushchev exhibited; but the same sort of thing at a different level can be found in the thundering pronouncements for example, of anti-grammarians*42 who authoritatively decide and determine against those who might upset their new rule?
Thus it is not despite as would be apt, but because of this new surreptitious and conceivably unintentional authoritarianism of the liberators (such were those termed in another sphere who 'freed' the occupants of the Cambodian capital, presumably from themselves, and certainly from the capital...) - that no need is seen for 'a statutory right of withdrawal' *43 .
The inhospitality, to adopt their term, is crucial and absolute; the blasphemy in Biblical terms, to cite but one example, is profound, and the assault on divine claims in the Bible, total and presuppositional, as we have considered at length. This is a part of the very milieu and atmosphere of the proposed course, and to boot, a part of the 'best' and the 'acceptable', the 'authentic', and so on: with other question begging and definition deterring terms ... Nevertheless, the right of withdrawal because of this new thing, this new tolerance in our ages is hopefully to be removed. Remarkable, quite remarkable. But this must be used for our purpose, our creedal concentration.
There is no suggestion of intention on the part of the Report program's orientation, to achieve such remarkable results as these; so that presuppositions once more figure to the point. Indeed they do not even appear to be recognised, though they amaze the onlooker by the assurance with which they are utilised, being 'clearly' the case and so on, as if they were really being presented to year 12 High School students as examples for the examination of the phenomenon of 'begging the question', the better to safeguard them from that undoubted logical flaw. And this, it is education?
Such is (pre-suppositional) life! This in characteristic of certain forms of religion which do not stress the rational in their field; and as we have seen, this is the case with the Report Religion: the subjective. intuitive, symbolic (largely) unifiable-with-other-faiths core of it. We seem to have been rewarded disproportionately in our excursion, then, for the creed-exhibiting purpose in hand.
However, real and indeed acute, as is our
present concern for the parents under the sceptre of
presupposition, in our present context this is a passing matter. It Is not here relevant that we should dwell further on it. Our
point is that the new Report having 'established', evidently to its own
satisfaction in some sense, its general proposition in right-to-withdraw
matters, we may anticipate confidently that it will be greatly helped*44 in dealing with religion. We will recall the
importance to it, of avoiding subversives (that is to say, those alien
religious bodies or their representatives, constituents or sympathisers, who had to conform while the school exercised some of
their erstwhile powers for them, on its newly potent but allegedly secular
premises).
1
The parents, we have seen, already bear philosophic
fetters: their protestations are invalid before the indefeasible authority (cf.
Report p.124, as earlier quoted) as reasoned fetters, to authoritarian
declaration; but they are present as verbal and putative fetters.
Perhaps, then, in something for some reason at some time, they MAY be heard, if
their residual and conditional position seems to permit of it, to the powers
that would be. Let us then hope that such powers never are; but if they are to
be, that they will be so for a time which is short.
These authoritarian educational powers? How then do they treat the parents? They treat them with a procedural respect directly proportional to the measure of logical regard the Report has warranted for its pretensions; but inversely proportional to the exaltation of the public education authority, that receiver of the goods the parents produce, known as children.
It is an intriguing exercise in procedural methods, however, to watch exactly how the fetters, which to a measured degree, the parents constituted, become their own, enforced by the State, indeed unscrewed for the nonce, but made the surer, the safer, by the conception - a concession, we recall, allowed from a merely verbal eminence. This is all on pp. 277 ff.. We have already examined the seemingly sportive assumption that the religious education should adopt the cognomen 'secular', thus enabling the Act to be implemented while Education Department Staff proceed to teach religion. We need do no more than recall our earlier exposure on that topic.
However, this 'secular' hypothesis, though a flat contradiction in view of its implications and confrontations with religious authority, per se, is surely inventive and shows great initiative. It is this, which had it been spent instead on teaching within the confines of the Commonwealth constitution and without the carefully forged self-contradictory presuppositions, might have accomplished rather more for the children.
For the moment, this 'secular' hope of doing, by verbal gymnastics, what is adequately forbidden by the Commonwealth Constitution at least, arises with new importance. (It may be noted that the Commonwealth is a major contributor to State financial needs for education within its realm, in various regards.)
First, the Crown Solicitor is to determine (so enabled by the educative experience of reading this Report and his legal applications to this and other points) - this State figure whoever he may be, is being sought to determine whether this can legally be done. If so, the matter is simple. If not?
Then an amendment will be necessary to Section 23. Meanwhile, during transitions, no great changes need be made. Religious outsiders, no part of the establishment or its views, may for the time continue to come, prior to their educative exclusion from the class-room (though they could even later, still be consulted outside it, and this even on school property!). They might come under other management... or managed in the ways earlier exhibited.
Now the Committee at work in these matters, we learn, has been forcibly impressed by the Chapter we have just considered, So were we; but evidently not in the same direction. The Committee also has to take cognisance of the fact that over three quarters of both students and teachers supported the right of parents to withdraw their children from religious education programs.' What then, with culture - some sort of cultural mandate from that unspeaking and unstable, but voluble ... thing, with this and statistics seemingly at variance, are they to do?
First, they say remarkably little, compared with earlier occasions. No mounting phrases are seen. Second, they allow senior students to be irrelevant as their programs are electives. (They do not HERE point out the possible impact on the students from the religious segments which might be included in other subjects - 'appropriate' religious segments... This signalisation perhaps is left to such as we. So is the consideration of how the electives will be graded, approached, from the sovereign status of culture, enshrined, enthroned and installed in the courses, and in the CURRICULAR MODEL. )
What is left, for the finale? Just this: first, the 'others' should be given a grudging liberty to withdraw*45. The reason adduced: 'It would be wrong to place in jeopardy the continuance of a program of religious education because it was not approved by a small minority of such parents.' We sense the lack of sympathy with the non-unonist party. AS a large majority want liberty for dissidents, but a small body is affirmed to want actual withdrawal, we become aware of a significant whittling. We could have hoped that the large body, the majority as it is stated to be, would in some way impart some of the power of their reasons to the committee which so focusses the small body who might actually withdraw. Yet withdraw they may - for the moment, perhaps to the music of Section 23 in its traditional setting. We have seen how they prefer a certain naturalness about the take-over, so that the now subject religions would be better if they could, as it were, keep some of their national dress. It adds colour.
For a
preliminary transitional period, and later by Section 23 or without it, then,
we have witnessed the impacts of prospective or envisaged educational
authority.
END-NOTES
In fact, Jesus' words, in John 12:24, strikingly impact with any mere survival tenacity:
Mark
Some societies might conceive of something
rather better to do than reproduce themselves; and some might even conceive of
something better to obtain, than a replica or engraving of themselves. Absolam in the Bible, son of David of illustrious fame, but
himself rather less, was keen on the conservation of his image. It did not end
well. It needs to be considered what that image IS! of
what it is an image, and why such an image should be conserved; and indeed,
what more excellent objectives might be found. Some have even conceived of the
idea of sacrifice rather than reproduction. Some have conceived of the idea of
survival, but what has survived has been ghastly in its ineptitude, rank
grossness and degeneration.
We have already heard J.S. Mill declaim on the topic (pp. 166-171 in Section VIII).
See my Some Points on Teaching Methods in
English,
S.S. Laurie has a useful historical point which is of interest for the extent to which parallel considerations provocatively relate to our current topic, though coming from another Age. (For our own Age, see earlier in this Section, and infra.)
In the book, Educational Opinion from
the Renaissance, p.2, this writer
meditates: