A school in northwest London might seem to have little bearing on our culture wars in the United States. But the nature of the Michaela Community School, located in the unfashionable district of Wembley, and of a lawsuit it won this month in Britain’s High Court offer lessons for other countries struggling to accommodate large immigrant populations and disparate mores.
The Michaela Community School was founded and is run by a kindly but resolute disciplinarian called Katharine Birbalsingh, who is renowned as the strictest head teacher in Britain. She once worked as the national government’s “social mobility czar,” which suggests that she has clear ideas about what helps children from lower social classes rise and achieve success.
Her pupils must, among other things, wear neatly turned-out uniforms, keep silent in corridors between classes, and eat the same vegetarian lunches that everyone else does that do not breach any religious dietary restrictions. Michaela is rigorous, oversubscribed, and one of the best-performing academic schools in Britain. It is also free or, more precisely, financed from tax revenues rather than school fees.
It is secular, so there are no prayer spaces for the Muslims, who make up more than half the school roster, nor for the Christians, Hindus, and others taught there. That is where there was trouble. A Muslim student and her mother sued the school for infringing religious rights. But the High Court rightly rejected the claim this month, accepting the school’s argument that students for whom lunchtime religious practice is important are free to enroll in other schools if they are dissatisfied with the ethos at Michaela.
Birbalsingh is not opposed to religious practice outside school, but she will not allow it to divide her students, whom she is determined to unite in a single culture. Her statement in response to the court decision reveals this clearly. It contains no anti-religious sentiment, merely a determined embrace of a common ethos of which all pupils are required to be members and are expected to respect.
She said, “Schools should not be forced by one child and her mother to change [their] approach simply because they have decided they don’t like something about [their] school. At Michaela, we positively embrace small c conservative values which millions of people including so many of our families and pupils also value. Those values enable extraordinary academic progress. But they also promote a way of living, where gratitude, agency and personal responsibility, refusal of identity-politics victimhood, love of country, hard work, kindness, a duty toward others, self-sacrifice for the betterment of the whole, are fundamental to who we are. … At Michaela, we expect all religions to make the necessary sacrifices to enable our school to thrive.”
The head teacher finished her statement with a resounding expression of her resolution to win this battle for the benefit of the many, using the ancient Roman phrase “strength and honor.” The phrase, which is intended to identify a dignified path to success, will be familiar to many from its stirring use by Russell Crowe in the movie Gladiator. It suggests the steel required to defeat the corrupting and corrosive forces of identity politics now as much as for victory over barbarian hordes in the reign of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
But although Birbalsingh’s words and system at Michaela are mostly admirable and effective, she gets one thing wrong about what she has so splendidly created. It is that she still pays lip service to “multiculturalism.” She refers several times to it in her statement, but the truth is that Michaela is successful not because it is multicultural but because it is an oasis from multiculturalism.
The single ethos to which all pupils and their families must subscribe if they wish to belong is the antithesis of multiculturalism. The head teacher’s final words in her statement are “God save the King.” This gets to the truth of her success. Certainly her school is filled with children who come from different backgrounds, but she has built an establishment for their success that is united in a single shared culture, imbued with love of country.
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The confusion over multiculturalism is reminiscent of the Left’s illogical analysis in 2012 when a British ethnic Somali athlete, Mo Farah, won Olympic gold medals. He celebrated by waving the British flag. The Left told us this showed the success of multiculturalism. But the reverse is true. A great athlete of foreign origin was adopting the preeminent symbol of the single, uniting national culture of the country that was now his home.
The lesson here in the U.S., and anywhere else with populations that are increasingly mixed ethnically, is that the country’s strength and honor, and its people’s unity and success, are best achieved not by nurturing cultural differences and pretending “our diversity is our strength,” but by fostering shared values. This does not suppress religious or other freedoms, but it does require a minimal sacrifice from those who wish to benefit from the great benison of living and working within the liberal democracies of the West.
