Item from the Smart Marriages Archive, reproduced in the Divorce Statistics Collection
Sunday March 19, 2000

'Teachers must teach love and virginity,' screamed one headline. 'Schools
to teach marriage,' yelled another. And this on the day I was to address
40
headteachers on their promotion of pupils' spiritual, moral, social and
cultural development. How did they respond? What do you think?

You imagine trying to persuade a member of your staff (possibly themselves
divorced) to extol the virtues of marriage to a class, 70 per cent of whom
are from single-parent families (some of whom might be single-parent
families). You imagine suggesting to a class of 15 year olds that they
'delay sexual gratification', when most of them have been at it like
rabbits
from the age of 13. You'd be likely to feel, as the headteachers I was
with
felt, that you were being asked to sell your soul for the sake of the
politicians.

These politicians, you might think, have managed to get themselves out of
the political difficulty of repealing Section 28 against the wishes of the
Church by doing a deal that requires you to square the circle. Worse, it
requires you to expect your staff to square the circle. Who was it who
said
that one should never expect anyone to do something one wouldn't do
oneself?
Clearly it wasn't a politician. In these new guidelines, the Government is
going further than it ever has before in what it requires schools to
teach.
Furthermore, this requirement is different in kind from requirements to
teach literacy and numeracy, to deliver a national curriculum or to meet
targets for examination results. This requirement involves asking schools
to
halt a social process started well before many of today's teachers were
born, a process that started in the Sixties, a process that those in their
forties and fifties welcomed with open arms, and those in their twenties
and
thirties take for granted.

In the Fifties, sex meant children, children meant marriage, marriages
were
for life and, if you were unlucky, happiness was something you hoped for
in
the next life. Now, thanks at least in part to the Pill and feminism, sex
is
a recreational activity, children are quite separate from marriage and
marriages can be dissolved at the drop of a hat. In the Fifties,
responsibility was more important than happiness. Now, happiness seems to
be
the only thing we think about.

In asking schools to encourage pupils to delay sex, in asking schools to
'teach' marriage and parenting, the Government (prompted by the Church) is
effectively asking schools to try to halt, or even reverse, this very
long-term, massively far-reaching and generally welcomed social trend.
This
is not a small request. Nor is it a request that should be made on the
grounds of political expediency. If schools get the impression that the
request - requirement, even - is being made purely to get the Church off
the
Government's back, they will dig their heels in. And this would be a
shame.
Indeed, it would be a disaster. It would be a disaster because there are
excellent reasons for thinking that the health of our society depends on
halting this trend, even on reversing it.

Everywhere you look, the evidence is clear: the more seriously we have
pursued happiness the less often we have found it. Depression and stress
are
endemic, far more common than in the Fifties. Suicide levels among young
men
are at record levels. Young women put off marriage until their biological
alarm clock goes off and then wonder where all the men are. We work longer
hours and are less happy about it. Our marriages break down faster; even
divorce doesn't make us happy (one year after remarriage, most men wish
they
had remained married to their original partner).

Remarriage certainly doesn't always make our children happy. According to
one influential study, the presence of a step-parent 'is the best
epidemiological predictor of child abuse risk yet discovered'. The
statistics are absolutely clear: married parents are better for children
than any other type of family. Perhaps the Church had it right all along:
a
happy, lifelong marriage really is the ideal towards which we should
strive,
certainly the ideal when it comes to bringing up children. And if marriage
can be such an important ingredient of human happiness, then surely
schools
should teach marriage? This has nothing to do with political expediency;
it
has to do with the nature of the good life (as Aristotle would put it). An
important caveat: the fact that the pendulum has swung too far does not
mean
that it should swing back to where it was.

No one (surely?) wants to go back to the days when people were trapped in
truly unhappy, possibly abusive, marriages, to a time when to lose one's
virginity outside marriage (if female) was to lose everyone's respect
(including one's own), to a time when being born outside marriage was a
stigma for life. Nor, importantly, do we want to reverse the trend towards
inclusivity. We may, generally speaking, have been happier in the Fifties
but were homosexuals happier? Members of ethnic minorities? People who had
no wish to harm others but who wanted to be different? Personal happiness
is
important; authenticity, the ability to be oneself, is equally important,
and we certainly don't want to return to those days when people were
forced
to be hypocrites because anything else was likely to get them ostracised.
Hypocrisy, in fact, is a key issue in this debate. Most teachers are not
convinced that marriage is unreservedly good. Some of them, like some
politicians, have escaped from unhappy marriages. Are they supposed to
teach
pupils that divorce is a bad thing? If they are, what are they supposed to
do with their own feelings? Hide them? Pretend they don't exist? If, by
means of a statutory requirement (or a non-statutory framework that is
inspected as if it were a statutory requirement), we require teachers to
teach things they don't believe we will come unstuck. We have excellent
evidence of this already in the requirement on schools to hold a daily act
of worship that is 'mainly Christian' in nature. This law is often
observed
in such a teeth-grittingly hypocritical manner that it puts young people
(and headteachers) off God for life. Children and young people are
hypocrisy-detectors par excellence .

If we are going to succeed in reversing this trend, in getting the
pendulum
not to swing back but to stop where it should, the Government (backed by
the
Church?) will have to get schools (and the rest of us) on board. It will
have to convince heads and teachers that in 'teaching' marriage, they
really
will be helping their pupils strive for happiness. And it will have to
convince parents (and the rest of society) that they should support
schools
in such work because without such support schools will be whistling in the
wind. And this means nothing less, in my opinion, than a public-relations
campaign for marriage, a public-relations campaign to convince teachers,
parents and everyone connected with schools why, whatever their own
experiences, they should promote marriage as an ideal.

It is only if people really believe that marriage is a good thing that
they
will teach it convincingly. So there's a challenge for the Secretary of
State. Is the requirement born simply of political expediency or is it
born
of a sincere belief that this is what we should do for our children? And
if
the latter, what exactly will the Government do to support schools in this
work? There's one thing of which we can be absolutely certain: if schools
are left to do this without the support of society, then pupils might be
justified in thinking that teachers need to get a life, that they
obviously
don't know what goes on in the real world.

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