Class

This piece is inspired, if that's the right word, by Andrew Gilligan's article "To fight the class divide" on page 12 of the Standard of 22nd October.

Firstly, it is well known that most of the people who get to the top of British society have attended certain public schools and universities, and this has been the case for several centuries. None of the social policy initiatives of modern times has done anything significant to change this. It's often remarked how people of that background seem to have an air of confidence about them, that their contemporaries from other backgrounds do not. This is most clearly noticed in the university setting. Bright children from working class families can be overwhelmed by it, and can be made to feel very inferior.

This is because the education system that most of us experience is of no value when it comes to learning "people skills". As Matt Morris put it: "I studied English, math, history, grammar, science and geography, but I was never offered classes in confidence, self-esteem, leadership, motivation, communication skills, how to build quality relationships, how to create wealth, or enjoy physical well-being or spiritual growth....As a result I entered the world with big goals, big dreams, but no real-world tools to achieve what I wanted. So like many people I struggled as an adult in the workforce." Mr. Morris now teaches personal development classes, but don't let that put you off. If the National Curriculum offered lessons to all children in such things as confidence and self-esteem, that would go a long way towards removing the class barriers.

I've no objection to private education as long as it is made genuinely available to everybody. Thus, if I were the government, I would want all children to have the opportunity to take an entrance exam for Eton, Harrow, Rugby or wherever. If they were from a poor family who couldn't afford the fees, the Government would pay the fees for them.

In one of my earlier pieces, I said that I would not take any education system seriously unless it taught kids how to meditate. It seems that David Lynch and Donovan have been putting this idea forward, to predictably dismissive comments in today's "Readers' Views". Transcendental meditation (TM), it appears, leads to "pre-medieval notions" and is at best "Californian mush". We forget that every belief system in the world, including those of James Randi and Richard D. North who wrote on the "dangers of TM", has its fair share of apparent absurdities.

To illustrate, in my religious system (Judaism) I perform a ritual on Friday night and Saturday called "making Kiddush" in which I hold a cup of wine aloft and recite a number of verses from the Scriptures stating that God made the world in six days, and rested on the seventh. I don't for a moment think that God really did make the world in six days, or indeed that He rested on the seventh. What I do think those verses mean is beyond the scope of this blog. I could cite similar examples from other religions. The point is that all beliefs, not just TM, are to a greater or lesser extent harking back to a pre-scientific view of the world.

The very fact that we think a week has seven days is only because early man observed that besides the stars, which seem not to move, there are seven heavenly bodies that appear to be in motion. These are the sun, the moon, and the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. We decided that each of them had a special influence on a particular day: hence Sunday, Monday (the day of the moon) Tuesday (Mardi in French, the day of Mars) Wednesday (Mercredi in French, the day of Mercury) Thursday (Jeudi in French, Jupiter's day) Friday (in French Vendredi, the day for Venus) and Saturday (Saturn's day). We all accept this without thinking about it, even though there isn't a scrap of logic to any of it. All we can say for sure is that a week of seven days seems to work, so we have stuck to it. The French tried to introduce a new calendar including a ten-day week after the Revolution, and nobody could live with it, so they went back to the traditional calendar.

The reason I think meditation is so important is that it works. There's nothing particularly esoteric about it. It simply involves deciding what you want to think, and then thinking it, to the exclusion of all else, for a given amount of time. In this world we are bombarded with all kind of images that tell us what we should think, and they form a distraction from life at best and an incentive for us to harm ourselves at worst. You have to develop the skills to keep on course, and the earlier you begin to do it, the easier it will be when you are an adult. We are back to the importance of learning self-confidence and inner peace as an essential tool for life.

When we get into the habit of thinking that in the ultimate reality we are all one, which is what we are, and that there is no such thing as superiority, questions of social class will not matter.

My opinions on anything are subject to change. My love for you will not change.