We must protect students from IS recruiters, cardinal says

CARDINAL Vincent Nichols (pictured right), is expected to urge Catholic secondary school leaders to join the fight against the radicalisation of young people by Islamic State (IS) through the internet, writes Paul Wilkinson.

Stressing the important role that schools play in the formation of young people, he was due to speak on Thursday of how fundamentalists’ ideal targets were 14- to 15-year-olds whom they regarded as “clean skins … as yet unformed by substantive values”.

“We are talking about the age of children in your schools, in your care,” he was due to tell delegates to the Conference for Leaders of Catholic Secondary Education in London.

A number of Catholic schools have a majority Muslim student population.

The internet’s power lay in the ways it can be used to assemble many fragments of information “into a seemingly coherent whole and focus them into a narrative which compels and captivates”, he was to say. “This is the skill that can be put to good use, but it is also the skill of the recruiters of violence.”

Teachers have a role to play in showing children how they contributed to a greater whole.

“The degree to which you achieve this is the degree to which our schools will never be sending into the world ‘clean skins’ ready to be seduced by a corrupt and inhuman ideology, or by any other lesser versions of violence and degrading humanity,” he will argue.