British values vs social integration
In defence of the past, the national and education (not behaviour modification)
In November 2014, the Department for Education published Promoting fundamental British values as part of SMSC in schools. This guidance stated: ‘Schools should promote the fundamental British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs.’
Until quite recently I was ignorant of this official advice. But my suspicions were raised, as a curious school governor perusing the websites of local schools. To my surprise, though I had assumed few would subscribe to ‘British’ values, I found school after school citing them. Word for word.
This rather put me off. Not off British values but the unconvincing impression of slavish adherence to them. It could be worse I suppose. Or rather it is. Schools are also signing up to questionable at best and damaging at worst orthodoxies, from unconscious bias training, to tall tales of eco-doom, and Drag Queen Story Hour. Apparently without a moments thought to the consequences for their children.
Arguably, enlightenment values - here rebadged as British - are the antidote to such self-loathing and divisive notions. But parroting them isn’t the same as understanding them. A defence of the past is a formidable challenge when it has so many ‘progressive’ detractors. But that is what we must do if we care about educating the young. The past, after all, is where our values come from and the source of learning.
Sport and the British, recorded in the run-up to London 2012, and still available on BBC Sounds, is instructive here. This excellent 30-part series presented by Clare Balding is a celebration of sport, a history of how the British codified everything from boxing to football, and at the same time a critical commentary on the class divisions, racial prejudice and misogyny that accompanied their development.
That balanced, sober account of Britishness couldn’t be further from the reaction to the National Conservatism conference earlier this month. It outraged the left-liberal media set. Much of the hysteria centred on author and political commentator Douglas Murray. He said, in one throw away line in a twenty plus minute speech, that people shouldn’t feel ashamed of their country just ‘because the Germans mucked up twice’ in one century. A not unreasonable argument delivered in a characteristically mischievous style was (deliberately?) misunderstood by our unserious press.
He was accused, disingenuously, of underplaying the crimes of the Nazis. But their real problem, it seems to me, was not with his supposed fascistic sympathies, but with his unapologetic defence of national pride. Frank Furedi, sociologist, prolific author and - as he acknowledged during his talk on ‘the war against national belonging’ - a veteran of the far left, echoed Murray. He observed how at a time when we are encouraged to identify with a multiplicity of niche identities, the one identity that is regarded with near universal disdain is national identity.
So much so, I wonder if that guidance published in 2014 would even get written today, when the mere mention of the nation causes a meltdown in elite circles. This month, the Department for Education published Social Integration in Schools and Colleges. A decade after it prescribed the British values it would like schools to cohere around, it is more interested in finding a ‘way to promote social integration’ inside schools. Instead of inspiring the young to play a part in the future of a society committed to democracy, liberty and tolerance, it is content to ‘produce behaviour changes (sometimes also changes in thinking or feeling)’.
There’s a lesson here. You can’t teach schools - never mind their young students - British values by rote. That guidance should have been delivered as part of a national conversation - as a pretty good starting point for the coproduction of an agreed set of values that we might all subscribe to. Sadly, we’ve now reached a point where even having that conversation - as we’ve seen from that National Conservatism conference - has been deemed toxic by the supposedly right-thinking in our mainstream politics and media. So much so, we’ve reached a point where engaging the young is passed over in favour of behaviour managing their relationships with their peers. It isn’t too late to start talking to each other about this but it has become more urgent, and if it’s going to happen at all, we’re the ones who are going to have to get it started.