ABSTRACT
Britain is exceptional among modern Western democracies in having had, until recently, very little direct provision of citizenship education in state schools. One reason for this absence may be that between 1925 and 1988 there was, in England and Wales, almost no direct central government control of curriculum content. Another reason for this neglect is the character of citizenship itself in Britain. Many writers have argued that the British are ‘subjects’ rather than citizens. Historian David Cannadine contrasts the USA ‘where the inhabitants are citizens’ with the UK ‘where the inhabitants are still subjects’ (1998: 53-4). Sociologist Bryan Turner (1990) in his well-known typology put the UK in the category of ‘citizen-as-subject’. And Tom Nairn has written scathingly of Britons having ‘a surrogate national identity’ in which the Crown and the Royal Family provided the key symbolic focus – ‘a national-popular identity composed decisively “from above” ’ (1988: 136-7). In such a situation it is scarcely surprising that Britain has no developed language of citizenship, no discourse through which British people naturally think or speak of themselves as citizens, and no public rituals in which citizenship is explicitly the focus (Ahier, Beck and Moore, 2003). Despite this, Britain presents a paradox in that, especially since the Second
World War, UK citizenship has been substantively strong – in certain respects much stronger than, say, in the USA. In his celebrated lectures on ‘Citizenship and social class’ (1950) T.H. Marshall distinguished three ‘elements’ of citizenship each associated with distinct kinds of entitlements. These were, first, the civic element consisting of civic and legal rights and protections, secondly the political element comprising a range of rights associated with democratic participation and representation, and finally (and most innovative) the social element, which includes, precisely as rights of citizenship, a range of welfare entitlements protecting individuals against risks arising from ill health, unemployment, and poverty in old age, and also including free primary and secondary education. Marshall went on to argue the contentious thesis that the realisation of full citizenship in a modern democracy needed to include this social element – not least because a relatively
high standard of education, health care, etc. was a precondition of citizens being able to exercise their civil and political rights effectively. In Britain, these social entitlements became strongly entrenched, especially through the welfare legislation of Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government (1945-51) and they have, despite some erosion, broadly remained so. It is illuminating in this respect to contrast attitudes to ‘socialised’ medicine in Britain and the USA. In the UK support for the publicly funded, free-at-the-point-of-delivery National Health Service has remained strong ever since it was introduced in the post-war years. This is so even among many who vote Conservative. On the other hand, there is in the USA a long history of resistance to extending free health care to all as an entitlement of citizenship. Despite this absence of a developed discourse of citizenship, the education
system in England and Wales has played a very significant role in political socialisation in a broader sense – especially in shaping a sense of a shared British identity. Historian Linda Colley (1986; 1996) has highlighted the longevity of efforts, going back well before the introduction of compulsory elementary schooling in 1870, to shape such a sense of Britishness – based on identifications with the monarchy, the Empire, ‘glorious’ military and naval victories and the like. Colley notes that this sense of national belonging was always defined against an array of ‘others’ – who epitomised all that was not ‘British’. Inevitably, the nation’s schools were in due course recruited to this task. In an illuminating study, John Ahier, discussing history and geography textbooks used in British elementary and primary schools in the period 1880-1960, has shown how various kinds of ‘othering’ worked to shape a sense of national superiority among British children. He notes that school texts in regional geography
both established a national confidence and at the same time, a set of assumptions about other races. It located ‘them’ (native people of ‘the colonies’) firmly in their climates and in lands which inhibited their growth towards civilisation. … In these books there is a clear implication of a natural hierarchy by which the British were given their place in the world. It is a place that demands hard work and delayed gratification but offers superiority.
