43 results
8 - Conclusion
- Sally Tomlinson, Goldsmiths, University of London and University of Oxford
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- Ignorance
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- 20 January 2024
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- 20 October 2022, pp 171-188
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Summary
Things fall apart
The centre cannot hold
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity
W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming
UK achieves herd immunity of tolerating bullshit.
Nish Kumar
So, what would my four-year-old self think about the state of ignorance in education in 2021, almost 80 years after the Beveridge Report and Rab Butler's Education Act? What would be my future if I was four years old now? For starters, I would no longer be an “infant”. I would be a pre-schooler in an early years foundation stage, with teachers who know all about cognitive development and social learning skills, as well as crayoning and singing songs. They would be following government guidance on whether I had achieved my early learning goals. Ofsted would soon be checking up on whether my reception class was good or outstanding, especially in preparing us for the literacy and maths skills we would need in Year 1 and the first Key Stage tests. But my present and future achievements and levels of ignorance would still depend heavily on my social class and ethnicity, my family or care background, whether I had been told I had SEND and especially the schools I would attend. Would they be expensive or cheaper private, part private academies, local authority maintained, selective grammar or comprehensive, faith-oriented or agnostic, urban or rural, well-resourced or starved of funds and much else? I would also have started my schooling not with actual wartime bombs falling, but with the bombs of a pandemic still falling all around and a government that had not responded well to the Covid-19 pandemic and its mutations. I would not have had a full year's schooling in 2020 and 2021 as the pandemic took hold, and 2022 and beyond was looking shaky. Although early ignorance of the implications of a pandemic were understandable, the public has been subjected to much deceit, evasion, fabrication and lies affecting all public institutions and the well-being of the whole population. A YouGov poll in December 2021 “revealed huge public cynicism” over trust in politicians to act in the national interest (Helm & Savage 2021), but the view presented by Nish Kumar in his Daily Mash programme was that “the British public are now so used to lies and stupidity that the entire country has become immune” (Kumar 2021).
3 - Market Forces and Ignorance in the 1980s
- Sally Tomlinson, Goldsmiths, University of London and University of Oxford
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- Ignorance
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Summary
There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then to look after our neighbour.
Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, 626
There are a great many women … who have to find effective personal strategies to succeed in a world that is often still dominated by men. Mrs Thatcher was not the only woman to feel that she had to work harder than the men around her to get on.
Caroline Slocock, People Like Us: Margaret Thatcher and Me, xiv
Having moved in 1978 to Lancaster University, I was nearly as busy as Margaret Thatcher through the 1980s: researching, writing, teaching, examining, administering, being head of department for three years after promotion to professor in 1984. That year only 5 per cent of allprofessors in England were women, although the late Lord Beloff did announce, when I opposed him in a Cambridge Union debate, that “the lady calls herself a professor; this is like a motor mechanic calling himself an engineer”. My promotion was announced in the Lancaster Guardian as “Mother of Three Made Professor”, so in spite of Enoch's view, I had managed it with children. I was now able to challenge much of my own ignorance, even travelling to the University of the South Pacific and meeting some policy-makers and politicians, including Margaret Thatcher. I spent time on two government-appointed committees dedicated to removing ignorance about minorities and imperialism, but the reports of both were ignored. I also chaired the parents’ Advisory Centre for Education (ACE), set up by (Lord) Michael Young, father of Toby (see Chapter 6). ACE has done great work for parental knowledge about what is happening to their children.
REGRESSIVE VISIONS
Margaret Thatcher became the first woman prime minister of the UK in 1979. One of her early activities was to take elocution lessons to lower her voice, which she thought was too shrill. Famous actor Lawrence Olivier had suggested that voice trainers at the National Theatre would oblige. At Oxford she was president of the university Conservative Society and early on demonstrated her dislike of socialism and the Labour Party, which she equated with Stalin's version of communism.
2 - Breaking Out of Ignorance, 1945–80
- Sally Tomlinson, Goldsmiths, University of London and University of Oxford
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- Ignorance
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The prizes offered (for passing the 11-plus) in one class included sixteen new bicycles, three watches, three puppies, a bedroom clock, a portable radio, a tennis racket, a perm, a pair of roller skates.
Brian Simon, Education and the Social Order 1940–1990, 153
The essential point is that all children should have an equal opportunity of acquiring intelligence, and developing their talents and abilities to the full.
Edward Boyle, Half our Future, foreword
I passed the 11-plus after extra coaching and was pushed up a year into the alpha stream of my girls grammar school. We did Latin. The “C” stream did domestic science and girls left at 15. Out of some 90 girls who started grammar school with me, six ended up going to a university. Several others who stayed for A-levels went to teacher-training colleges. The girl who did best married a builder who ended up a millionaire. My parents, like other lower-middle-class families, were desperate to take advantage of the now free but selective secondary schooling. After school I helped out at the private nursing home where my mother, a qualified nurse and midwife, was now able to work, having had to give up her job pre-war when she married. One evening I helped her bath baby Simon Hughes whom she had just delivered, which is probably the most political thing she ever did as he later became an MP and deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrat Party. I began to learn the realities of social class, how “private” meant “more money”, and went to university to study sociology and boys. Married straight from university as girls did in those days, I had a brief career in Canada as a social worker and trained as a teacher. Then three children by age 26 and a struggle to get back into higher education. Just in time for it to be “Downhill all the way: the 1970s” (Simon 1991: 405).
SELECTING THE POSH AND THE DIM: THE 1950S
This chapter discusses the various ignorances incorporated in selective schooling, the regeneration of private schooling in the 1950s, the breakout from much ignorance in the 1960s (which, contrary to right-wing propaganda, was actually a decade of progress and innovation) and the ignorances of the 1970s.
1 - Introduction: Ignorance Evolves
- Sally Tomlinson, Goldsmiths, University of London and University of Oxford
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If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
Car sticker from the mid-1980s after cuts to education spending
Never forget the past, you may need it again in the future.
Malcolm Bradbury, Dr Criminale, 133
I am four years old and sitting on the steps outside a school and crying to be let in. My brother, older than me, is inside the two-room school in the village to which we were evacuated in the Second World War as the bombs began to fall on Manchester. I don't know it yet, but I want many different kinds of knowledge. I want to know about the letters and words on the bright posters around the schoolroom walls. I want to be able to paint and crayon and sing with the other children. I want to run around the small playground and play new games. In short, I want the “cultural, mental and physical development” that the national curriculum of 1988 announced would provide me with a broad and balanced education, along with spiritual and moral development. As it was a Church of England school, I would have got those anyway once the church and state had been reconciled in the 1944 Education Act, and later on in the Catholic convent school I was sent to, where we had a lesson on “manners and morals” every Friday.
But I would also be introduced to various kinds of ignorance. I wouldn't learn until much later that letters and words could be in other languages. I wouldn't realize that some of the “truths” I learned about Britain, its history and geography, even stories and poetry, would be lies or misinformation. I wouldn't learn that there were other religions or ethnicities until my teenage years. I didn't know I was being introduced to the acceptance of a social class hierarchy when we sang a hymn, “All things bright and beautiful”, which included the verse, “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate”. I was yet to learn that being a girl would limit my future. I didn't know that my excited need to know about the world around me would soon be narrowed into joyless rote learning and practising for something called tests, and a thing we learned to dread called the 11-plus examination.
Ignorance
- Sally Tomlinson
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As a universal experience school provokes strongly-held opinions. The views of teachers, parents, pupils compete with those of educational theorists, social engineers and ideologues. Although undoubtedly much improved since the time of Beveridge, the provision of education remains beset with challenges. Sally Tomlinson's engaging, and at times personal, journey through Britain's postwar experience of schooling and education reform draws on her many years of working in the sector. She explains how legacies of different systems and countless policy initiatives have led to the persistence of social inequalities, entrenching them in society and perpetuated by the power dynamics that they create between class, race and gender. Furthermore, she shows how the increasing mania for testing, targets, choice and competition, which has made schools into a marketplace and young people into consumers, threatens to undermine schools as a place where citizens can share learning and the democratic values that are needed as much today as they were in Beveridge's time.
4 - Redistributing Ignorance in the 1990s
- Sally Tomlinson, Goldsmiths, University of London and University of Oxford
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- Ignorance
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The last half-century … has been a period of struggle, of rebuffs, but sometimes victories in the continuous endeavour to ensure access for all to a full, all-round education.
Brian Simon, Education and the Social Order 1940–1990, 558
I wanted to believe that he [John Major] was the man to secure and safeguard my legacy and take our policies forward.
Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, 860
The 1990s were my busiest years ever: career peaking with a job at Goldsmiths, London University as professor of education policy and dean of education, then promoted to pro-warden (a sort of vice-principal). Perks included dinner with the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths in the City. Other delights were three grandchildren and more juggling work and family. With funding from the Leverhulme Trust I organized seminars and a conference on the results to date of Conservative education policies. I also entered into Labour politics in a small way, beingon Jack Straw's Education Advisory Group from 1989 to 1992 and on a European Enquiry Team into technical and vocational education set up by Neil Kinnock. This included interviewing Lionel Jospin, later the French prime minister, and a school dinner of three courses with wine at a lycée (secondary school) in Paris. Then for two years I was an advisor to the shadow education secretary, Ann Taylor, when we wrote the last “old Labour” policy paper on education, and an associate at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), where a young David Miliband organized us into producing Labour education policies, which never happened.
HOW DID HE WEAR HIS UNDERPANTS?
Hindsight is always right. Looking back 30 years it is clear that under John Major's term as prime minister he did take Thatcher’s educational legacy of ignorance for the majority forward, and did not ensure access to a full all-round education for all young people. When he first got the job he was a bit of a figure of fun. After a suggestion that he tucked his shirt into his underpants, cartoonist Steve Bell depicted him as Superman who wore his underpants outside his trousers, and the Spitting Image television series during the 1990s portrayed him as a grey man slowly eating peas (Fluck et al. 1990). But he was clever enough during the struggle to succeed Thatcher to absent himself in hospital to have his wisdom teeth out.
Contents
- Sally Tomlinson, Goldsmiths, University of London and University of Oxford
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7 - Ignorance in Covid/Post-Covid Schooling, 2020–21
- Sally Tomlinson, Goldsmiths, University of London and University of Oxford
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Summary
This year [2021] more than any year, teachers deserve our thanks. It's too soon to know the true cost of the pandemic on student and teachers’ mental health but it's clear that the lack of clarity, the incompetence, the mismanagement of examinations, the bias, and the appalling lack of knowledge shown by government about the majority of children and young people's experiences of education have had a profound effect on attainment, on confidence, on a generation’s love for learning.
Kate Moss, “Letter to my teacher”
The scandals of the Major government do not compare with the debasement of democracy currently underway.
Nicholas Reed-Langan, “This government has unleashed something worse than sleaze”
Like millions of people over the two years when a global pandemic caused by a virus known as Covid-19 affected us all, I went through the stages of alarm, depression, resignation and just about coping! Although worried about children, grandchildren, friends and colleagues, I was not in charge of or responsible for children or students on a daily basis, but I observed the difficulties of many families, especially single parents, coping with the behaviours required of them as the government responded badly to the crisis. Just some of the issues were: lockdown in houses or flats, which was awful for those without gardens or access to parks and open spaces; the closure of schools with the expectation that parents or carers would “homeschool”; the efforts of teachers to provide online teaching and learning, or going into schools to teach vulnerable children (my daughter and daughter-in-law were among these teachers); the crazy shuffles over examinations, an increase in mental health problems and ever more inequalities between children. University departments closed down in early 2020, as did the libraries, staff and students suffered disruption, and by 2021 universities were still not able to workwithout restrictions. Just as we thought things were getting back to a new “normal” towards the end of 2021, along came omicron, another variant to Covid-19 to worry us all. I was able to keep writing, join the advisory board of a study of school exclusions, examine PhDs, struggle with Zoom and sadly wrote some obituaries for colleagues. The Africa Educational Trust that I had supported for years merged with another charity and some work goes on, despite government and other funding for overseas aid being cut.
References
- Sally Tomlinson, Goldsmiths, University of London and University of Oxford
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Index
- Sally Tomlinson, Goldsmiths, University of London and University of Oxford
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Frontmatter
- Sally Tomlinson, Goldsmiths, University of London and University of Oxford
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- Ignorance
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5 - Bog-Standard Schools and Academies, 2000–10
- Sally Tomlinson, Goldsmiths, University of London and University of Oxford
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- Ignorance
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My Dad's greatest wish was that I be educated privately, and not at just any old private school. He chose Fettes because he thought and had been told it was the best school in Scotland.
Tony Blair, A Journey, 43
The day of the bog-standard comprehensive is over.
Alastair Campbell, press briefing, February 2001
Freed from 30 years of administration and endless meetings, after taking early retirement from the day job in 2000, I started a happy time in the Education Department at Oxford University as an honorary research fellow. With some teaching I was able to research, write and study the depressing antics of our political masters and their aides as they further degraded what could have been a fair democratic education system into what became an unfair and corrupted system. In a pointless gesture, I resigned my fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts when asked to pay £50 towards an academy school (I did rejoin later!). I served on yet another commission looking at the Future of Multiethnic Britain thatwas duly rubbished in the press (Parekh 2000), but I tried to help education along in a country where, after various postcolonial wars, there was not much of it. This was the independent republic of Somaliland, where as a Trustee of the African Education Trust I could help train teachers and skill disabled people (Tomlinson & Abdi 2003). On several occasions in the north of Somalia we had a bodyguard with an AK-47, although as most people welcomed any kind of education, there wasn’t much need for an assault weapon, and I was never sure if anyone wanted to kill a granny. I also spent eight years on the council of the University of Gloucestershire, including chairing their employment committee, which was a much more dangerous activity.
BEING TONY BLAIR WAS TOUGH
Reading his memoir, A Journey (Blair 2010), you have to feel sorry for Tony Blair. As a privately educated young man (Durham Choristers, Fettes College and St John's College, Oxford), his first love was Amanda, the only girl at Fettes, whose father was a judge at the European Court of Justice.
6 - Weirdos and Misfits, 2010–20
- Sally Tomlinson, Goldsmiths, University of London and University of Oxford
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The era of market triumphalism has come to an end … the most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not just an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets into spheres of life where they don’t belong.
Michael Sandel, What Money Can't Buy, 7
Boris Johnson's Chief Advisor issued a call for ‘weirdos and misfits’ to apply for jobs in Downing Street as plans to shake up Whitehall went into overdrive.
Rayner & Sheridan, “Weirdos and misfits for Whitehall”
Another busy decade from 2010 for global capitalism, education and me, none of us doing too well by the end of it. I joined the council of a further education college for four years and also joined a limited company of four of us to keep the local library open. I had an emeritus grant from the Leverhulme Foundation to study “low attainers in a global knowledge economy”, which let me visit schools and colleges in England, New York, Los Angeles, Malta, Finland and Germany, with conferences to talk about it all in Istanbul, Portugal, Holland and Chicago. Still more writing, including a book with Danny Dorling, Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire (2020). In this we noted that England had led the way out of the European Union and onto a downward spiral in world trade and respect, and that national identity was up for grabs again as it slowly dawned that there was no empire to loot any more. In 2013, along with a hundred other education professors, I was called a Marxist “actively trying to prevent children from getting the education they deserve” by then education secretary Michael Gove. He was keen on promoting democratic values that he claimed were “British” but along with his adviser, Dominic Cummings, seemed to have promoted some dodgy values himself. As a good sauvignon-blanc socialist I stood as a Labour candidate in a local council election and got 13 per cent of the votes in a very Tory village. My admiration for people actually working in schools increased, but incredulity grew as the White Papers, Acts and guidance from what had reverted to the DfE further entrenched a hierarchical, divisive and increasingly corrupted education system.
Preface
- Sally Tomlinson, Goldsmiths, University of London and University of Oxford
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Summary
This book was suggested to me by Alison Howson at Agenda Publishing, who had the excellent idea of asking five people to consider how far William Beveridge's assertion that five giants needed to be overcome in postwar Britain had actually happened and whether these giants had now been banished. These were Want (poverty), Disease (health), Idleness (unemployment), Squalor (housing) and Ignorance (education). I have lived through the post-Beveridge changing and expanding school system, and then worked “in education” at various levels and together with many valued colleagues and friends have researched and written about the education system in Britain and other countries. Together with many others I am sad that the education system in England, which slowly and with errors was beginning to serve all children and young people and help develop some measure of social and racial justice in our society, has been turned into a competitive, semi-privatized, profit-seeking and unjust system. Ronald Reagan, the former US president, had much admiring right-wing press coverage for his claim that “the most terrifying nine words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’ ”. In my view the five most terrifying words over the past 40 years have been “Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher”, as they were the principal architects of what became “neoliberalism”, a free-market ideology which has dominated much of the world since the 1980s and produced, in England especially, pointlessly competitive and corrupted schooling. Other postwar European countries managed to banish much ignorance in their populations through more equitable and just education, and without the often vicious denigration of a state-maintained system and its teachers, which is still in full flow in this country. It has become more difficult to find out what is actually happening in many of our schools, as they have been turned into businessoriented institutions with all the claims for confidentiality that characterize businesses. Research that might be critical of policy and practice is discouraged and much research funded by government avoids searching questions. Current claims that governments are interested in “what works” in schooling avoid the question “works for whom?”
Some intrepid writers, along with committed journalists, have managed to study and write from critical perspectives, and a number of books, articles and blogs now question what is going on.
4 - Post-imperial anxieties and conflicts, 1970-90
- Sally Tomlinson
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- Education and Race from Empire to Brexit
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We all thought the empire was a marvellous thing. It was a force for good throughout the world. When Britain chose to give her empire away we were rather saddened – the colonial people had all the blessing of colonial rule and look how casually they dismissed them. (National Service cadet officer, quoted in Shindler, 2012: 92)
If we went on as we are, by the end of the century there would be four million people of the New Commonwealth or Pakistan here. Now that is an awful lot and I think it means people are rather afraid this country might be swamped by people with a different culture. (Thatcher, 1978)
An empire mindset never really died. For some, colonial rule was a blessing given up by ungrateful people, and for many, including a prime minister, the arrival of former colonial subjects into the colonising country was regretted. By 1978, some politicians claimed that just 1.5 million black and Asian people, a third actually born in Britain, might swamp the other 55 million. National servicemen who had served overseas were, as Colin Shindler has noted, among many who regretted the ending of the British Empire. From the 1970s all political parties were in agreement that immigration from the former colonies, euphemistically termed ‘New Commonwealth’ countries, should be limited. Whereas in the 19th and earlier 20th centuries politicians, adventurers, academics and others were openly racist over colonial conquests of supposedly inferior peoples, by the mid-century, an ideology of conservative imperialism had developed to try to smooth moral dilemmas. Civis Britannicus sum (‘I am a British citizen’) and accompanying legal rights was a claim all people in the Empire could make, but it assumed colonial people would stay put in their countries. Conservative imperialism, liberal ideologies concerned with human rights and socialist notions of the brotherhood of all workers disappeared with the invited arrival of colonial workers and their families. By the 1970s notions that might earlier have been dismissed as morally unacceptable became the unspoken assumptions of all political parties.
This chapter documents the continuation of an anti-immigrant ideology and its linkage with the idea of an exclusive British identity, and the developing reactions of a younger generation becoming more race conscious.
2 - Internal colonialism and its effects
- Sally Tomlinson
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- Education and Race from Empire to Brexit
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I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along hundreds of miles of that horrible country … if they were black one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours. (Charles Kingsley on Ireland, quoted in Curtis, 1968: 84)
The United Kingdom is not a country. Currently it is composed of four countries – England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The people in the whole of Ireland, Wales and Scotland were internally colonised by the English over the centuries, both before and after England colonised overseas countries. The notion of internal colonisation was used by Lenin to describe groups in Tsarist Soviet Russia, by Gramsci to describe Southern Italy and by other writers to describe the conquest and attempted annihilation of American Indians (Hechter, 1975). But it also describes the way English elites variously conquered, laid claim to and took over these three countries, with subsequent conflicts over governance, land, culture, language and religion. It was 1707 before an Act of Union joined England and Scotland, and only in 1922 that a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland came into being, Wales having been annexed by England in 1536. It has already been noted that an understanding of the imperial past and how people think Britain is now seen by the rest of the world is largely a product of nostalgia and myths. Many ‘traditions’ in the three countries, as in the British Empire, were invented by rulers imposing their cultures and beliefs or by groups claiming or trying to sustain an identity (Trevor-Roper, quoted in Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). Education fostered the myths of heroic deeds that made a ‘Great’ Britain, but governments are still in the business of denying what actually went on during colonial times by removing or ‘losing’ archival material. Even files relating to the Falklands War in 1982 and ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland from the 1970s have apparently been ‘lost’ (Cobain, 2017).
This brief chapter is not in any way a definitive history, but it is included because there is much ignorance about the creation of a ‘Great Britain’ and the internal wars, conflicts and atrocities that took place as it was all notionally united.
Education and Race from Empire to Brexit
- Sally Tomlinson
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This book offers an historically informed discussion of the failure of the education systems in Britain to counter hostilities towards racial and ethnic minorities and migrants, which have escalated after the vote to leave the European Union, and left schools and universities failing to engage with a multiracial-multicultural society.
List of abbreviations
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Acknowledgements
- Sally Tomlinson
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1 - Empire and ethnocentric education
- Sally Tomlinson
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- Education and Race from Empire to Brexit
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What is Empire but the predominance of Race … do we not hail in this, less than the energy and fortune of a race, than in the supreme direction of the Almighty? (Lord Rosebery, 1900)
The unbroken life of the English nation over a thousand years or more is a phenomenon unique in history … from this continuous life of a united people in its island home spring … all that is peculiar to the gifts and the achievements of the British nation. (Enoch Powell, quoted in Lord Howard of Rising, 2014: 146)
Trying to explain the British Empire to most young people, unless they have specifically ‘done a module’ on some aspect, is to invite incomprehension. Even older people, schooled during decolonisation, have little knowledge about it, the Commonwealth or recent global migrations, although regrets for a lost empire still linger. But explaining the 2016 Brexit vote, trade wars and race and migrant antagonisms must start with the British Empire, specifically in the later 19th century, when power, wealth and trade dominance were concentrated in a predominantly white world. Any early 19th-century humanitarian notions, which had influenced legislation ending slavery, gave way, as more countries were added to the Empire, to beliefs that ‘black and brown subjects were natural inferiors’ (Lloyd, 1984: 180). Beliefs that God was in favour of white supremacy and imperial expansion were widely embraced, as Lord Rosebery, in his inaugural address as Rector of the University of Glasgow in 1900, indicated. Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1877, and there was a ‘scramble’ for imperial control of African countries by major European powers in 1884. American historian David Goldberg wrote that by the late 19th century, race ‘had assumed throughout the European orbit a sense of naturalness … a more or less taken for granted marking of social arrangements … an assumed givenness and inevitability in the ascription of superiority and inferiority’ (Goldberg, 2009: 3). But he also noted that it took hard work to reproduce social and racial arrangements. Science and literature, scripture and law, culture and political rhetoric were co-opted to establish assumptions of white superiority.