Community cohesion
Category:
12 / 02 / 2010 | Author: dnorris
Community Cohesion
Community Cohesion has emerged as one of the aims of the new secondary schools curriculum, but the first question to ask is why?
I for one have never fully understood what a community stood for. Is it that idealised English village where the postman, the vicar, the lord of the manor and the publican all rub along together in perfect harmony, or as is more the case in urban areas the council estate where all those on low wages live; the new housing estate further away where all the professionals live; or the refurbished apartments in the town centre where nobody knows who lives where?
The uneasy truth about communities is that likeminded people herd together. Catholics join the Catholic Church. Polish immigrants join the Polish club. Jews join the local synagogue and businessmen become Freemasons and if they don’t all live together then the community in which they do live in will have become linked to status and status is linked to quality of housing.
So how do you get to point two of the curriculum which aspires to create a society in which the diversity of people’s background and circumstances is appreciated and valued?
I have witnessed at first hand the simmering dislike created in an idyllic Oxfordshire village as the houses were bought up one by one to become week-end cottages. Wealth split the community spirit and co-operation vanished. I have also witnessed an immigrant population slowly buy up houses in a conservation area in Bradford. The response was not co-existence but flight as older residents packed their bags and left.
Multiculturalism is being made a plaything of social engineering and the school curriculum seems to be getting sucked into it. That’s a fine thing in that it eliminates social unrest, but the consequences never seem to match the aspirations as clause 3 would have is believe.
Similar life opportunities should be available to all. The implication is that we should strive towards a meritocracy and those who strive to improve their circumstances should be able to get there. Such a view is all too simplistic. Society doesn’t function like a one way street system leading to a Piazza full of top jobs. Ask some Doctors from the middle-east. They are qualified, but some do not have an aptitude for languages and therefor find it difficult to practice their trade in Europe. Aptitude and opportunity have never gone hand in hand. Knowing what you should train to become depends on knowing what opportunities exist. As far as aspirations being socially acceptable, that too is questionable. What do you do with women who just like having babies? What do you do with men who just like breeding crocodiles? The desire to have a society in which strong and positive relationships exist smacks of utopianism.
Few people fully understand their community. Indeed it is a source of amusement to watch those who try.
I have watched ‘Local Counsellors’ try to understand the neighbourhood they represent. They seem to have little comprehension of the number of fringe jobs that the residents undertake, no comprehension of their troubled past, never witness the night time conflicts or the clandestine deals that are conducted on the streets. They should know the number of children who go to special schools and the number who don’t go to school at all, but it is doubtful if they realise how infrequently they go on holiday or how starved they are of imaginative and creative ways to spend their time.
The point is that it is almost impossible to get inside the mind of a community. The Community Hall may offer a snap shot but no more.
Near my own home there is a family which illuminates their home at Christmas with a kaleidoscope of coloured lights. The whole neighbourhood finds it bewildering. We don’t understand the phenomena and yet it is not illegal.
My suspicion is that nobody understands what a community is either – so why is it put into the school curriculum?
