By Susannah Wright
A year ago, on 27th November 2014, the British
Department for Education launched its non-statutory
guidance calling for schools to actively promote ‘Fundamental British
Values’ as part of pupils’ Social, Moral, Spiritual and Cultural education in schools,
the values in question being “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty,
and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs”.
Promoting fundamental British values, the guidance continues, requires
“challenging opinions or behaviours in school that are contrary to fundamental
British values”.
This attempt to promote British values in schools defines
‘Britishness’ and what the community of British citizens is through cultural
and ideological means. It goes beyond
strictly legal categories of nation state citizenship through reference to a shared
set of values, and the categories, people, narratives, symbols and actions that
symbolise these values. Good Britons uphold these values, those who do not are
somehow deemed not fully part of the national community, whatever their legal
citizenship status.
Educators in the past have similarly recognised that schools
provide an unrivalled opportunity to reach a captive audience of young people who
are obliged to be there for five days a week for much of the year, and to shape
their ideas of what being British means. Many elementary school teaching and
reading books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (not
centrally prescribed but designed to meet the needs of a government-defined
curriculum) associated Britishness with democracy and fairness, and other
markers such as Christianity and the Anglo Saxon Race,[1]
though the long-standing assumption among historians that Britishness meant
Englishness rather than anything else is now
being questioned. ‘Britain’ in these texts included her vast Empire, but
the way that Britishness was defined ensured that full British citizenship was
denied to the heathens and the ‘backward races’ living in imperial territories
overseas.
If this notion of the Briton as Anglo-Saxon and Christian
had some purchase (not all historians think it did, Jonathan Rose notably
questions how far these and other apparently hegemonic messages were taken on),[2]
we could also suggest that citizenship in terms of values and cultural meaning
was denied to agnostics or atheists within Great Britain itself. The
non-believers who gathered together within secularist groups such as the
Ethical Movement, London Positivist Society and the National Secular Society,
therefore, defined British values as they should apply to pupils in schools in
broader, more inclusive terms.
The Moral Instruction League, for example, a
pressure group formed in 1897, argued that a carefully designed syllabus of ‘non-theological’
moral lessons in schools would ensure that pupils acquired the knowledge,
values and behaviours that they would need as future citizens of the British
state. The League, for over 20 years, questioned the widespread assumption that
this citizenship must rest on Christian foundations. Britain, the League
suggested, and also the larger empire, contained many citizens who were not
Christian, so a moral code which could appeal to people of any or no religious
creed, rather than a Christian one, was the only just, fair and truly
democratic foundation of ‘British’ values. League activists had themselves, as
secularists, encountered a range of barriers including blocked employment
opportunities and work duties, eviction from meeting premises, even violence in
public places. They were fully aware of what defining British citizenship in
purely Christian terms could mean for those who were British but not Christian.
But was their moral code as universal as they hoped? Lessons
on the theme of ‘democracy’, penned by League activists AJ Waldegrave and FJ
Gould in their handbooks for teachers, advocate political participation for all
and not just an elite, and better wages and living conditions for the poor.
This was not the Whiggish story of the Magna Carta leading eventually to the
constitution of parliament and to greater glory found in other texts of the
period: Waldegrave and Gould did not ignore this story, but felt it was not
enough. The potential for controversy was greatest when texts touched on religion
and religious tolerance. Gould, in a lesson on ‘Differences of Opinion’ in his Children’s Book of Moral Lessons, suggested that atheists and adherents
of all world religions should be ‘saluted’ alongside Christians – this lesson
was singled out for vilification in the national and educational press. The
good Briton, for Gould, would salute all these people, the good Briton, for his
critics, would not. A common, unifying language of values could mask deeper
ideological differences which could be revealed in the context of actual texts
and lessons.[3]
Others
have questioned whether it should be
the place of schools to promote fundamental British value as the Department for
Education suggests. My argument, on the basis of historical example, is that we
should also ask how successfully they can
do so. Firstly, identifying particular values as British means that as well
as including those who supposedly uphold these values, those who do not can be
left beyond the boundaries of the ‘imagined community’, as opposed to the
strictly legal community, of British citizens. Secondly, the values identified
as British - democracy, liberty, tolerance - all emerge as subject to very
different definitions – perhaps an obvious point but a fundamental one if they
are meant to serve a unifying function. And if not applicable to all Britons
can any scheme of values to be taught in schools be fundamentally British?
[1] S.
Heathorn, "Let Us Remember That We, Too, Are English":
Constructions of Citizenship and National Identity in English Elementary School
Reading Books, 1880-1914, Victorian Studies, 38:3, 1995, 395-427.
[2] J.
Rose, The Intellectual Life of the
British Working Class, 2nd edition, Newhaven and London: Yale
University Press, 2010 especially pp.1-11.
[3] S.
Wright, ‘Our future citizens’: values in late nineteenth
and early twentieth century moral instruction books’, History of Education and Children’s
Literature, 4:1, 2009, 157-77.
