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Death of Harold Blackham, aged 105
In a very real sense Harold Blackham was from another time zone yet also very much of the present. Humanity was his lifelong passion. It informed his extensive writings, which included The Human Tradition (1953) and The Future of our Past: from Ancient Greece to Global Village (1996). It led him to initiate several organisations, including the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), the British Humanist Association and the Social Morality Council/Norham Foundation. It also lay behind his enthusiasm for both Moral and Religious Education. Thus, he provided much of the energy for the launch of the Journal of Moral Education, now globally the leading interdisciplinary journal in that field. He also edited the influential report Moral and Religious Education in County Primary Schools (NFER 1975). As well as having well informed and imaginative things to say about children's gains from ME, RE and collective worship, it contains the following paragraph which might well be entitled Community Cohesion:
At all ages, when world religions and non-religious convictions are studied, it is important to foster an attitude of tolerance and a willingness to stand where the other person stands in an effort to see how something must appear to them. There is a danger that without an attempt to reach this empathetic standpoint, the study of different convictions may produce only negative results. Tolerance and understanding will be achieved most effectively by personal contact, and in the absence of that, by a skilful use of literature and by the teacher's encouragement of sensitive relationships within the classroom and the school. The fostering of these positive attitudes in the children will then extend, we hope, outside the schools into the wider community.
It was Harold Blackham's spirit of open humanism which made the British Humanist Association a most welcome member organisation of the Religious Education Council of England and Wales from its foundation in1973.
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