Bijan Omrani

The National Curriculum Review, published earlier this month, was a rare opportunity to ask some fundamental questions about the purpose and outcomes of British education. It is an opportunity that has been missed. In some ways, the review has a laudable conservative tenor. It is, for the most part, grounded in practical evidence rather than blind ideology. It acknowledges the improvements in literacy and numeracy brought by the previous government’s reforms, and calls for incremental rather than radical changes. However, it fails to grapple with the connections between education and society’s most fundamental problems. No one can deny that the country is in the grip of a mental health crisis, especially amongst the young.

Finally, some good news from Oxford. The university has recently been through a gloomy patch. It slipped from the top three in UK rankings for the first time since records began. The Oxford Union president-elect, George Abaraonye, also shamed the institution by gloating over the murder of Charlie Kirk. However, the university’s classicists are bringing light into the darkness. Dons at four colleges – Jesus, Harris Manchester, Brasenose and Queen’s – are engaged in an extraordinary initiative that is widening access to the subject, improving standards and bringing back a Renaissance spirit to the study of ancient languages. In short, they have started to teach their students to speak Latin and Ancient Greek. This idea may seem eccentric.

‘But will anyone be interested?’ the vicar asked cautiously. It was a fair response to my latest madcap scheme. One of the vicar’s 12 churches, St Candida and Holy Cross at Whitchurch Canonicorum in Dorset, hosts one of the country’s only three remaining pre-Reformation saints’ shrines with the relics of the saint still present. In this case, the shrine is to St Wite, a ninth-century virgin princess martyred by the Vikings. Her saint’s day was coming up. Could we, I asked, recreate a pre-Reformation church service in honour of it? The vicar, the Revd Virginia Luckett, who is sometimes heard on Radio 4, agreed to my proposal – but with trepidation. She is used to conducting pilgrimages to the shrine, and knows the spiritual value of this medieval tradition.

Christian culture is under fresh attack. Those striving to preserve old Christian institutions, to maintain the Bible and Church traditions as a common cultural reference point, or to use scriptural ideas to influence society’s laws and ethics, regardless of whether society still possesses an underlying faith, are facing censure. This new assault has not come from the usual suspects: Islamists, secularists, decolonisers or the woke left. Instead, the latest cries against Christian culture are coming from Christians themselves. The faith of Christ’s apostles was active. Its ethic was constructive The charge has been led by Paul Kingsnorth, the writer, environmentalist and former journalist, who was baptised into the Romanian Orthodox Church in 2021.