The Hodge Hill Prophecy

Between 2005 and 2010, a team led by Birmingham University education Dean James Arthur launched a character education project called Learning For Life, the first of its kind in Great Britain. Building from a base of solid social science research, Learning For Life seeks to build and strengthen character in families, schools, universities, and on the job.

 

Learning For Life, which was funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, included a comprehensive 2007 survey of character attitudes among disadvantaged English youth in Birmingham’s Hodge Hill constituency and others like it across the UK. To read it today, in the aftermath of youth rioting and looting that shook major British cities, is to encounter a kind of prophecy. Prof. Arthur spoke to us from his home in England after a tumultuous week.

 

 

Not really. I was surprised by the extent of it, but I was not surprised that young people don’t feel a part of society. They also generally do not engage positively in their communities, the exception being Muslim children. The reasons are quite complex, and there’s not an easy answer to the whole thing. I don’t for a second think it was economic. Well over half of [looters] were under the age of 18. Clearly the vast majority of them are not the kind of people who had any sort of higher education. We’re not talking about people who had been at university. We’re talking about a large group of people who have not gained serious qualifications to participate in society. They are young people who live in the most socially and economically deprived areas of our cities.  

 

You’ve got these two groups, poor Afro-Caribbeans and poor whites, who were the main participants in the riots. When I did my research in schools across England, we discovered that it was precisely many of these disadvantaged white children and Afro-Caribbean black children that had the least respect for the basic virtues in civil society — and these were the groups that mainly rioted.

 

My research found that these children were less happy and less optimistic about the future, and they didn’t feel that they belonged to civil society. They were also less positive about the virtues — honesty, trustworthiness, courage, justice and others. They also had far fewer aspirations for their future compared with other groups.

 

 

Within Hodge Hill and elsewhere, the Muslim community was much clearer about the meaning and usage of the virtues. They understood virtue. They understood the significance of duty and responsibility. Partly it’s because of their religion. These people were poorer than the white children in economic terms and the Muslim children live in larger families. But what they have is family stability. They also have religion to back them up. They have clear family values. They have a code of honor and a morality that recognizes all the virtues that we were looking at in Hodge Hill. They could recognize these virtues more readily because of the way they were brought up and because their religion brought them up in the discourse of these values.

 

That wasn’t the case with black children and white children in my study. Many of the children who rioted already had much in the way of basic material goods. But if you look at their families, their families were much more likely to be in some way dysfunctional. Many of them are in single-parent families. A number of them are also in families where a number of children have been born to different fathers, and their mothers are often dependent on the state for benefits. The economy has been extremely unkind to many of the families of these children in recent years.    

 

 

I believe quite a bit. We live in a society — and both Labour and Conservative governments bear some responsibility for this — that provides an environment in which children are much more sensitive about their rights, but less about their duties. So they have a very weak base for the values of civil society. In fact, many of them lack a moral language to discuss moral questions, because they don’t have the kinds of traditions, such as religion, in order for them to discuss these matters. So religion becomes less important to them, because through the secularization process, they’re losing touch with the moral traditions of society. No government or other secular tradition, has been able so far to replace the Judeo-Christian moral tradition.

 

Muslim children grow up with the language of morality and virtue provided to them by their religious tradition. They can at least discuss these concepts, because they have the language for it. Many of the white children in my studies throughout England identified themselves as Christian, but what they meant was: ‘I’m white and I’m English.’ They’re using Christianity as a label for something they see as superior. It has nothing to do with real Christianity.

 

 

Yes. Few of the rich in Britain give anything like what American rich people give to promote civil society. The rich aren’t as philanthropic as American rich people are. The rich in England, bankers and celebrities, don’t show a great example to the young. The bankers and others who have made all this money have spent it largely as consumers. I often think they appear to have no moral compass and young people see this.

 

There’s a problem of politicians. We’ve seen how they’re seen to be morally corrupt because of the expenses scandal [in which Members of Parliament were found to have charged the state excessively for personal items and services — Ed.], but the truth is they’re not paid a great deal. As a result, it’s not surprising that a culture developed that allowed them to pad their expenses. They felt they had an entitlement to do those things because they had such a low salary. It is true that they are underpaid, but what these politicians spent their money on were sometimes outrageous — e.g. a duck house in their garden pond! So the politicians are no real example to young people. Neither are the people in business or the captains of industry.

 

And we’re exposed to the celebrity culture, which is completely amoral, and tells people the only thing worth living for is fame, money, and pleasure. For that, the media have a lot to answer for.

 

Young people see this and think it is the norm. And because of the human rights agenda, which places an inordinate emphasis on the child’s wants many think it’s their right to have these consumer goods. It’s been normalized by the media and by the example of politicians and businessmen.

 

The current education system lacks moral authority. Teachers have been stripped of their moral authority. It’s very difficult for teachers to control unruly classes now, because they lack real sanctions can get in trouble for almost anything they do. It all goes back to the human rights lobby. There needs to be more emphasis on the child as a member of the community with certain duties and responsibilities.

 

 

Well, I have been a member of some government committees for a number of years. How do you put society back together again in a way that it becomes a good society? This is going to be the most difficult part. There are so many issues to deal with.

 

For too long, people have thought that what they do in their private lives has no effect on the public consciousness, but clearly it does. But I would say that my advice to politicians would be that we need to have a serious look at schools and parents. For too long we sat on the fence and said little about the problems experienced by single mothers. The government needs to do something about parents — and I’m not talking about running courses for parents. We should not be celebrating the idea that men can have children with multiple partners without responsibility, and there is no social stigma attached to it. This is endemic in some communities. 

 

I think English society has recognized that there is something really rotten at the heart of all of this. Young people have had the void inside them filled with consumerism and a desire for celebrity. Teachers have sought to construct a rationale for moral education without subscribing to any particular set of values — parents have done the same. It seems they find identifying with any set of values to be deeply problematic in a pluralist society. It seems we have entered a new moral Dark Age. The secularization process, and the loss of transcendent values that comes with it, is rampant in the UK, even in some parts of America. There is also a collapse of authority, and a collapse of the recognition of authority. Many of our young people have little in the way of a stake in society — they have few public amenities to stimulate them in the form of public libraries, community centers, youth clubs, or sporting facilities. I fear that most of America is only 20 to 30 years behind us. And I don’t believe we’ve seen the end of this. These young people have done it once, and I think they’ll do it again.