We Shouldn’t Expect Historical Greats to Be 21st Century Role Models

When, in the late 1990s, the idea of ‘lifelong learning’ was suddenly on everyone’s lips I mentioned in a speech my surprise that this should seem such a novelty given that lifelong self-improvement had always been at the heart of England’s Christian traditions. The hostile response of my audience – that I had ‘ruined a good speech’ by an untoward reference to religion – made me realise the truth of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s warning, just before his death in 1955, that “humanity was facing the future without a sense of the past”. Events since then have only reinforced the feeling that one of the determining features of our time is its lack of interest in the past and its simultaneous and seemingly compulsive wish to paint it in a toxic light.

In education this rejection of the past has been apparent in the abandonment of the traditional moral language of right and wrong, virtues and vices and commandments. Schools remain some of the most moral places in society, but if you look at their value statements you will see that it is often a very self-flattering form of morality based on rights, inclusion, non-judgmentalism and respect. Most of these value statements are drawn up by schools themselves, often through consultation with pupils, and are less memorable than traditional moral language that carries with it the patina of time. This is hardly surprising given the widespread assumption within modernity that one is no longer preparing children for a conception of the good that is unchosen but for one they are expected to create for themselves.

More broadly in education what Frank Furedi has called our “war against the past” has been characterised by a rejection of the idea that education is largely about transmission, a preoccupation with the contemporary and a wish to do penance for Britain’s imperial, racist, misogynist and heteronormative past. These pressures have been gaining in intensity since the 1970s, rising to a hysterical crescendo in 2020-22 following the death of George Floyd.

As well as having major implications for what is taught, these pressures have also caused much agonising about the names of schools and universities and their  buildings. The Elizabethan seaman and explorer Sir Francis Drake stands out as having got into a lot of people’s crosshairs during those years and providing  tempting opportunities for people to feel better about themselves.

One school – the former Sir Francis Drake Primary School in Deptford – changed its name, and two schools – Exeter School and Queen’s School, Bushey – removed Drake’s name from their houses. Schools in other parts of the country have since followed their example. All did so on the grounds that, as with many other 16th-century European seamen involved in exploration, Drake had taken part in the slave trade. There is no doubt about the facts. One wonders, however, how much effort those who cancelled Drake put into assessing his importance within English history before making their decisions. Did they realise, for example, that by making a pre-emptive strike that  delayed the Spanish Armada for a year, and sending fire ships into it once it had reached the Channel, Drake saved England from conquest, foreign occupation, forced conversion to Catholicism and absorption into the Spanish Habsburg empire? Robert Tombs in The English and Their History calls 1588 a moment of danger in our history comparable to 1940 and 1066 and, like 1940 but unlike 1066, a moment when the English succeeded in fighting off a threatened foreign invasion, much of it thanks to Francis Drake. Those who removed Drake’s name from their schools thus deprived their pupils of the very personal connection they might otherwise have had with the destiny of a nation of which they ought to have been helping them to feel a part.

They also missed an opportunity to show pupils how important it can be for adults to remain steadfast at times when ill-considered pressures for change become overwhelming, There is a famous poem I was taught as a child whose first line goes: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs.” I urge school leaders to keep a copy on their desks in case they are ever faced with another George Floyd moment. It is of course Rudyard Kipling’s poem If. Kipling had views that might make nervous readers run for their smelling salts (not that the Daily Sceptic has any such readers), but was a great poet and storyteller nonetheless.   

Not everyone has learned lessons from the lemming-like rush in 2020-2022 to decolonise, remove statues and change names. Hinchingbrooke School in Huntington has just joined the list of offenders by removing the name of Samuel Pepys, famous 17th-century diarist and former pupil, from one of its houses. This follows the school informing its community that new research had shown the diarist’s personal relations, especially with women, to have been “harmful, abusive and exploitative” –  something that others have said was already well-known – and putting the matter to a pupil and staff vote which gave the disgraced writer the thumbs down. 

The school has justified the decision on the grounds that Pepys had disrespected the school’s values of “kindness” and “equality” but, in addition, because he could no longer be seen as a “role model”. It had never occurred to me that this was the function of school house names, but if it is there are likely to be unseen consequences. Another of Hinchingbrooke’s houses is named after the school’s most famous pupil Oliver Cromwell who, among other sins (including, for any royalist, being the main architect of the execution of Charles I), was responsible for the appalling slaughter of Irish men, women and children in numbers comparable to what the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has just been doing in Iran. Put details of the massacres of Drogheda and Wexford before pupils and staff, do so in a disapproving way, ask them to vote, and you might get a similar result.

I am not suggesting that either Pepys or Cromwell be removed. Their lives should be explained and discussed as part of a pupil’s education, not elevated into those of a role model. I hope schools that, in the heat of 2020-2022 and in search of ideological purity, re-named their houses after Greta Thunberg are now showing their pupils how even young heroines have feet of clay in the light of the group Stop Antisemitism’s far from careless nomination of her as “Antisemite of the Week”.

These examples of re-naming show three things about ‘the war against the past’.

First, we need more rather than less history so that we can get beyond simplistic stereotypes of issues such as slavery, empires, the industrial revolution and past gender roles and see them in all their complexity and moral ambiguity. Current plans to insinuate climate education and other contemporary issues into the revised national curriculum look as if we are moving in the opposite direction – less history and more indoctrination.

Second, it is good that schools continue to see moral education as a core task. Since 1968 and its slogan il est interdit d’interdire (“it is forbidden to forbid”) splashed across the walls of the Sorbonne it has not been easy to move away from non-judgmentalism. But it is not good for morality to take the form of pointing the finger at others – whether Samuel Pepys and Francis Drake in the past or easy ‘far Right’ targets in the present – instead of looking into one’s own shortcomings. This kind of moralising also ends up with heads doing embarrassing imitations of Malvolio or Obadiah Slope when, in announcing their acts of exclusion, they talk priggishly about historical figures not being consonant with “the values and inclusive nature” of their schools.   

Finally, it is alarming that important decisions about name changes can be taken following pupil votes. How historical figures are presented to pupils is part of their education and thus a matter for educators to decide. A suspension of adult power undermines the legitimacy of the teacher’s authority as transmitter of an inheritance from one generation to the next, as Michael Oakeshott and Hannah Arendt from their different philosophical and political backgrounds both argued. Progressives, especially in the USA, have often talked about and tried to implement a ‘democratic classroom’. Along with most of the other cultural ‘unboundings’ that characterise the contemporary Western world – male-female, private-public, human-animal, and between nation states – blurring adult-child boundaries can have more disadvantages than advantages. A more appropriate adult response to periodic demands to cancel part of the past would be to pause, reflect, refuse to be rushed, make a decision for which the adults take full responsibility (which in exceptional cases may even involve the justified removal of someone’s name) and stick by it whatever the storm.

Kipling’s poem If – “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs” is dated but worth re-reading. The fact that Manchester University students publicly vandalised a copy of the text in 2018 ought to be all the testimony you need to tempt you to do so.

Dr Nicholas Tate was head of England’s school curriculum and assessment agencies in the 1990s and is currently Adviser to the Learning Institute, Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Budapest. His most recent book is Seven Books that Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does.