It’s the week before Remembrance Day, and at Biddenham upper school in Bedford small visual portents are beginning to appear. A jacket hung in the executive principal’s office sports a red poppy; in a sixth-form history group a Royal British Legion collecting tin sits on a table.
Like most schools across the country, Biddenham will observe two minutes’ silence on Tuesday for pupils and staff, along with a special assembly. Poppies have been on sale for the past week.
But as in most schools, perhaps, there’s some ambivalence under the surface. Ruth Pineda, the head of history, puts it eloquently: “As a history teacher I’m aware of the complexities of war and the futility of it. If Germany had won the first world war, arguably the second world war might not have happened.
“I feel very uneasy about Remembrance Day, because I’m uneasy with the poppy appeal and the way it’s marketed,” she says. “The poppy appeal makes it [war] less complicated, and sanitises it.” Grasping for an explanation, she reaches for a scene in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys, in which a young teacher points out that Britain led the arms race prior to the first world war, and suggests public ceremonies are used to gloss over Britain’s culpability.
“He talks about remembrance as a form of forgetting the reality of war, because it’s about ritual, and it doesn’t make you question what went on,” she says. “We need to make a distinction between the human cost of war and the causes of war.”
So what is remembrance for? Is it about erasing the horror, as Bennett suggested? Or is it about keeping memories alive in order to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, perhaps? A show of gratitude to those who died, or even a reinforcement of “British” values such as courage or self-sacrifice?
A controversial pamphlet published on Tuesday addresses these questions. It is part of the Impact series, which brings philosophical perspectives to bear on education policy, and argues that there has been too little debate about schools’ role in acts of remembrance.
Written by David Aldridge, a philosopher working in the School of Education at Oxford Brookes University, it argues children should learn about the horror of war. But says there is no justification in encouraging them to feel gratitude to those who died, because not all of them gave their lives willingly.
Should we feel gratitude also that those men were prepared to kill for us, it asks? And should we be grateful only to those on the winning side, or should we feel gratitude for those who fought and lost?
“It is not clear that gratitude is in fact owed … it is hard to establish that those sacrifices either directly or indirectly brought about a state of affairs that is more beneficial to us or overall more morally acceptable than any alternative,” the pamphlet says.
Perhaps even more controversially, it adds that charities such as the Royal British Legion should not be allowed to fundraise in schools. The sanitised poppy image and slogans such as “standing shoulder to shoulder with all who serve” tend to undermine the aim of conveying the horror of war, it says. Furthermore, there might be other causes more worthy of exposure.
“Educators should consider, for example, replacing associations with bright red flowers, pristine stone memorials, and elderly men wearing medals, with images or narratives of children killed or wounded in war,” it says.
Aldridge, a former religious education teacher, hopes the pamphlet will open up a much-needed debate. “Nobody’s addressed this specifically from an educational perspective,” he says. “At this time of year there’s all kinds of debate about what remembrance is, and whether we should even be doing it. But educationally, it seems to be kind of the last unquestioned front.”
At Biddenham, a sixth-form history group is grappling with some of these questions. At times the debate becomes heated – although all agree they’ve taken part in acts of remembrance throughout their school lives without really questioning their meaning before.
Lizzie Frost, 16, argues that some act of remembrance is necessary: “People your age have been killed, and it’s important to get across that war’s not just about glory, or just fighting political battles. We need to be aware of how lucky we are in this country that we haven’t had a war on our soil in recent times. If we were living in Syria it would be very different.”
But Tabitha Everett, 17, says it’s not appropriate to expose children to the war’s reality too young. “How would it help those people if our seven year-olds were crying to their parents about people being brutally murdered?”
There are other perspectives in the group. André Reece-Brown, 16, has a Rwandan grandmother and he visited the country recently. Some of his relatives were killed in the 1994 genocide. For him, remembrance – and visiting the genocide memorial in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali – was about showing respect and support for his grandmother and other relatives: “It was something we had to do, almost.”
And for Mojahid Hussain, 18, visiting family in Bangladesh has been equally instructive. “Quite a lot of the focus is on how Britain sacrificed its troops in world war one and world war two. I’ve been to Bangladesh a few times, and I’ve never seen poppies there despite the fact that there were soldiers from there who fought in those wars. They didn’t have a choice – they were forced to go. I think it should be up to the Royal British Legion to extend its remembrance for those soldiers.”
But the Royal British Legion argues the free resources it distributes to schools – 60,000 packs a year with no obligation to raise funds – commemorate all those who died. “The resources promote remembrance as something for people of all faiths and no faith, all political views and none, all ages and all abilities,” said the Legion’s head of remembrance, Dr Stephen Clarke. “Legion learning resources aim to encourage young people to challenge remembrance past and present, to question the reasons for conflict and to consider their own role in shaping future peace. They are also encouraged to research the impact of war on families, local communities and entire nations.
“Injured veterans of all ages, some with obvious injuries and not so obvious, certainly convey the ‘horror’ of war to young people through the Legion’s work and I have never met a veteran who has not said ‘war is terrible’.”
For the school’s executive principal, Mike Berrill, Remembrance Day is one of a series of events which mark the passing seasons – black history month, Holocaust memorial day, Eid, Ramadan and Diwali being among the others.
He welcomes Aldridge’s paper, published by the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. “Without this debate there’s a risk that we come to engage with the mawkish sentimentality of remembrance and fail to acknowledge that – whether just or not – war is always horrific for combatants and non-combatants alike,” he says.
He has a poppy on his jacket this week – his father, who was chair of the Western Front Association in Cumbria, would have expected it, he says. “I think it’s out of respect,” he says. “We just engage in it like we engage in Halloween, without really thinking about it.”
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