In an interview, Williams said that when a child learns language, it also learns about gesture, facial expression and coding and decoding, in order to interact with the other speaker. “We all know what happens when people don’t learn that,” he went on, “when they speak without a sense of the codes that are operating – the tone, the timbre, etc. I suppose that’s what panics people about, let’s say, a primary school teacher wearing the face veil.”
This was reported as: “Let Muslim primary school teachers wear full-face veil in class, says former archbishop of Canterbury.”
[TOP RATED COMMENT] Why have you deliberately failed to quote the rest of what Rowan Williams said? Is it because it than makes this a poor example to choose for your opinion piece?:
"“I suppose that’s what panics people about, let’s say, a primary school teacher wearing the face veil.
“As a matter of fact I think that’s largely a misplaced anxiety, but I can see where it comes from.
“I’ve actually been in public discussions in Pakistan with women wearing full face veil, and you learn to read differently, it’s not that those codes don’t happen … but there’s a cultural obstacle to overcome.”
This is why quite rightly the media reported that Rowan Williams thought that the worries about the face veil in the classroom were "misplaced".
[ANOTHER] Don't know about everyone else but if it had been me in primary school I'd have been scared s*****s by a teacher walking around in a niquab.
[ANOTHER] A Saudi cleric has called for babies to be put in burquas to help prevent children being abused. .... and in the UK, Imams offer to marry girls as young as nine. There is a definite problem in the Islamic world and it has been imported into the UK. [Guardian Cif] Read more
