Podcast

Culture

Education

Original sin

S&U interviews

10 June 2023

5 min read

My conversation with... Katharine Birbalsingh

A stubborn hopefulness drives Katharine Birbalsingh. Belle Tindall reflects on her conversation with the controversial headteacher for the Re-Enchanting podcast.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A head teacher sits at her desk, holding her hands in a gesture in front of her.

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I’m finding it very hard to sum up my conversation with Katharine Birbalsingh, to place it neatly in a mental box. But I’m wondering if that’s the value of it.

Katharine has infamously been dubbed ‘Britain’s Strictest Headteacher’, and after spending an hour in her company, I can understand why – it’s as if an air of authority was baked into her DNA. She is the founder and headteacher of Michaela Community School in Wembley, a school which has garnered a huge amount of attention not only because of their outstanding success, but also because of the ‘clear ethos’ that Katherine accredits the success to.

Michaela School has silent and single-file corridors, meaning that transitions between classes tend to take ninety seconds. Turning around to talk to another child in class is immediately punishable by detention, children are taught to stand for Katherine when she enters assembly, and lunch times have set conversation starters. When Katharine says, ‘I believe in strictness’, she really means it.

It’s safe to say that Katherine has both avid admirers and passionate critics, and perhaps many people who can’t quite decide which camp to pitch their tent in.

What struck me the most about Katharine’s approach to education during our conversation was the why behand the what. It seems to me that these behavioural expectations are not for their own sake. She defined her approach this way,

‘It’s holding them (the pupils) to high standards, and loving them enough to do so… People don’t like strictness, but it’s a way in which you can support the most disadvantaged children’.

Katharine’s educational philosophy is driven by a stubborn compassion, a stubborn hope, a stubborn confidence. Michaela school, a school with no kind of selection process, refuses to underestimate a single child that flows through it. Katharine has made the decision to give her life to helping children, particularly those who are so often overlooked, reach their full potential, and therefore, happiness. And who can fault that? Her school may be extreme in its methods (although I’m sure she would refute that), but I find the reasons that undergird its culture hard to find any kind of fault with.

Another thing that I can fully agree with is Katharine’s palpable admiration for teachers, something which she believes to be lacking in common consciousness,

‘People who aren’t teachers don’t realise just how much teachers have to give; how exhausting it is, how much energy it requires, and how intellectually demanding it is. I think that being a teacher is the biggest privilege and the hardest job. And people who haven’t done it, they just don’t realise… they don’t realise how clever you have to be, how skilled you have to be.’

I, like you, know and love enough people who are/have been teachers to be able to wholly agree with these words. We are not nearly thankful enough, and we need more teachers to tell us so.

So, this was the arc of the first half of our conversation with Katharine, we were able to soak up her obvious passion for her job and the children that she spends her days with. I found myself thankful that Michaela School exists, but equally thankful that my parents did not send me there.

Katharine is a campaigner by nature, and so the second half of our conversation with Katharine seemed to focus on some of her more controversial views on wider culture. It is at this point in the episode that you will undoubtedly be reminded that she has become quite the polarizing figure. There is plenty to admire about Katharine, there is also, as you can imagine, plenty to disagree with. I’m willing to place my own cards on the table and admit that there was much that Katharine said that I do not agree with. While there is no need to go into the specifics (what you think about her views because of this conversation is of far more importance), on reflection I have noticed that there is a theme that ties together the places where we differ in opinion and conviction: the theme is binary characterisation.

When surveying the cultural landscape, there is a tendency (amongst us all) to place people into binary categories in a way that I’m not convinced is actually happening within the cultural landscape itself (at least, not to the extent we are assuming). There is nuance to us all, I’m afraid it is an inescapable by-product of humanity, we are not 2D creatures. And so, there is nuance to our political and cultural ideas, our convictions, perceptions, hopes and fears. Any characterisation of us that strips away such nuance is doomed to be a caricature, a mischaracterisation.

I found her reference to ‘original sin,’ and the way she uses it as a means by which to regard children as inherently ‘naughty’ particularly interesting, not least because she does not believe in God. The whole theological concept of ‘original sin’/’the fall’ (as Marilynne Robinson refers to it on a previous episode of Re-Enchanting), isn’t binary. The Genesis literature, from which Katherine is drawing her thesis, is intent on answering the question of why good and bad seem to co-exist, why we aren’t all one-dimensionally-good, why goodness prevails in some cases, and evil is triumphant in others. Why, to borrow a phrase, what we want to do we do not do, but what we hate we do.

Beauty and brokenness are neighbours within us, living in astonishingly close proximity – and that, as I understand it, is the reality of ‘original sin.’

Perhaps this is where our tendencies to place people into rigid cultural categories, to treat each other as if we come with some kind of moral package-deal, comes from: what we believe about human nature becomes what we perceive when interacting with it.

Nevertheless, interviewing Katharine from her desk in her school, with the ‘pips’ that signify the end of class as our backing track, I was reminded that Katharine is a person who lives out her convictions, and I am sure her pupils are profoundly thankful for that. Sure, she seems to make herself many an enemy whenever she stands on a national platform, but far more of her life is spent behind the doors of Michaela School, serving her community with her disposition of stubborn hopefulness.

And so, there they are – my anything but neat reflections on my conversation with Katharine Birbalsingh, you can listen to her episode of Re-Enchanting now.

Article

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

Weirdness

Zombies

24 October 2024

5 min read

Zombies: a philosopher's guide to the purpose-driven undead

Don’t dismiss zombiecore as lowbrow.

Ryan Stark

Ryan is the author of A Guidebook to Monsters: Philosophy, Religion, and the Paranormal.

A regency woman dabs her mouth with a bloody hankerchief.

Lilly James in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Lionsgate.

Writing from his new book, A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan Stark delves into humanity’s fascination for all things monsterous. In the second of a two-part series, he asks what and where zombies remind us of, and why they caught the eyes of C.S. Lewis and Salvador Dali

On how Frankenstein’s monster came to life nobody knows for sure, but he is more urbane than zombies tend to be. Nor do Jewish golems and Frosty the Snowman count as zombiecore. The latter sings too much, and both are wrongly formulated. Frosty comes from snow, obviously, and the golems—from mere loam, not what the Renaissance playwrights call “gilded loam,” that is, already pre-assembled bodies, which is a zombie requirement. Tolkien’s orcs function likewise as golem-esque monsters, cast from miry clay and then enlivened by the grim magic of Mordor. We do not, for instance, discover scenes with orc children.

And neither is Pinocchio a zombie, nor Pris from Blade Runner, but dolls, automatons, and C3POs border upon the land of zombies insofar as they all carry a non-human tint. Zombies, however, carry something else as well, a history of personhood, and so in their present form appear as macabre parodies of the human condition writ large. They are gruesome undead doppelgangers, reminding us of who we are not and perhaps—too—of where we are not. Hell is a place prepared for the Devil and his angels, Christ tells us in the book of Matthew. And maybe, subsequently, for zombies.

Kolchak, in an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker aptly titled “The Zombie,” correctly discerns the grim scenario at hand: “He, sir, is from Hell itself!”

C.S. Lewis pursues a similar line of thinking in The Problem of Pain: “You will remember that in the parable, the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the damned go to a place never made for men at all. To enter Heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter Hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into Hell is not a man: it is ‘remains.’” Lewis makes an intriguing point, which has as its crescendo the now-famous line about the doors of Hell: “I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of Hell are locked on the inside by zombies.” I added that last part about zombies.

I make this point—in part—to correct those in the cognoscenti who dismiss zombies as a subject too lowbrow for serious consideration.

Not everyone believes in Hell, of course, yet most concede that some people behave worse than others, which also helps our cause. Indeed, part of zombiecore’s wisdom is to show that bad people often produce more horror than the zombies themselves. Such is the character of Legendre Murder, a case in point from the film White Zombie. Not fortunate in name, Mr. Murder runs a dark satanic mill populated by hordes of zombie workers, which is the film’s heavy-handed critique of sociopathic industrialization. The truth to be gleaned, here, is that zombies did not invent the multinational corporation; rather, they fell prey to it.

We might think, too, of Herman Melville’s dehumanized characters from Bartleby the Scrivener: Nippers, Turkey, Ginger Nut, and the other functionaries whose nicknames themselves indicate the functions. From an economic standpoint, their value becomes a matter of utility, not essence, which is Melville’s reproach of the despairingly corporate drive to objectify personhood—of which zombies are an example beyond the pale. They might as well be fleshy mannequins, in fact, and as such provide the perfect foil for the human being properly conceived.

Here, then, is why we do not blame zombies for eating brains, nor do we hold them accountable for wearing white pants after Labor Day, as some inevitably do. They cannot help it—in ethics and in fashion. Perhaps especially in fashion. The best we can hope for in the realm of zombie couture is Solomon Grundy, the quasi-zombie supervillain who holds up his frayed pants with a frayed rope, a fashion victory to be sure, however small it might be, though “zombie fashion” is a misnomer in the final analysis. They wear clothes, but not for the same reasons we do.

The point holds true for Salvador Dali’s zombies as well, most of whom find themselves in nice dresses. I make this point—in part—to correct those in the cognoscenti who dismiss zombies as a subject too lowbrow for serious consideration. Not so. Exhibit A: the avant-garde Dali, darling of the highbrow, or at least still of the middlebrow, now that his paintings appear on t-shirts and coffee mugs. Burning giraffe. Mirage. Woman with Head of Roses. All zombies, too ramshackle and emaciated to live, never mind the missing head on the last one, and yet there they are posed for the leering eye, not unlike those heroin-chic supermodels from Vogue magazine in the late 1990s. Necrophilia never looked so stylish.

The zombie’s gloomy predicament bears a striking resemblance to that of the Danaids in the classical underworld, those sisters condemned to fill a sieve with water for all eternity...

But never let it be said that zombies are lazy. They are tired, to be sure. Their ragged countenances tell us this, but they are not indolent. Zombies live purpose-driven undead lives. They want to eat brains, or any human flesh, depending on the mythos, and their calendars are organized accordingly. No naps. No swimming lessons. Just brains.

But we quickly discern that no amount of flesh will satisfy. There is always one more hapless minimart clerk to ambush, one more sorority girl in bunny slippers to chase down the corridor. In this way, the zombie’s gloomy predicament bears a striking resemblance to that of the Danaids in the classical underworld, those sisters condemned to fill a sieve with water for all eternity, an emblem of the perverse appetite unchecked, which has at its core the irony of insatiable hunger. And as the pleasure becomes less and less, the craving becomes more and more. The law of diminishing returns. So, it is with all vices. The love of money demands more money, and the love of brains, more brains.

And so, in conclusion, a prayer. God bless the obsessive-compulsive internet shoppers, the warehouse workers on unnecessarily tight schedules, and the machine-like managers of the big data algorithms. God bless the students who sedate themselves in order to survive their own educations, taking standardized test after standardized test. And God bless the Emily Griersons of the world, who keep their petrified-boyfriend corpses near them in the bedroom, an emblem of what happens when one tries too mightily to hold on to the past. And God help us, too, when we see in our own reflections a zombie-like affectation, the abyss who stares back at us and falsely claims that we are not the righteousness of God, as Paul says we are in 2 Corinthians. And, finally, Godspeed to Gussie Fink-Nottle from the P.G. Wodehouse sagas: “Many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance, and started embalming on sight.”

From A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan J. Stark. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.