No.128
The Trusty Servant
‘Family is the basic building block of society’
‘The family is the basic building block
of our society; marriage is the corner
stone of family life’.
Rex Chester MBE (F, 48-53) Founder
& Hon. President Explore (Students
Exploring Marriage Trust):
During my time at Win Coll in
the 1950s, there was no notion of
learning emotional intelligence.
We were taught to show sang-froid
on the outside and to hide the
turmoil within. But nowadays
an all-round education would be
incomplete without a strong element
of relationship-learning. In my
organisation, we have seen, year after
year, the increasing appetite young
people have for direct talk about their
fears and hopes for making lasting
relationships in their adult lives. The
challenge is for their teachers to take
this demand seriously, and to address
it.
The organisation I founded, Explore,
goes back more than 20 years. In
the summer of 1996, I was working
for a public company which was
engaged in the paint and chemical-
coatings industry. At the same time,
I was much involved with a social
science research organisation called
the Grubb Institute of Behavioural
Studies (after the late Sir Kenneth
Grubb, then Chairman of the House
of Laity of the Church’s General
Synod). The Institute’s business was
in the field of interpersonal and
intergroup relations - how people
work together in organisations. It
had also pioneered over many years
a process of learning by experience
- as opposed to the more traditional
method of learning from didactic
teaching.
At around that time, I got a bee in
my bonnet and the bee said, ‘If as
a society we think that family life
is important, and that marriage is
the cornerstone of family life, what
are we actually doing to help our
young people prepare for this critical
decision - whether or not to get
married, and to whom, and how to
make it last?’ I met and talked to a
wide variety of people in education,
in the Church, in social services and
came to the sad conclusion that the
answer to the question was, ‘Little
or nothing.’ The main assumption
seemed to be that you would
somehow or other just pick it up from
your parents and muddle through.
However in this period of
exploration, I uncovered what
seemed to me some unpalatable facts
- that the UK had the worst divorce
rate and the worst rate of teenage
pregnancy of any country in Europe;
that the chances of a young person
still living with their birth parents
at the age of 16 were no better than
50/50; and, most staggering of all,
that the estimated cost of family
breakdown was over £30 billion
(currently £52 billion) per annum. All
of this data was openly available in
the public domain but no one seemed
particularly concerned.
16
The bee refused to go away and
insisted that something needed to be
done about this deplorable state of
affairs. Further reflection led me to
conclude that the idea that you might
be able somehow to teach marriage
was a non-starter: 0900 Latin, 0930
History, 1015 Marriage? No way!
However, I had one big idea - perhaps
there might be married couples out
there who would be willing to share
their actual experience in a way that
young people would find helpful.
The Director of the Grubb Institute
with whom I discussed this idea said
that as far as he was aware nothing
like this had ever been attempted
before and encouraged me to write
a concept note, which I duly did. He
then suggested that I would need to
talk to some schools to see if they
might be prepared to give the idea a
trial run. To my surprise and delight
both Banbury Comprehensive and
Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School
at Faversham in Kent agreed to act as
guinea pigs.
The Institute then set about
designing a methodology that would
enable students to talk to married
couples who had expressed their
willingness to share their experience.