David Day sermon, Christ Church Aughton

This sermon by David Day, principal of St. John's college, Durham, was preached at Christ Church, Sunday, 31 January 1999.

Education has achieved a phenomenal amount. A few years ago when teachers were looking for a pay rise there was a car sticker published which said, “If you can read this - thank a teacher.” We fly to the moon. We perform triple heart by-passes, we throw an impossible bridge across the river at San Francisco, eliminate killer diseases, write poetry that will bring tears to your eyes, compose requiem masses, produce bigger and bigger vegetables and smaller but more powerful computers. Education, in one form or another, is responsible for all that. How wonderful is education! I think I want to start there because clearly later, I’m going to say one or two things that I think are critical. I’ve been involved in the education industry for 57 years from my first experience of it. My mother said, “How did you enjoy it today?” “Very nice. I shan’t go tomorrow.” Aah! For 41 years it has paid my mortgage so I’m clearly committed to the education industry, teaching or being taught. I want to echo the car sticker, “If you can read this, thank a teacher.”

Yet I also want to express some doubts and some unease. If education is asked to deliver what it can’t deliver - to bear a weight of hope and expectation that it can’t sustain - then we are in trouble if we put our faith in it.

My own world, my most recent world, is beginning to experience graduate unemployment. I’m confronted by very, very bright but bewildered young people, 22 or 23 years old, who more or less say, “Look I’ve jumped every hurdle that my teachers and my parents and the system put in front of me and, at the end, I can’t get a job.” What I want to say to them is, “Well then, your education failed you. It didn’t teach you the most important thing.” So, a few reservations.

Let’s start with the first one. I think there is a worrying trend to see education in terms of success in a career. Education is about jobs, it’s about getting on and getting up, it’s success oriented. You ask the person in the street and they’ll say education is about qualifications. That’s facts, and information, and skills, and GCSE’s, about knowledge and know-how. About getting a job, for your own sake, because you need a job, for the sake of the economy and Britain’s place in the world.

It’s a pity, if that’s the only thing we can say about education. But you see it starting to translate itself into action as parents spot early on that education is the key to social advancement. So - scan the league tables. Buy a house in the right catchment area. Buy it a long time in advance. Plan for your child to go to that school. Go to church for three years, even though you don’t want to, to make sure your child can get into the nice church school. People are beginning to scheme because education is all you need in order to get on.

But that sort of education lacks something absolutely vital. I don’t know if you read, 2 weeks ago, Jonathan Sachs the Chief Rabbi, commenting on an article he’d read called, ‘Moral Evasion’ where the author had identified 11 ways in which we now avoid making the difficult moral decisions - or making ANY moral judgement. How many times have you heard these?

‘There’s nothing you can do about it.’ ‘It’s never been any different.’ ‘There is no quick fix.’ ‘Well, it’s the price of a free society.’ ‘You must move with the tide.’ ‘Can’t turn back the clock.’ ‘The problem is much more complex than you think.’ ‘It’s beyond the reach of the law.’ ‘You’re focusing on the wrong issue.’ ‘Who are you to talk?’ ‘Everyone’s doing it so how can you object?’

Jonathan Sachs said, ‘We are standing at one of the strangest cultural moments in history. Other generations saw moral decision as at the heart of what it was to be human - the heart of what it was to be civilised. The capacity to discriminate between right and wrong was essential to living in society.”

And now, those very decisions are just marginalised with eleven statements - and maybe there are more like the ones I have just mentioned.

An education system which encourages or allows us to slip into moral evasion is death to the spirit. Success - all right, I’d like my children to have a good job - but, success at any price, destroys integrity.

I once taught a little Quaker girl. I came across her in the first form at school and encountered her all the way through until she was going to university entrance. She went for an interview to a well-known university. The interviewer was the interviewer from hell - you know what I mean! He sat with his feet on the desk, smoking, looking out of the window and picking holes in her answers.

Towards the end of this dreadful interview he said, “What do you look for in a newspaper?” So she gave a truthful answer. “Huh!” was all she got in reply. And then, “What do you think I look for in a newspaper?” And she said, “Spelling mistakes and grammatical errors!” I could have hugged her when she told me that.

There was a hard core of integrity in that lass. She went to a different university, got a degree, went into social work. I was intrigued by that hard core of integrity,

“I will not just say what is needed in order to get on. I am a person with some kind of honesty and integrity.”

That came from her Quaker upbringing and a family which saw life as having a moral dimension more important even than getting a job.

Second little question mark. In 47 years of being involved with education I see a worrying tendency to look on education as our primary hope for the nation. So, we hand more and more of the child’s welfare over to the education system. Schools are being asked to do more and more.

To teach, of course, but also to feed children, to explain about sex, to phone if children are absent, to counsel those in distress, to check for nits, to help with stress and drugs education, to teach them to cross the road safely and eat healthily. Schools look as if they are being asked to take over the total care of the child.

Jobs that used to be done by parents, by granny, by granddad, by the clergy are now more and more being forced upon the school as if we thought that was the way we could answer our problems. I’m worried about that and I should think schools are worried about it as well.

Schools and colleges can never be the hope of the nation because they are run by people like us. They are flawed like any other institution.

I encounter at the moment lots of mature students who want to go to university in their late twenties - early thirties, mid thirties sometimes. They make very good students, often doing access courses to come into university. Time and again I hear the same statement.

“School ruined me and I need a second chance.”

I’m sorry. I know good teachers who would not have ruined them but to say that education is the hope of society is ridiculous.

Let me remind you of some of the bad things. We have a curriculum which is dominated and determined by economics. We have an obsession with assessment. I watch teachers going home, not preparing lessons but ticking boxes. I see them sometimes up at four in the morning, or, I hear of them going to bed late, just to fill in the paperwork. An obsession with ‘pull up the plant and see how it’s growing.’

What are the results of Ofsted inspections? Teachers have stomach ulcers and nervous breakdowns. Did you know that in the year of an Ofsted inspection GCSE results fall in the particular school that is being inspected. So failing schools will have more frequent Ofsted inspections. Just think of the logic of that one!

In universities, as anyone in universities knows, we are all scribbling as fast as we can, not because we wish to increase the sum total of human knowledge but because we have been told very clearly - you publish or you’re finished. The research assessment exercise means that you must get 4, 5 or plus ‘stars’ because that’s what the money depends on.

Schools are themselves flawed. Do you remember what schools are like? Do you remember?

SIT UP. Stop tipping back. That bell is a signal to me. WAIT!. Who’s tapping? Hands up. WALK! Where are you going?

Schools and prisons are the only places where you have to ask permission to go to the toilet! (I just thought I would throw that one in.)

And when the teachers go? Do you remember that - the playground? And break? In the lunch hour you learn, in many schools, that power is the only reality. And children learn very fast how to cope. Don’t be too keen, or too enthusiastic, and lose your accent if you come from another part of the country. Fast - or you will be dead. It was school that taught me to swear. My parents didn’t.

Education is not the new creation. It does wonderful things but we are daft to think that it will save us. We cannot be saved for we are all in the same boat and teachers are no different from the rest of us.

And one more thing that worries me. Education is obviously about knowledge but there is a disturbing tendency to see knowledge in terms of more information.

There has never been a time when it has been easier to get facts. The Internet and surfing the information super-highway, riding along it, possibly getting overwhelmed by it, means that you can get information at your finger tips.

I meet students who are depressed because they cannot read all the books on the book list. Somebody should have told them they are not intended to. The book list is for the lecturer to show that he’s read all these books. You are not meant to read them - let alone buy them. But the students get depressed. If they are depressed then, what happens when they suddenly realise that all 14 million volumes of the Library of Congress are at their fingertips on the Internet - they’re not going to read all those.

And suddenly, I have the feeling that all human knowledge is out there - I can just key into it. I can learn on the Internet how to make a bomb - there is no lack of information.

But who will ask the important questions in a culture obsessed with league tables, exam results, information and facts. Who will remind us that information alone makes clever devils?

God has put in our hearts the desire to ask ultimate questions. By ultimate questions I mean - not questions that have no answer - like: where does your lap go when you stand up? Why are there frosted windows on the loos in Concorde? Well, think about it - you’re about 30,000 feet above ground level - you’re travelling faster than sound - who’s looking in? These are important questions, I’m sure you’re wrestling with them! What does occasional furniture do the rest of the time? If the Samaritans care so much why do they never ring you up? Those are not the only important questions!

Why are we here? Is there a God? What happens when I die? Is there any point in living?

A biology teacher came back one break and said, “I’ve just had a lesson with Fiona, We were drawing the life-cycle of a frog. (Do you remember the life-cycle of a frog. You know it goes round, and round - starts up there as one thing, goes round a bit, gets really big. You colour it in with your felt-tips afterwards). And suddenly Fiona said, “Mr Evans, what’s it all about?” You don’t expect questions like that. And he, to his shame, I think, said, “Just get on with it or you’ll stay in at break.” “What’s it all about? It just goes round and round,” she said. He said, “Ask Mr Day” (I was the RE teacher). I still think that was an unfair thing to say. Here was somebody who was actually thinking as a human being. ‘What is it all about?’ It was not a question, perhaps that would have appeared in the biology exam but it was a very important question.

The author of Ecclesiastes (remember the reading) was a product of the Old Testament education system but he was the kind of person that you wish wouldn’t come to your lectures because he kept asking, “ Yes, that’s all very well within the little box that you’ve given me but - what’s it all about? Now, he writes with realism. At the end of 11 chapters, he comes to number 12 and says, “I’ve seen 2 important things about life and education ‘under the sun’. That’s his standpoint - ‘under the sun’. Not outside.

Number 1 is: you have nothing to look forward to except falling apart. You can see why his friends called him ‘Sunshine’ can’t you!

This is a great message. You remember those little snapshots of old age - ‘The keepers of the house tremble - your teeth fall out - the almond tree flourishes (it means ‘your hair goes white’). He works through the human body, arms, legs, teeth and all that and, in the end, the final stage - ‘the silver cord is snapped’ and ‘the pitcher is broken at the fountain’ and everything goes back to dust. You have nothing to look forward to ‘under the sun’ except falling apart. That’s the first brutal fact that he pushes in our face. The end of the education system - lifelong learning. Where does it end? With the pitcher broken and the silver cord snapped.

And the second fact is equally gloomy but it’s good to face these facts from time to time. ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’ Meaningless, all is meaningless. That is the last word on life ‘under the sun’ - it is futile. The word ‘vanity’ in the Hebrew means ‘the slightest breath, the merest whisper’. That’s what life is. What human life is all about can be written on wind and running water - ‘vanity of vanities’.

Now you could be forgiven for thinking, ‘who needs this stuff? I’ve come to get away from this. I don’t need the man with the sandwich board telling me that ‘ the end of the world is near.’

I actually think that the writer of Ecclesiastes knew his business. From time to time we need friends who will tell us the way it is. Aren’t you pleased that that best friend many years ago said, ‘Start revising now. The exams are in 5 weeks.’? Aren’t you pleased when a friend says, ‘You are not fit to drive - I’ll drive you - you’ve had too much to drink.’? Aren’t you pleased when a friend, or a wife or a husband says, ‘Fill in your tax return’? So, I think it’s good when people present us with what reality. You have nothing to look forward to except falling to bits and everything is vanity, mere breath.

We need to receive that because that may be the most important thing that anybody says ‘under the sun’.

Durham Cathedral, which people think will stand for 2,000 years and has stood for 1,000 nearly, has little ‘tell-tales’ (I didn’t realise they were called that) little bits of glass which are cemented into hairline cracks at the west end of the cathedral with the date above them. If the crack gets bigger it will crack the glass. You go into Durham Cathedral and you look very carefully at the tell-tale and it hasn’t broken yet. You think ‘good!’ but presumably (I know you have problems with Liverpool Cathedral as well) presumably Durham Cathedral is quietly sliding into the river, but very slowly.

I remember a student of mine showing her infant class the ‘Snowman’ video. At the end she said (with tears), ‘He melts, David, he melts.’ And I thought, You’re an adult but she said, ‘I was so glad we were sitting with all the blinds drawn, in the dark, because they were all crying, and I was crying as well.’ That is the last word about life ‘under the sun’ - ‘Golden lads and lasses must, like chimney sweepers, come to dust.’

A boy doing his A-levels said to me, “What does it all matter? Time, life, is passing me by.’ I thought, you think you’ve got problems. What are you? Seventeen? I’m 62 - we’re not just coming to our peak, are we?

Remember the film ‘Educating Rita’? There’s that scene in the pub when they’re all having a sing-song like the old days: ‘The Old Bull and Bush’. Everyone’s having fun and the camera moves on to Rita who is sitting next to her mother, surrounded by the family and friends all singing away. The camera moves in on Rita’s mother’s face and she turns to Rita and says, ‘There’s got to be a better song to sing than this.’ We realise she’s not talking about the song they are singing.

This chapter says at the end, ‘Remember your creator - remember NOW your creator’ - like a little whisper. I know that in any job, education or whatever, it is easy to drown that whisper by the fact that my in-tray is overflowing, so let’s shift it and while I’m working on the in-tray, or the returns, or whatever, I don’t have to listen to the whisper that says, ‘Remember your Creator, now, while there is time. Remember the One who gave you life and breath. Remember the One who weaves the master story of the universe and gives YOUR little story meaning within His master story. Remember, he made you in His own image so that you are to think of yourself neither as a worm nor a beast nor a devil - and certainly not a god. Remember, he made others in His image - you cannot treat them like objects or slaves or tools and instruments. Remember that you are His viceroy on earth, that you are responsible for its safekeeping. Remember that He gave you gifts of intellect and creativity,of imagination and strength, of talents and achievement, so you are to use those gifts in the service of others. Remember that, at the end, all things will be summed up in Him and ponder the direction of your life. Remember when the storm comes, you will need a rock on which to stand.

I think churches are designed to be quiet places where we can ponder the questions that are drowned when we go about our ordinary work.

What will it matter, in the end, that you got 4 degrees, owned 9 cars, had 11 cats and a gerbil? What will it matter (if you’re doing your GCSE’s or A-levels) whether you got your essays in on time? What will it matter that you always met this month’s sales target?

What will it matter if you always kept the bathroom clean or played for the county at 18? Or, had a new kitchen every other year, or learned not to eat peas off the knife? Or got your handicap down to 13 or always went to Auntie Ethel’s on Tuesdays or badminton on Thursdays? What does it matter?

What does it matter in the light of the great questions of eternity?

People say now, ‘There is no big story which gives meaning to my little story’. As a Christian, I am compelled to say that the meaning of my life is not that I exist just to consume. It’s been called ‘I shop - therefore I am’. Tesco ergo sum - for those who like Latin - sort of!

If there is no God to whom I matter then in what sense do I matter at all?

For 2,000 years, Christians have said, ‘You do matter. You matter to God. And Christ came into the world to show you that you matter.’ Here is God in human form. Here is the absolutely authentic human life. Here is one who says even in our information overloaded, achievement dominated, consumer driven, cynical, sceptical world ‘I am the way, the truth and the life.’

George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury has said, ‘Just stand alongside the person of Jesus Christ and feel the tug of His presence.’ I think that’s all I want to say. If you don’t normally come to church or if the Christian faith has gone dead on you, or if you have never had a faith - stand alongside Him and feel the tug of His presence.

In the gospels, we meet Someone who doesn’t just talk about it - but does it. No one meets Jesus Christ and stays the same. No one is unchanged, once they have encountered Him. The blind see, the lepers are cleansed, the lame man leaps, the dumb sing, the sad are filled with joy and, unfortunately, some are terrified and ask Him to go away. Some are angry and plot to destroy Him. Some are sad and go away sorrowful because they are unwilling to pay the price. Some go away wistful because they lost the moment when the decision needed to be made.

But, something always happens when you stand alongside Jesus Christ and feel the tug of His presence.

Education is about learning the way to live. We are confronted in Jesus by One who says, ‘I am the way.’

Education is about knowledge and know-how. We are confronted in Jesus by one who said, ‘I am the truth.’

Education is about success and getting on. I offer you a man crucified at the age of 30 but risen from the dead. Jesus is alive. He is Lord of heaven and earth. Not the Jesus of the Sunday school prizes or the nativity play - not dinner-money Jesus, not Jesus of the RE lesson, not ‘darling, darling little man’ of the carol. Not Jesus meek and mild -but the Jesus in whose presence one day every knee will bow. He holds the keys of life and death.

Education is about learning to live. We also need to learn how to die.