ABSTRACT
Few would take issue with the claim that schooling in every society, whether modern or postmodern, plays a crucial part in the maintenance and reproduction of the dominant culture. The corollary, that all school curricula are necessarily imbued with assumptions, both tacit and explicit, about national identity, is likewise uncontentious. Yet despite the importance of this aspect of political socialization, relatively little is known about children’s constructions of national identity and how they develop. As action-researchers with a long-standing commitment to anti-racist and multi-cultural education, we have voiced concern about this apparent lacuna in the literature. Clearly teachers need to have some idea about how children construe their national identity if exclusivist and ethnocentric assumptions about citizenship are to be deconstructed. Mindful of the adage that no teaching will be effective unless it makes contact with the learner’s existing knowledge and understanding, we decided, in 1994, to embark upon a programme of ethnographic research in English primary schools (Carrington and Short 1995, Short and Carrington 1996). The research sought to explore the impact of age, geographical location and ethnicity on children’s understanding of national identity. A further concern was the extent to which their thinking about identity bore the imprimatur of the ‘new racism’ (Barker 1981), an ideology that first surfaced during the late 1970s on the Right-wing of the Conservative Party. Eschewing ideas of either biological or cultural inferiority, the new racism, according to James Donald and Ali Rattansi (1992:2):
presented itself as a worldly acknowledgement that different communities have different values and different ways of life which they have an instinct and a right to defend. There was an increasingly explicit articulation of a ‘white ethnicity’ linking discourses of family and community, national belonging, English patriotism, xenophobia and popular conservatism.
