Examination of Witnesses (Questions 391-399)
PROFESSOR LINDA
COLLEY, PROFESSOR
DAVID CONWAY
AND DR
DINA KIWAN
7 JUNE 2006
Q391 Chairman: Can I welcome all of you,
Professor Colley and Dr Kiwan and Professor Conway; particularly
so, Professor Colley, because I think you have returned very recently
from the United States?
Professor Colley: Yes, at 10 pm
yesterday.
Q392 Chairman: A particular brownie
point for you. You know what this inquiry is about and you know
that we have asked you because you are some of the leading authorities
in the world on this subject. The way we play these hearings is
to ask if anyone wants to start off and comment, very briefly,
and I will give all three of you that opportunity. I think you
know the background, I saw some of you were sitting in here listening
to the last session. We are seeking to learn, and we are getting
part-way through this investigation; we will be asking the questions
why this obsession with citizenship, which historically is a fairly
new thing, in UK society, that we feel there is this imperative
to give people lessons in citizenship, or educate them in citizenship?
Starting from the left, Professor Colley, why are we here at this
present moment in English history, why are we obsessed with this
subject?
Professor Colley: Obviously, I
am trying to come at these issues through a historian's point
of view and I would say that we are here dealing with these issues
not just because of current emergencies but because of a whole
set of developments really since, I suppose, the Second World
War. It seems to me that what we are dealing with is not just
a matter for schools. People in all societies, at all times, tend
to need a narrative, I think, a story to tell themselves which
puts their short, individual life in a wider, more meaningful
context, and the need for such a narrative is enhanced if you
come from a disruptive background, or if you live in a time of
immense change. In the past, in this country, we had a very strong
narrative. Okay, we did not talk specifically perhaps about citizenship
but certainly we had a powerful narrative about who we were, and
that was put over in various ways. It was put over by the churches
in patriotic sermons. It was put over by reading. People read
almanacs, which were the equivalent, if you like, of the Sun,
which contained all sorts of details about patriotic anniversaries
and their meanings. The narrative was conveyed too by festivals,
something like November fifth, which of course was anti-Catholic
but also very pro-Parliament and it made people think about the
value of preserving Parliament. Of course it was conveyed, too,
by mass history lessons. One of the first things that this Government,
in this country, did after education really did become compulsory,
at around 1880, was start thinking about history lessons. For
example, my mother, who left school at 14, because her parents
were poor, still had a whole set of dates and events implanted
in her mind by the fairly mean school she went to. A lot of these
modes of implanting a narrative in the people of these islands
either no longer work or they do not operate very powerfully,
if at all. This country, these islands, have gone through so many
changes since the Second World War that I think we need to be
devoting considerations to issues of glue, how we can work out
how to hold ourselves together. If you like, we need to work out
and propagate a new narrative, because if we do not give thought
to this, if it is not put over, not just in schools, I think we
can put over the narrative in lots of ways, the design of banknotes,
the design of stamps, thinking of new national holidays, there
are all sorts of things we can do, if we do not think about tailoring
a narrative that works, that can encompass the many different
peoples that live in these islands then the danger is, of course,
that they may go out and find their own narrative which is not
one we will find very happy.
Q393 Chairman: Do you agree with
that, David Conway?
Professor Conway: I agree with
some of it. I disagree with the view just expressed that we need
to invent some new festivals or ceremonies or, I refer to Marc,
our place and give it an identity, as I disagree with the suggestion
that we need to construct a new narrative. We have plenty of good
narratives and sufficient commonality in our British narrative
history, notwithstanding whatever might have occurred, or not,
in Lancashire, or otherwise, to be able to form a cohesive social
notion out of them, which I would maintain is the wherewithal
for not simply active citizenship, which was the buzz word when
Bernard Crick brought citizenship onto the curriculum, but good
citizenship, which involved civility and obedience to authority,
which somehow he felt at the time, he seemed to think, was not
quite sufficient and he wanted a more vigorous form of citizenship
which involved contestation, I think. If you read, as I have just
done for the last two days, his various writings on the subject,
going back to In Defence of Politics, in 1963, it was the
source of a lot of his ideas, which got into the curriculum when
his former student of politics, who was then the first Secretary
of State for Education, David Blunkett, set up the advisory group
which led to the citizenship order in 1999. The reason I have
gone into this is, if you follow Crick's understanding of what
is involved in citizenship you will see that it is based upon
a particular view of the nature of politics, which itself was
a function of a particular view about the nature of society, which
somehow got adopted and taken for granted as true, but it was
highly tendentious. Let me tell you what it was and why, I think,
it led this country down the wrong path, and I am glad to see
this Government is now reconsidering some of its own policies,
like citizenship education and like the Human Rights Act, some
of these chickens which now have come home to roost, and, I am
glad to say, it is beginning to see the error of its ways. If
I may make this one point about Crick: Crick had a view that society
was made up of groups with conflicting interests and that the
function of politics was to mediate between these conflicting
interests, in other words, it was a zero sum game, and its function
was to resolve these conflicts peacefully, and representatives
were merely spokespeople who articulated the different conflicting
interests. This is appalling. It is a kind of modulated version
of class warfare, the Marxist interpretation of history, and he
had no compunction whatsoever, in some of his writings, in saying
it was a socialist vision of citizenship education. Well, fine;
good. We have a place for socialism in this country, it is a fine
tradition, it is one of the traditions, but there is a deeper
commonality, a commonality of interest, and a nation, a political
society, is one where the common ground and the common good and
the common interest take primacy. This is what needs to be purveyed
by means of citizenship education. This historically was what
was done through British narrative history until it got deconstructed
and swept aside in the 1960s through progressive education. I
am glad to see that the Government has woken up to the need to
remarry its concerns about civics and civility and citizenship
with the teaching, and proper teaching, of British narrative history.
Q394 Chairman: We will come back
to that. I have to say, with that interpretation, actually I was
a student of Bernard Crick at the London School of Economics,
and that early work In Defence of Politics, in my view,
was very derivative on a whole group of American writers, Bentley
through to Konhauser, who analysed not in a Marxist way but the
group analysis, that analysis of purist democracy. Certainly it
was not new to Bernard Crick, was it?
Professor Conway: No. Of course,
what might hold true of a federal society made up of hundreds
of millions of people did not necessarily hold true of a much
smaller and more cohesive society such as Britain is. In the face
of increased diversity, we can debate what modifications, if any,
need to be made. I am not suggesting it was a neo-Marxist version,
but what it did, it lent itself, particularly in the climate of
what was being purveyed through the ideals of multiculturalism,
what it led to was the idea of identity politics and group politics,
and this does not actually make for social cohesion.
Q395 Chairman: Dr Kiwan, I am not
going to exclude you from this. I just thought to move to the
two Professors, to start with, and you will get an equal shout
in this, do not be concerned at all. What is your take on what
you have just heard, or what is your take on this subject?
Dr Kiwan: As I outlined actually
in my written evidence, the way I approached it was that I was
looking at what conceptions of citizenship were being framed in
the policy and curriculum development, starting with Crick's advisory
group and then following through to the curriculum development.
I interviewed a number of people, as well, as analysing some policy
and curriculum documentation, and the first question I put to
the people I was interviewing was "Why is citizenship education
on the agenda now?" The answers that I got were very strongly
a sense that it was the political will of certain key individuals,
namely Blunkett and Crick, and that it was about the time being
opportune as well, so that it was not only about individuals,
there were also a number of societal factors. I ranked these in
terms of, they are not mutually exclusive, and different people
gave more than one answer, but the key thing at the time, when
this was formulated in the late nineties, was that young people
were seen to be politically apathetic and that we needed to do
something about it and that there could be a democratic crisis,
there was low voter turnout. There was also another strand, that
somehow society was in moral crisis, and there was a reference
to key events, mainly concerning young people, in the mid to late
nineties, things like the Jamie Bulger case, the murder of the
head teacher, and so on. People I was interviewing refer to these
as being key trigger points and also the media they are seeing
very much as a catalyst in it as well. When it came to issues
of diversity and immigration, very few mentioned that when I was
interviewing them, and I think it is very much a symptom of actually
when I was interviewing people. I think, if I interviewed people
now, or you asked people now, diversity and immigration issues
have shot up the agenda, in terms of them being coupled with issues
of citizenship and citizenship education, but at the time I was
talking to people it was not really on the radar.
Q396 Chairman: That was, when?
Dr Kiwan: In 2002. The aspect
I think is interesting, when you ask people "Why is citizenship
education on the agenda now?" implicit in that is "What
do we hope to get out of citizenship education?" and these
were questions which came up in the last session. What I found
quite surprising was that there was a real lack of certainty as
to what we expect to get out of citizenship education. People
talk about, obviously, that perhaps there will be a more politically
literate population, that somehow democracy will be supported,
also certain things like social order, and, at that time, race
equality and human rights were right down at the bottom of the
list, which again I think was quite interesting. Again, contexts
change, and perhaps now there would be a certain re-ordering of
those things.
Q397 Chairman: Has your work in this
subject convinced you of the necessity for this sort of education?
Dr Kiwan: I would like to make
the point that I think this is such an ideological domain so people
say what they think is their opinion, and that is something separate
from having research evidence. I do not think there is any strong
empirical evidence which says that if we introduce citizenship
education into schools we will get these certain educational or
societal outcomes. My belief in citizenship education, which I
guess is not based on research evidence, is the sense that it
gives people a sense of empowerment and that they are connected
with their larger community and they are empowered to make a change
and contribution to their society. I would say, yes, I do think
citizenship education has a place in our educational system, but,
I am afraid, that cannot be supported by research evidence at
this point.
Q398 Chairman: One thing I do want
to ask you, and which has not really been identified in any of
the sessions we have had, is that it seems very partial where
this should start and where it should end. This Committee covers
the whole gamut of education, from cradle to grave, and beyond,
in some cases. I am talking about Barnsley, and Jeff Ennis. In
this particular context, we are told, "If you really want
to stimulate children the earlier you start the better,"
pre-school, all that; on the other hand, the importance of lifelong
learning. With citizenship, we seem always to be talking about
it in a very narrow age flow; no-one talks about it post-16, or
very little, no-one talks about it at all at university, whether
this should be appropriate and educated citizens should have a
broader understanding of the way their society works. Should medical
students have citizenship education, or whatever: where does it
begin and end?
Professor Colley: As a historian,
I am all for teaching as much history, narrative, whatever, as
possible, and I would not disagree in any way with that point.
That is partly why I believe thought should be given to some kind
of festival, some kind of day devoted to issues of reform, because,
of course, that serves as a kind of ongoing education, it is something
that people can fit into and take part in throughout their lives
and I think that is enormously valuable, and it does tie up with
voting. I am not a Thatcherite but I think one of the things that
Thatcher said, which I do agree with, was that people very often
do not value as much as they should what comes free, or what seems
to come free, whereas you do value things that you have worked
for. I think, getting the idea over to people that the vote was
something that people in these islands had to work for, for a
very long time, and for different groups it was much more difficult,
women, Catholics, Jews, the poor, the Irish, we could bring these
kinds of stories of the enfranchisement of our peoples into people's
awareness much more powerfully than we do: we can do it through
history lessons, we can do it through festivals, we can do it
through banknotes. I take your point absolutely, that citizenship
should not be something that people start at 10 and stop at 16;
we need to think of imaginative strategies whereby this is something
that people can be nudged into thinking about at all stages of
their lives.
Professor Conway: I think it is
very important, if we have not done so already, to give some consideration
to the question of exactly what, if anything, is to be done in
school under the heading "citizenship education". I
think the tacit assumption of the question, and certainly in the
last session I heard "an hour a week" being devoted
to it, is that citizenship education is some bolt-on subject which
somehow now has displaced other subjects. For example, citizenship
education is taught, currently they have this compulsorily in
state schools, from 11-16; history stops at 14 as a compulsory
subject. The point is, there is education for citizenship and
then there is citizenship education as a discreet subject for
which a GSCE O level and an A level are being developed. I think
it was the case, although I have to give Bernard Crick some credit
and his advisory committee and the citizenship order, it was not
intended that it be a separate subject, it was left open to schools
how they would realise the aspirations. It had three objectives,
as I recall. One objective was to bring about civility and mutual
respect, another was to encourage volunteering and participation
in the community, and I think the third was to address the problem
of political apathy in voting. I have to say, by the way, just
by the bye, it is ironic that the country as a whole, or the parliamentary
representatives of it, are focusing on the issue of citizenship
and worries about lack of turnout in the polls at the same time
as more and more governance occurs from a source beyond our shores
and, as it were, with a partial transfer of sovereignty. It is
not for nothing perhaps that the voters now, when there is comparatively
little to choose from, particularly now, say to themselves, "I've
got better things to do with my time than vote," and I do
not think, incidentally, that is necessarily a sign of a lack
of—
Q399 Chairman: That is not a research-based
statement, is it, in terms of your interpretation of voter apathy?
Professor Conway: There is little
to choose between the parties.
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