Katharine Birbalsingh is right: children do have original sin

When my son was about six he heard something at school about slavery but was not quite clear what it was all about. So I spelled it out. I told him that a slave was someone that someone else owned and ordered around and probably mistreated. I waited for the proper response of moral horror to show on his innocent features. Instead he said, ‘Cool, I want one!’

I offer this recollection in support of Katharine Birbalsingh’s supposedly controversial opinion that children are not naturally full of the right moral impulses. ‘Britain’s strictest head teacher’ has bolstered her reputation by saying that children are born with ‘original sin’ and must be ‘habituated into choosing good over evil.’

This opinion immediately offended the great and the good, as if her point of view was equivalent to advocating the thumb-screw. An outgoing member of the social mobility commission, which Birbalsingh now chairs, accused her of ‘whipping up division’ and said he hoped it wouldn’t be a ‘sign of things to come’.

Another departing commissioner told the Times that, ‘I wouldn’t agree with those comments and I wouldn’t say her comments reflected at all any of the current commission’s views. I’ve always viewed young people in the best light and any negativity comes from the fact that they haven’t been nurtured or aren’t in the position to get the support they need.’

Others called her view ‘medieval’, a very dated accusation. This remains a strand of secular humanism, the idea that humanity is naturally good, and that people become corrupted by bad ideas as they grow up. This was the opinion of Neil Gray, an SNP MSP, who said her ‘original sin’ comment was ‘the opposite of my world view.’ He added: ‘Children are not born bad. Children are born good and I would suggest trauma, poverty… and negative influences of adults are what drive negative behaviour into adulthood. We must nurture and protect our children not stigmatise them from birth.’

Yet the problem is that there is no pure ideology that saves children from the moral murk of the world. And obviously if they are left to themselves they are feral.

Many would agree with Birbalsingh that ‘moral formation’ is necessary for children, but reject her appeal to original sin. But I think she is quite right, and that the most rigorous moral idealism entails this concept.

What’s wrong with the vague orthodoxy that everyone is a mix of good and bad impulses, and that most of us manage to be good enough? It is not ambitious enough. The strange thing about original sin is that it sounds amazingly negative but is actually the most idealistic belief available. It says that normal moral decency is not good enough, it’s a compromise that makes us feel moral as long as we don’t break the law. In fact we are all morally inadequate, and even the keenest do-gooders have dodgy inclinations. This ‘bleak’ view of humanity is not bleak at all – it simply means that an ideal of perfect morality is on the table. We should, ideally, be morally ideal, perfectly loving, all the time. It is only in relation to this extreme ideal that ‘sin’, as a universal human condition, makes sense. They are two sides of the same coin.

So hats off to a headteacher capable of teaching us all a lesson.