The immortal line from Rob Reiner’s classic 1986 film “Stand By Me” about four 12-year-old boys in late 50s small town America was, of course, “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12…Jesus, does anyone?” The film is currently on re-release to celebrate it’s 40th anniversary. That only happens to those few films that touch on something universal. It didn’t matter where you were from or where you grew up, if you had ever been 12, you were gripped by the film’s central message that there’s something  all at once eternal, fragile and infinitely more powerful about the friendships that we have in early and mid adolescence than the ones we have as adults.

It’s not something you can ever have again – you can’t reproduce the quality of what it means to have friends when you are 12 when you are 20, or 30, or older. That message was brought home to me forcefully when I heard that Immanuel College, the UK’s only Jewish private secondary school, my son’s school, was proposing to close this summer due to financial pressures imposed by the Labour government. Of course, there are lots of losses involved when a school closes. For the teachers and parents in particular. Many parents of course had chosen Immanuel for its very special qualities – a Jewish ethos, excellent Jewish education and high academic standards, alongside a smaller more intimate and caring environment coupled with excellent pastoral care. Something that is far more difficult for the larger state funded Jewish secondary schools, and indeed many other state and private schools to achieve. It’s also a loss for the community – the loss of a resource, and indeed the loss of the Jewish learning of future generations of children.

As I write these words, it’s still difficult to believe that it is happening. All these losses are real, but in the end they are not the most important thing. However difficult it is for the teachers and the parents, and indeed others in the community, they have all already been twelve. They had the chance to have their friendships. “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12”. But for my son, and all the other Immanuel children along with him, the closing of their school means, in most cases, the fracture of their friendship groups. Their tight knit groups will be split up across different schools, spread out across the city. Wherever they end up they will have to fight to fit in with groups already long established. And unlike when a single child moves school, they won’t be able to hold in their mind that the group they left still exists in some way. All they will have are images of empty classrooms and empty playgrounds.

The backdrop to the closure of Immanuel is the Labour government’s imposition of Value Added Tax to school fees and the withdrawal of other tax breaks for private schools. This has made the UK one of the only countries in the world to tax education. As a result, over 100 private schools have now closed, and 25,000 children have been uprooted. Many, including Labour ministers Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, and Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, come up with “justifications”. Who on earth knows if these make any sense, or whether in the grand scheme of things the relatively small sums the state has gained from this move will make much difference to anyone else. I leave it to others to decide. What I do know is that they have disregarded the impact on thousands of children. Ronald Reagan, quoting C.S. Lewis, pointed out how modern evil is often found in the decisions of the bureaucrats of the state – “…evil is… conceived and ordered… in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars… who do not need to raise their voice.”

Well, the quiet men (and women) with white collars in government have spoken and our children suffer.

It’s true of course that there is worse under the sun. Many children across the world sadly suffer much worse.  But that doesn’t, as some strangely argue, diminish our responsibilities as adults to do the very best for the welfare of our children. I can’t help but think that there must be a special place reserved somewhere for those quiet men and women in white collars in government and elsewhere who forgot that you don’t ever have friends like the ones you had when you were twelve, and who with a stroke of their pens needlessly ripped apart the friendships and lives of so many children.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)