I was forever separating students when I was a teacher. It was particularly necessary with high school girls, whose capacity to talk perpetually might one day offer a solution to the world’s sustainable energy problems.
Separation is a curiously ineffective thing. When I separated students, it did not affect their friendships, the subject of their conversation, nor, in most cases, the amount of attention they were giving me. They were just a bit further apart.
According to the Concise Oxford, the adjective ‘separate’ means not much more than ‘physically disconnected’. I suppose that is right. When you separate things, or people, or ideas, about the only thing you can control is their physical location, and even that only temporarily. Things that are related will remain so, wherever you might try to move them.
So how do you separate church and state, intimately connected in a variety of ways, and lacking physical manifestations that can be neatly assigned to different sides of a room?
France has recently tackled the problem with typical Gallic pugnacity, planning to outlaw in state schools the wearing of headscarves by Muslim women, skullcaps by Jewish men, and large Christian crosses. (Thanks to popular culture and Madonna in particular, apparently the image of the Son of God hanging on a tree for the salvation of the world is no longer religious, provided the image is small enough).
Perceived by many to be principally an anti-Muslim measure, the proposal has been recommended by President Chirac, and readily embraced by the centre-right Government and a frightening proportion
of the still mostly (if only nominally) Catholic French population.
It is a curious development in the land of liberty, equality and fraternity. This is the country that in 1789 embraced the idea that ‘No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious
views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.’ Yet, the Government is justifying its plans by reference to the values of the revolution and the need to uphold the country’s secular identity.
In an unusual twist, the French share with the United States the same slightly bizarre thinking of that great architect of civil society, Thomas Jefferson. Although the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was drafted by the Marquis de La Fayette, apparently he had more than a little assistance from Jefferson, who was then the US