PAVEMENT ART
A step beyond the Mona Lisa rendered in coloured chalks.
TO BELIEVE OR NOT TO BELIEVEÖ
A recent headline in two or three of the broadsheets announced plans for the drawing up of guidelines for the teaching of atheism in schools. Falling church numbers seem to have influenced this notion advanced by the government body that administrates curriculum & examination policy in England & Wales, the Qualifications & Curriculum Authority.
Although some schools already incorporate non-belief into their religious education teaching, there exist no national guidelines for its structuring. In proposing a structure the QCA is continuing to pursue relentlessly its policy of assuming that teachers in individual schools are entirely incapable of putting together & then implementing unaided a syllabus for their particular subject. Somehow three years of higher education followed by instant & intensive experience in the classroom just doesnít provide a firm enough foundation for the task.
With this ludicrous proposal the governmental policy of the nationalisation of knowledge that now spans three administrations approaches farce. The fall in church attendance has been steepening for years now. While 19 per cent of Britons attended a weekly religious service in 1980, by 1999 that had fallen to 7 per cent. Itís the final legacy of over two centuries of rationalism &, more recently, the proliferation of alternative approaches to spirituality. And this last stage or reorientation is proceeding very rapidly. In my direct experience very few reflective young people have a clearly articulated sense of what they believe about divinity, indeed, about existential issues of any complexion. They are more than ready to discuss matters temporal & spiritual; the appetite for enquiry, the thirst for knowledge are no less imperatives for the more outwardly sophisticated & knowing kids of today than they were for my more sheltered & conservative generation.
But the spectrum of belief no longer runs between largely unquestioning Judao-Christian worship & relative non-conformism. Now it stretches from the minority position of conventional Western church orthodoxy standing alongside fundamentalist Islam, Hinduism & Sikhism, passing through various increasingly partisan or liberal interpretations of the Old & New Testaments & their equivalents in other faiths, into the ënew spiritualityí in the form of Wicca or Gaia or Druidism & beyond, & ending up in the broad fields of informed or ëdonít knowí agnosticism, humanism & cheerful, unafraid atheism. What underpins it all is the doubt & scepticism that, for better & worse, informs our age.
We donít need atheism taught in schools ñ not if itís to be served up from some prescriptive menu provided by the QCA. Paradoxically, what we do need is a well-grounded philosophical curriculum that incorporates both the roots & branches of world belief & every significant variety of alternative existential thinking. If young people are to make considered choices as to what will or will not determine their view of the human condition then they should be provided by the school with whatever forum best suits its individual situation. Let us at all costs keep the dead hand of the State out of the classroom so as to permit the teachers & the students to pursue enquiry in their own way.
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PUTTING ON THE RITZ
Apparently the Ritz ñ arguably the most famous hotel in the world ñ is engaging in penny-pinching practices. Its restaurant manager Simon Girling admitted to an employment tribunal that unfinished bottled wine served in the Trafalgar Suite was then sold again to customers by the glass in the restaurant.
This wouldnít have come to light had it not been for a case brought against the Ritz by sacked former deputy restaurant manager Edip Adanir. It seems that he was dismissed for providing to his friends free of charge fine wines to the value of £7,000. Adanirís counsel told the tribunal that ìif anybody was stealing wine it wasÖthe Ritz hotelî.
Next time I dine there Iím taking the bottle home with me.
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11:36:54 PM 
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