By Dr Rob Loe 

I very much enjoyed a pulsating encounter between Ireland and France last weekend but, despite an extraordinary conclusion to the game, it was the opening minutes of the anthems that really got me thinking.

Before the arrival of “Ireland’s Call” in 1995, Amhrán na bhFiann was the anthem that preceded all Ireland’s rugby matches. For those like former international Trevor Ringland, it’s a song that symbolises relationship building: 'I think that people need to understand what it actually achieves. It is a song that people across the whole island can embrace and enjoy. It’s something that creates a sense of inclusion and respect for the new traditions across this island.'

Whilst some may never feel as comfortable with it, many will agree that witnessing the men and women of the four proud provinces of Irish rugby, arm in arm, singing their hearts out, is both moving and thought-provoking. It is certainly not the only example of where individuals and groups have set aside historical tensions or disagreements for a shared common purpose or goal. Having tried the ‘hate route', Ringland argues, ‘why not try friendship?’.

In his essay on the subject of friendship, C.S. Lewis observed that the characteristic posture of friends is side-by-side or shoulder-to-shoulder, much like the Irish team, indeed any sporting team. It is distinctive to the characteristic pose of lovers, so often seen face-to-face, enchanted by one another. Friendship begins, he suggests, when people discover a common interest or passion - when it is experienced, shared and jointly valued. It is found when we discover people travelling the same road as us, and make that conscious decision to walk together. Relationships are ultimately founded on  shared goals.

This is not a new way of thinking about relationships. Aelred, a British monk from the 12^th century, distinguishes between various typologies of relationship, three of them specifically forged around different kinds of goal and worthy of highlighting and differentiating

1. Carnal friendship - based on a shared pursuit of pleasure, love or lust;
2. Worldly friendship - based on a pursuit of mutual or cooperative advantage
3. Spiritual friendship - based on a commitment to follow a common goal that transcends the individual – in his example, God.

He saw a distinction between relationships of intimacy and relationships of mutuality. It strikes me that the DfE’s current attempts to revise and enhance the Sex and Relationships Education curriculum (now to be referred to as the RSE curriculum) fails to draw these lines as clearly nor engage in a debate about their differences.

Through the passage of the Children and Social Work Act 2017, Parliament voted in support of the Government’s proposal that all primary schools, including maintained schools, academies and independent schools, would be required to teach "Relationships Education".

As the consultation window closes on Monday, I would imagine the resultant policy recommendations will fail to recognise three vital issues:

Relationships and Sex are not the same thing

So much of what we know about relationships has previously be confined to a wider narrative of “dating” relationships. Indeed, when conducting our first research in schools in 2014, a common response from students to me as researcher was, 'why would I even want to think about this – it’s not as though I want to “go out” with her.' A student voice perspective such as this is significant; both student and academic perceptions of relationships in school fail to adequately respond to the distinction between connected relationships and those that are in some way sexualised. Furthermore, it fails to respond to the reality of how we measure the quality of a relationship: it is not understood by how much you like someone but the degree to which you know them. That is not to say that young people cannot see the distinction merely that there is a reticence, perhaps, to recognise the benefits of more platonic friendship. We should be interested in relationships for their own sake because they support the development of many key skills such as altruism or empathy or communication skills such as negotiation. But our research seems to support the idea of a “two worlds theory”; that is as students develop through the school years, they grow apart, socially and culturally, into distinctive silos.

You can't simply learn about relationships - you also have to experience and practise them

As with so many things, debates tend to centre on curriculum and not the contexts of that education. The problem is we so often approach life as an intellectual project which, of course, assumes a rather narrow conception of what it is to be human. We are told that human beings are, as Descartes had it, thinking things, res cogitates. A sort of disembodied head that your insignificant body merely carts around and could be replaced by a machine; our brains are where all the real action takes place. And this determines how we think about learning in schools; that learning is primarily an individual cognitive thing. You just need a curriculum, a text book or a timetable for all this stuff.

This is what Freire called a banking model of education. We think of learning as just another form of capital and all our actions or behaviours in life, consequently, as withdrawals from that bank, as if our actions are always the result of an intentional and logical decision-making process. Of course, all of this disregards the influence of the people and organisational cultures around us that shape our habits.

As James K. Smith argues (2016), 'to recognise the limits of knowledge is not embrace ignorance. We don’t need less than knowledge – we need more! The implicit picture of humanity is dynamic – to be human is to be for something, orientated to something. We are teleological – orientated towards a “telos” or goal. But what goal?' The educational experiences of young people, the relationships they experience, shape who they are. Shape their virtues and their values. And our virtues and values are acquired through imitation. So let me clear – this debate should be about what students experience not what they should be taught. They’re not the same thing. This debate MASSIVELY misses the point, if all we get is a change of curriculum.

That’s because...

You have to change everything

Building trusting, respectful, connected relationships amongst adults and students in schools is well beyond the limited capacity of a lesson or a curriculum. As Smith argues, 'to recognise the limits of knowledge is not embrace ignorance. We don’t need less than knowledge – we need more!' It must be addressed in all aspects of a schools’ life. Without this context any new curriculum will fail.