"Without vision people perish": Philip Lawrence's prophetic

warning was issued in the Herald in 1993. We reprint it here.
CATHOLIC INNER CITY schools have to face all the challenges of secular ones and more.
We have to be consciously something more, something distinctive. It is pinning down that "something" that forms the challenge. Many Catholic headteachers fix on their office wall the Psalmist's warning; "Without vision the people perish."
But pious words alone do not give tangible form to a vision of Catholic educadon in the urban devastadons of our time. Talk of "Gospel values" is certainly not enough. It would be difficult, in fact impossible, to find a secular comprehensive school not dedicated to justice, peace and forgiveness. Our battle is to go beyond that. Today's inner city Catholic schools probably do not tower literally over neighbouring housing like the educational cathedrals of Victorian Britain. That kind of 19th century confidence is no longer available to most of us. They are, though, rightly conceived, genuinely dedicated to bringing another kind of vision to those whose young lives are starved of hope.
Certainly we will teach the three or four "R"s, all the more rigorously for our conviction of the God given nature of every child's talents (however obscure these may sometimes be).
With enthusiasm we deny the dreadful neo-capitalist doctrine that there is no such thing as society and assert Christian community as the essential experience we work to build in our schools, even as islands of mutually supportive sanity in a fractured world.
Above all, here on Arnold's "Darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight", our challenge is to witness to a faith that beyond that darkness there is Christ and an ideal which can dissipate the confusions of our fractured, materialist, urban world. Sharing that vision with our young people justifies the struggle.
Extract from "The Challenge of the Inner City" by Philip Lawrence, 1993, C Catholic Herald.