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Original sin
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5 min read

My conversation with... Katharine Birbalsingh

A stubborn hopefulness drives Katharine Birbalsingh. Belle Tindall reflects on her conversation with the controversial headteacher for the Re-Enchanting podcast.
A head teacher sits at her desk, holding her hands in a gesture in front of her.

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I’m finding it very hard to sum up my conversation with Katharine Birbalsingh, to place it neatly in a mental box. But I’m wondering if that’s the value of it.  

Katharine has infamously been dubbed ‘Britain’s Strictest Headteacher’, and after spending an hour in her company, I can understand why – it’s as if an air of authority was baked into her DNA. She is the founder and headteacher of Michaela Community School in Wembley, a school which has garnered a huge amount of attention not only because of their outstanding success, but also because of the ‘clear ethos’ that Katherine accredits the success to.  

Michaela School has silent and single-file corridors, meaning that transitions between classes tend to take ninety seconds. Turning around to talk to another child in class is immediately punishable by detention, children are taught to stand for Katherine when she enters assembly, and lunch times have set conversation starters. When Katharine says, ‘I believe in strictness’, she really means it.  

It’s safe to say that Katherine has both avid admirers and passionate critics, and perhaps many people who can’t quite decide which camp to pitch their tent in.  

What struck me the most about Katharine’s approach to education during our conversation was the why behand the what. It seems to me that these behavioural expectations are not for their own sake. She defined her approach this way, 

‘It’s holding them (the pupils) to high standards, and loving them enough to do so… People don’t like strictness, but it’s a way in which you can support the most disadvantaged children’.  

Katharine’s educational philosophy is driven by a stubborn compassion, a stubborn hope, a stubborn confidence. Michaela school, a school with no kind of selection process, refuses to underestimate a single child that flows through it. Katharine has made the decision to give her life to helping children, particularly those who are so often overlooked, reach their full potential, and therefore, happiness. And who can fault that? Her school may be extreme in its methods (although I’m sure she would refute that), but I find the reasons that undergird its culture hard to find any kind of fault with.  

Another thing that I can fully agree with is Katharine’s palpable admiration for teachers, something which she believes to be lacking in common consciousness,  

‘People who aren’t teachers don’t realise just how much teachers have to give; how exhausting it is, how much energy it requires, and how intellectually demanding it is. I think that being a teacher is the biggest privilege and the hardest job. And people who haven’t done it, they just don’t realise… they don’t realise how clever you have to be, how skilled you have to be.’ 

I, like you, know and love enough people who are/have been teachers to be able to wholly agree with these words. We are not nearly thankful enough, and we need more teachers to tell us so.  

So, this was the arc of the first half of our conversation with Katharine, we were able to soak up her obvious passion for her job and the children that she spends her days with. I found myself thankful that Michaela School exists, but equally thankful that my parents did not send me there.  

Katharine is a campaigner by nature, and so the second half of our conversation with Katharine seemed to focus on some of her more controversial views on wider culture. It is at this point in the episode that you will undoubtedly be reminded that she has become quite the polarizing figure. There is plenty to admire about Katharine, there is also, as you can imagine, plenty to disagree with. I’m willing to place my own cards on the table and admit that there was much that Katharine said that I do not agree with. While there is no need to go into the specifics (what you think about her views because of this conversation is of far more importance), on reflection I have noticed that there is a theme that ties together the places where we differ in opinion and conviction: the theme is binary characterisation.  

When surveying the cultural landscape, there is a tendency (amongst us all) to place people into binary categories in a way that I’m not convinced is actually happening within the cultural landscape itself (at least, not to the extent we are assuming). There is nuance to us all, I’m afraid it is an inescapable by-product of humanity, we are not 2D creatures. And so, there is nuance to our political and cultural ideas, our convictions, perceptions, hopes and fears. Any characterisation of us that strips away such nuance is doomed to be a caricature, a mischaracterisation.  

I found her reference to ‘original sin,’ and the way she uses it as a means by which to regard children as inherently ‘naughty’ particularly interesting, not least because she does not believe in God. The whole theological concept of ‘original sin’/’the fall’ (as Marilynne Robinson refers to it on a previous episode of Re-Enchanting), isn’t binary. The Genesis literature, from which Katherine is drawing her thesis, is intent on answering the question of why good and bad seem to co-exist, why we aren’t all one-dimensionally-good, why goodness prevails in some cases, and evil is triumphant in others. Why, to borrow a phrase, what we want to do we do not do, but what we hate we do.  

Beauty and brokenness are neighbours within us, living in astonishingly close proximity – and that, as I understand it, is the reality of ‘original sin.’  

Perhaps this is where our tendencies to place people into rigid cultural categories, to treat each other as if we come with some kind of moral package-deal, comes from: what we believe about human nature becomes what we perceive when interacting with it.  

Nevertheless, interviewing Katharine from her desk in her school, with the ‘pips’ that signify the end of class as our backing track, I was reminded that Katharine is a person who lives out her convictions, and I am sure her pupils are profoundly thankful for that. Sure, she seems to make herself many an enemy whenever she stands on a national platform, but far more of her life is spent behind the doors of Michaela School, serving her community with her disposition of stubborn hopefulness.  

And so, there they are – my anything but neat reflections on my conversation with Katharine Birbalsingh, you can listen to her episode of Re-Enchanting now.  

Article
Books
Culture
Morality
1 min read

Never Let Me Go: 20 years on

Ishiguro’s brilliant novel is the perfect Frankenstein story for today.

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here

Four young people peer through a window.
Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley in the 2010 film adaption.
Fox Searchlight Films.

This article contains spoilers. 

Human beings are creative. For good or for evil, making new things out of raw materials is something that we can’t help doing, whether that’s writing new books, creating new recipes, or building new houses. Why are we born this way? Christians would say it’s because of the imago Dei: because according to the book of Genesis, the first book in the Bible, we are made in the image of God. If God created the world and every one of us, and if we’re made in his image, then it follows that all of us have this creative impulse within us, too.  

But if creating is something natural to us, does it follow that it’s also core to our identity as human beings? In other words, is making something that we do, or something that we are? Are we different from all other living creatures in this world by being creators ourselves?  

Although he doesn’t call himself a Christian, these are precisely the kind of theological questions the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro asks time and time again in his books. And nowhere does he ask them more powerfully than in Never Let Me Go, which was published 20 years ago. 

Never Let Me Go starts off as the story of three children at a boarding school. Kathy, one of three friends, serves as our first-person narrator; it’s through her eyes that we slowly realise something sinister is taking place. As Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth grow into teenagers and then young adults, it’s finally revealed that they are clones, brought into being thanks to advancements in cloning technology in a dystopian post-World War II Britain. They are brought up for the sole purpose of being organ donors. Or, to put it more bluntly, they’ve been raised for slaughter.  

Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy have a happy childhood at their boarding school, Hailsham. Their future is hinted at by their teachers, but they’re largely shielded from the truth. All around the country, we later find out, clone children are being raised in horrific conditions. But Hailsham is different, because its Headteacher, Miss Emily, is part of a group that believes the clones deserve to be treated humanely – at least until someone needs a kidney transplant.  

But, though treated in a ‘humane’ way, society doesn’t see the Hailsham clones as ‘human’, and that’s precisely what Miss Emily is trying to prove: that they are not unlike real, normal people. So, she encourages the children to make art. ‘A lot of the time’, Kathy tells us, ‘how you were regarded at Hailsham, how much you were liked and respected, had to do with how good you were at “creating”’. The children don’t understand why they must always paint and draw, but they’re told that Madame Marie-Claude, a mysterious figure, will collect their best artworks for a seemingly important ‘gallery’.  

Years later, Tommy and Kathy have become a couple. Before dying – or ‘completing’, as they call it – after her second ‘donation’, Ruth tells them that she believes a deferral is possible for couples that are truly in love. Kathy and Tommy go to Miss Emily’s house, their former Headmistress, certain that, as children, they were encouraged to produce art precisely to be able to prove, one day, their true feelings.  

They are quickly disappointed. Miss Emily reveals that Hailsham has now closed down, but that while the school stood, it was meant as an experiment, aimed at convincing the public to improve living conditions for the clones: 

‘We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all…we demonstrated to the world that if students were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent as any human being.’ 

Equating creativity with human identity does make sense, to an extent at least. In The Mind of the Maker (1941), Christian novelist and critic Dorothy L. Sayers argued that the closest we can get to understanding God as our Creator is through engaging ourselves in creative acts: ‘the experience of the creative imagination in the common man or woman and in the artist is the only thing we have to go upon in entertaining and formulating the concept of creation’. In creative acts, from a Christian perspective, we partially grasp God’s creation of us.  

Ultimately, however, being creative in imitation of God, is not enough to get to the very core of what defines a human being. There are all kinds of factors, from old age to mental or physical disability, that make any form of traditionally creative act highly unlikely for some people. By that definition, someone in a coma or a newborn baby is not fully human. 

That’s exactly the definition of humanity that underpins the cruel society of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. We need a better definition, and Christianity provides a unique tradition to help us on the way. A Christian concept of the human person is one that looks both at why we were made, and what we were made for. Christians believe that God made us out of love, and for the purpose of being in communion with him. He made each one of us as a special and irreplaceable individual, and for each of us our telos – the end or aim of our life – is to join him in heaven.  

If we embrace this definition of what it means to be human, then the extent to which we are able to express our intelligence or creativity while on earth doesn’t really matter anymore. If we believe that merely to exist is good – not to exist and fulfil our potential through this or that accomplishment, but just to exist – then we can’t deny that each member of the human family is, in fact, a ‘person’ in the fullest sense of the word.  

It is precisely this God-shaped hole that makes the concept of human dignity so fragile and slippery in Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro’s brilliant novel is, ultimately, the perfect Frankenstein story for the modern day. It warns us about the consequences of what might happen if we try to treat other human beings as things we have paid, but even more powerfully it shows us the danger of valuing human life for its creativity, instead of loving it as the creation of God. 

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