Politics & Power Quote by Polly Toynbee

There is a sharpened accusation tucked inside Toynbee's plainspoken sentence: the state isn’t merely failing education, it’s actively switching referees. “Standing up for reason” frames government as a bulwark - the one institution meant to protect a shared, testable reality. By contrast, “handing education over” suggests abdication and capture, a quiet transfer of authority from public accountability to private doctrine. The verb choice makes it sound less like a debate and more like a sell-off.

Toynbee’s subtext is recognizably British and recognizably columnistic: an anxiety about what happens when pluralism is managed through deference rather than standards. “The world of faith” isn’t presented as personal consolation or community life; it’s a parallel jurisdiction with different rules of evidence. She’s warning that once schools become sites for competing truths, the state stops teaching citizens how to argue with one another and starts managing identities instead.

The line also works because it compresses a whole policy fight into a moral contrast: reason as civic infrastructure, faith as an interest group. In the UK context, it lands amid recurring controversies over faith schools, academisation, and the political temptation to outsource social cohesion to religious institutions. Toynbee is not attacking belief so much as the government’s convenience: letting “faith” do the work of education means dodging messy questions about inequality, curriculum, and social integration. The sting is that this isn’t portrayed as an accident. It’s a choice.