Citizenship Education — Why Old School Beats New

Civitas, 16 June 2006

Tomorrow is the official 80th birthday of the Queen. Yesterday, to mark the occasion a special morning service was held at St Paul’s, followed by a slap-up lunch at Manson House. There over three hundred guests, ranging from the likes of Eric Clapton to Margaret Thatcher, turned up to pay homage to the remarkable lady who has done more than anyone else during this last turbulent half-century to hold the nation together.
Remarkably, this occasion served to evoke some rare words of sense from both the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Before tucking into his smoked salmon with blinis starter, Tony Blair spoke in glowing terms of the Queen’s ‘life-time of service to our country’. He rightly observed that the reason she was regarded with such affection by so many of her subjects, young and old, was the exemplary devotion to duty that she has always displayed. ‘Duty’ remarked the Prime Minister in this rare outburst of sense from him ‘is what marks you out, Ma’am –a selfless, dignified and perpetual adherence to doing your duty by your country.’ How true!
Earlier the same day, and even more miraculously, Rowan Williams was driven by the occasion to speak some good sense rather than in his more customary unfathomable tongue. He did so when in his sermon he observed that:
‘The identity of the United Kingdom has had something to do with the development of a critical democracy within the framework of symbol and tradition, At our best, we have found solidarity in a network of relationship and practices quite hard to codify, but variously connected with the personal focus that is the monarch.’
You might have thought that the ruling sovereign’s official birthday, plus such other events in the public life of the country as Coronations, the annual Day of Remembrance and other similar occasions that regularly punctuate the calendar, would provide schools with more than ample occasion to join in or study as would suffice, combined with suitable study of British history, to teach them enough about the framework of tradition and symbol that their country has been blessed to have been able to develop over the centuries as would be almost guaranteed to foster in them the appropriate solidarity with it.
By way of illustrative example of what scope study of their national public life has to offer schoolchildren for a form of citizenship education as would be liable to foster social cohesion in them, consider the oath the Queen took at her coronation at Westminster Abbey in 1953. Here, before a television audience of millions of her subjects at home and abroad, and among whom, as a young boy, the present author can still vividly recall staring in wide-eyed wonder, the young Elizabeth swore before God as Queen to:
‘do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the Holy Church of God, help and defend widows and orphans, restore the things that are gone to decay, maintain the things that are restored, punish and reform what is amiss and confirm what is in good order.’
Pretty awesome, in my book!
What a citizenship lesson for our present multi-faith society being made to consider what making such an oath must feel like.
Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely today’s schoolchildren will receive opportunity to engage in any such forms of empathetic study as part of their citizenship education. For, as newspapers report today, their time spent in class on such studies is far more likely to be spent being made to think about, where in their locality, are the most vulnerable targets for Al Qaeda terrorists to make a strike and other such salubrious topics.
I kid ye not. As part of their citizenship studies, today’s Times reports that pupils attending secondary schools in Waltham Forest are being given an education pack entitled ‘9/11: The Main Chance’ containing worksheets asking children to address such enticing questions as: Are there any possible targets in your local area? What weapons or methods could be used? How safe is our water?
Call me old-fashioned or what, but give me old school citizenship education any time, exemplified by watching a Coronation or being made to line a local road to wave flag as the Queen drives by, to the sort of the new-style active citizenship classes that are currently being offered in at least some of our schools which more bent on turning pupils into terrorists than anything else.