Paul Vallely: Modern education fails the spiritual test

The Government seems to believe that you can fatten a pig just by constantly weighing it

The last time I met Dom Antony Sutch he was looking for directions to a good Chinese supermarket. He needed to buy the ingredients to cook for a supper party he was giving to assuage the homesickness of one of his pupils, a boy from Hong Kong. For a Benedictine monk, Dom Antony is quite a dab hand in the kitchen. He once appeared on the TV demonstrating an admirably deft touch tossing pancakes in an item on Lent.

But it was not so much the culinary expertise that imprinted itself on my memory so much as the depth of his care for the pupils in his charge as headmaster of Downside, the prominent Catholic boarding school for boys. We had met to record a programme for Radio 4 on faith and education that was never broadcast (evidently we didn't disagree enough to make "good radio"). I remember thinking afterwards that if only I could set aside my reservations about boarding schools, I would have been very happy to entrust a child of mine to his sane and balanced style of headmastering. And that was without knowing that, in his eight years as headmaster, Downside had risen steadily in the league tables of exam performance.

It was a grim irony therefore to learn yesterday that Dom Antony has resigned as Downside's head, worn out by the pressures of the job. He is just the latest victim of the forces driving good teachers out of schools. A terrible anxiety culture has been created. Parents are fretful. Children are pressured beyond what is reasonable. Curriculums are narrower. Teachers cram complex subjects to fit the overburdened exam syllabus. And box-ticking bureaucrats protect their jobs by creating more and more systems to measure everything. It is all, the monk says, "destructive of what I would call a proper education".

He is far from alone. At the weekend, a collection of eminent historians and writers met with the Prince of Wales to rail against the national curriculum as unduly prescriptive and demand that it should be scrapped. We have to be careful here. Education is one of those subjects on which it is easy to wallow in nostalgia and hark back, as the Prince did, to the golden age of one's childhood "in architecture, agriculture and education". What is new is not invariably a retrograde development; the Prince's historians lamented the decline of stories and chronologies in favour of teaching 12-year-olds to scrutinise the integrity of historical sources, and yet in a world where manipulation seems integral to the modern political process, it seems rather a useful skill to acquire.

Having said that, it is clear the world of education is entrapped in a straitjacket of assessment. The Government, as the monk-headmaster concluded witheringly, seems to believe that you can fatten a pig just by constantly weighing it. It is significant that this latest counterblast comes from a priest. The battle to resolve the tension between exam successes and the other values a good school seeks to foster is apparent in many schools. But a religious context articulates it with particular clarity.

Downside, like the abbey to which it is attached, takes its inspiration from the sixth-century rule of St Benedict, whose vision was of a community "where the strong have something to strive after but where the bruised reed is not broken" in a loyal and supportive society. There's nothing fashionably leftist or meritocratic about that or about the man who espouses it. Dom Antony is a former accountant as well as a sometime spiritual director to the late Princess of Wales. Yet he speaks about liberating his pupils from being self-centred or irresponsible. "It is essential," he says, "that every person should be his own man: responsible for others rather than taking his tone from them."

The paradox is that this counter-cultural approach has produced a school the Government sees as exemplary. "Any school that takes pupils from across the ability range," the inspectors recently reported, "and that has a significant proportion in the lower bands, and yet achieves results... in the top half of performance tables, deserves commendation. If at the same time it is providing outstanding pastoral care and spiritual development... then it has reason to be proud of its efforts. Downside is just such a school."

Dom Antony once cited the words of the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre as an educational touchstone. What matters now, MacIntyre wrote in his seminal After Virtue, "is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages that are clearly upon us". A school should be a repository of a more balanced and sane vision of human life than our utilitarian culture allows – distinctive, humanising and pointing gently towards eternity. When a man with such a vision gives up we should know that our schools really are in trouble.

p.vallely@independent.co.uk