I read an article today in the Evening Standard, page 12, by Tom Newton Dunn. It's called 'How to defuse a culture war: a group of London schools found a way', and it basically talks about how the benefactor, Robert Aske, started the Haberdashers' Aske's set of private educational institutions from a request he made when he died in 1689.
The issue with the benefactor was found out recently, in March 2021- that he partially funded the Royal African Company, which, apart from obtaining gold and other valuables from Africa, also extracted people and made them slaves.
Due to this, the Haberdashers school governors had to decide: should they cancel Aske as a benefactor, or defend him? They decided to do neither, and consulted with all students, parents, alumni and school staff, the numbers of which exceeded 800+, for 6 months.
In the end, they decided to remove his name from school titles but not from the formal legal name of the federation, and they used his statue as an educational tool to teach Aske's history and explain it, both good and bad.
They found a third way that was almost universally accepted by all people associated with the schools, which can be summed up in the following excerpt: 'Undoctrinal, built with intelligence and sensitivity. Peaceful resolution and consensus has been found to an extremely sensitive cultural divide by painstaking consultation and debate'.
I read somewhere that each person is the sum of every person that they have ever met. If every person could be exposed to variations of such a 'third way', and realise that making a choice is not just either one- right, or two- wrong, perhaps our society would be much calmer.
It's nice to hope.
(A picture of the article is below, which you can read in its entirety.)
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