Cultural suicide

Friday, 1st February 2008

The government-commissioned report that says teachers should avoid instilling patriotic feelings in their pupils because British history is ‘morally ambiguous’ has caused people to choke on their cornflakes this morning. The Times reports:

Three quarters of teachers felt obliged to tell students about the danger of patriotism. The survey suggested neither pupils nor teachers wanted patriotism endorsed by schools…It said: ‘To love what is corrupt is itself corrupting, not least because it inclines us to ignore, forget, forgive or excuse the corruption. And there’s the rub for patriotism. Countries are morally ambiguous entities: they are what they are by virtue of their histories.’

The authors added: ‘It is hard to think of a national history free from the blights of warmongering, imperialism, tyranny, injustice, slavery and subjugation, or a national identity forged without recourse to exclusionary and xenophobic stereotypes…Dr Hand, the co-author of the report, said: ‘Gordon Brown and David Cameron have both called for a history curriculum that fosters attachment and loyalty to Britain, but the case for promoting patriotism in schools is weak. Are countries really appropriate objects of love? Loving things can be bad for us, for example when the things we love are morally corrupt. Since all national histories are at best morally ambiguous, it’s an open question whether citizens should love their countries.’

This is not just pernicious but perverse. No-one has called for patriotism to be ‘promoted’, merely for pupils to be taught about their country’s history and institutions so that they can feel as a result a sense of belonging, attachment and loyalty. If pupils are ignorant about the country in which they live they will have no such feelings — which is precisely what has happened, and why Brown and Cameron are so concerned (despite Brown's intention to remove Britannia from the 50p coin -- some confusion here, surely). Ignorance of a country’s past, of the values that have shaped it and the story of its achievements, means that people rattle around inside it without any feeling of shared commitment or obligation. That is the way a society ceases to be a society. Proper history teaching does not mean that shameful aspects of its past should be omitted; it means teaching the history in an objective fashion so that pupils can make up their own minds about individual events. But since this country was the crucible of western democracy and liberal values, for which countless thousands of its citizens fought and died, its story — warts and all — can hardly fail to instil a sense of the value and worth of the country which its citizens will therefore wish to defend. Indeed, the very act of teaching a narrative of national identity in and of itself instils a sense of belonging to a collective enterprise.

But of course, the authors of this report do not acknowledge any such criteria of objectivity, let alone the duty to transmit a culture down through the generations which is the very essence of education. No, the explicit basis for their conclusion is that Britain is intrinsically ‘corrupt’ and its history characterised solely by ‘warmongering, imperialism, tyranny, injustice, slavery and subjugation'. No-one should be the least bit surprised that ‘academics’ from the prestigious Institute of Education, no less, should come out with such sub-Marxist counter-cultural claptrap. For this has been the orthodoxy in the education establishment for the past three decades. It is the reason why the teaching of British political history and the story of the nation has been all but excised from the curriculum, replaced instead by bursts of disconnected propaganda gobbets about ‘slavery’, ‘empire’ (which of course was all bad) and the oppression of the poor, women and minorities (with Hitler thrown in for good measure because of the crowd-pulling appeal in the classroom of extreme violence). In the 1980s, when the then head of the curriculum body — himself a historian who was aghast at this negation of education in British schools — tried to turn the tide of cultural nihilism, he lost hands down to a teaching body which declared in terms that the teaching of British national identity was intrinsically racist, colonialist and xenophobic.

The education establishment has been intent for decades on destroying Britain's national identity in an attempt to turn it into Planet Gramsci. It has succeeded.