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I’m no expert. Still, I reckon the notorious claim made by Michael Gove, a leading campaigner for Britain to leave the European Union, that the nation had had enough of experts, will dog him for the rest of his career. In fact, he wasn’t alone. Other Brexit leaders also sneered at the pretensions of experts, the majority of whom warned about the risks – political, economic, social - of a Britain outside the EU.

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By Stephanie Olsen

In June, (now former) Education Secretary Michael Gove announced that all primary and secondary schools should promote “British values”. David Cameron said that the plans for values education are likely to have the “overwhelming support” of citizens throughout the UK. Cameron defined these values as “freedom, tolerance, respect for the rule of law, belief in personal and social responsibility and respect for British institutions”. ‪At root, such a policy gets at the emotional conditioning of children. To adhere to a certain ideological conceptualization of “freedom,” to feel “tolerant,” or to be “respectful” (whether of parents, teachers, authorities or institutions), is to act according to implicit feelings of rightness.

Values are never just abstract ideas, but are expressed and experienced through emotions. And they are not ideologically neutral. To stress the education of British values is to put a form of emotional education on the agenda. Though many commentators have pointed out that the broad outlines of such an education already exist in schools, the fear of “extremism”, of the promotion of the “wrong” sort of values, has triggered a vigorous debate. What has largely gone unrecognized in this debate, however, is that it is emphatically not new.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, politicians and educationalists promoted a new education based on character training and the emotions, precisely to build British citizens who would respect and uphold British institutions. This brand of education was to be accomplished at school, but also at home, and in religious and youth organizations.

Herbert Fisher, the President of the Board of Education who spearheaded the Education Act of 1918, argued that the masses should be educated “to stimulate civic spirit, to promote general culture … and to diffuse a steadier judgement and a better informed opinion through the whole body of the community.” Other educational commentators broadly agreed with this mission. Frederick Gould, a former Board School teacher and author of many books on education argued that “The community cannot afford to let the young people pass out with a merely vague notion that they ought to be good; it must frame its teaching with a decisive and clear vision for family responsibilities, civic and political duties”.

Civic duties – the civic spirit – were to be taught to the extent that they would become ingrained, implicit, felt. This was to be primarily a moral education. Educators stressed character training, linking moral education to British imperialism or nationalism in an unashamedly patriotic spirit. Education reform was to improve future citizens’ productivity and develop national character traits.

Like Gould, educator John Haden Badley stressed the need to teach active citizenship and service. Education on these lines would provide “a deeper understanding of the human values that give to life its real worth”, cultivating and maximizing the potential of a “superior” Britishness. Meanwhile, in a speech in Manchester in 1917, Fisher argued that “the whole future of our race and of our position in the world depends upon the wisdom of the arrangements which we make for education.” He observed, in language strikingly familiar to contemporary political rhetoric, that “we are apt to find that the wrong things are being taught by the wrong people in the wrong way.”

But even in 1917 the rhetoric was clichéd. A generation of commentators before Fisher argued that the civic shortfalls in mass formal education could be fixed by informal education in youth groups and religious organizations and through improved reading matter. Much juvenile and family literature, whether motivated politically or religiously, stressed emotional socialization, especially in the building of morality and character, as critical for national cohesion.

The trouble with visions of national cohesion, as the last century and a half of educational debate bears out, is the difficulty in getting any two parties to agree what that vision looks like. At the turn of the twentieth century all agreed that children mattered. How they were to be educated was important not just to individual children and their families, but equally importantly, to the community and the nation.

Yet some reformers had patriotic aims, others religious; some civic, some imperial; some conservative, others socialist. Many combined some or all of these aims. All, whether explicitly stated or not, wanted to train, instrumentalize and harness children’s emotions. Children’s reading matter, the stories they were told, and the lessons they heard were known to be powerful forces in cultivating the emotions. Hence the high stakes, then and now, on the narratives supplied to children.

Michael Gove, in common with his Victorian forebears, turns to the “great heroes of history” to serve as models of emulation. Back in the early 1900s, Gould thought history “the most vital of all studies for inspiration to conduct.” The study of history is certainly no stranger to being manipulated for didactic ends in order to impart “British values.”

While Gove is only the latest in a long line to link British history, British values and education, there are surely lessons to be learnt from past attempts and past failures to implement this strategy. A generation of boys and young men at the turn of the twentieth century had grown up learning the positive value of patriotic service. In this memorial year, marking a century since the outbreak of the First World War, it seems appropriate to reflect on what values we might want to instil in the young. What feelings do we want them to learn?

Stephanie Olsen is based at the history department, McGill University (Montreal) and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for the History of Emotions (Berlin). She was previously postdoctoral fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. The co-author of Learning How to Feel: Children’s Literature and the History of Emotional Socialization, c. 1870-1970 she is currently working on children’s education and the cultivation of hope in the First World War.

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It's very easy to get depressed these days, as a children's author, simply by reading the news. Library cuts. Michael Gove. Screen time on the rise. Michael Gove. Book sales in decline. Michael Gove. Literacy rates in the UK worse than anywhere else. An unholy obsession with one book by John Steinbeck gripping the nation. Michael Gove.

Every day a new controversy seems to rage across the Twittersphere, with all the nuance, sophistication and depth a conversation conducted in messages arbitrarily composed of 140 characters can have.

So, here is my totally non-controversial guide on how to make reading for pleasure, and reading widely for pleasure, habits as instinctive for the next generation as texting and tweeting now are for us. (I have submitted this to the DofE for their comments but am yet to hear back.)

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I took O Level English Literature at a girls' grammar school in 1979. We studied three texts: Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford; E M Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Midsummer's

Night's Dream.  A play by the ultimate English writer, and two texts connected only by their utter Englishness.
I found the detailed social history contained in Flora Thompson's memoir of life in rural England completely tedious. Forster's examination of Edwardian snobbery and xenophobia in Forster's novel was somewhat baffling, sixteen-year-old girls not being best placed to appreciate a story about a middle-aged woman's lust for a younger man (Eeeuw, yuck, disgusting). Re-reading it, 35 years later I was surprised to find it laugh-out-loud funny.
 I didn't enjoy English Literature O level, but I was good at it, and that was why I continued on to A level, which I found much more rewarding, with its wider (but still 100% English...not even British) texts.
Around the same time my husband received a reading list from his school. It included 22 plays, including contemporary works (Arnold Wesker's Roots, Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey), four plays by George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and Sophocles' Antigone.  For W Shakespeare the list read 'Any Play'.
The list for prose was longer -  44 books. They included plenty of nineteenth century novels: Jane Austen, Brontes C and E, two novels by Dickens and one by Hardy.
There were many twentieth century texts, British, American and translated : Anne Frank's Diary; Of Mice and Men (and another Steinbeck), To Kill a Mocking Bird. George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984; Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice and The Pied Piper, Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, D H Lawrence Sons and Lovers.
The list covered many genres -  science fiction (Day of the Triffids); romance (Pride and Prejudice); historical fiction (Rosemay Sutcliff's Warrior Scarlet); memoir( Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals), dystopian fiction (Fahrenheit 451); mystery (Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair) a western (Shane by Jack Shaefer) and a thriller (Alistair McLean's The Guns of Navarone).  There were several true-life stories from the Second World War, one by a Polish writer, one by an Italian and Alan Burgess's novel A Small Woman about a British missionary in China.
This list was clearly designed to be as broad as possible, introducing pupils to classic works of literature and inviting them to find out what sort of book they enjoy. It was challenging, interesting, reflecting different social classes and nationalities, as well as ethnic minority groups.
Should schools find this extensive list too short, there was a note: 'Candidates from Schools whose extended lists have been approved by the Board may, of course, refer in addition to texts on these lists.'  My husband remembers that pupils were told to read at least five or six of the 66 texts on the list, but he read at least 20, some in class, some from the local library. The final examination at the end of the course asked generic questions such as: 'Write about strong characters in some of the books you have read.'
This list  fostered a love of  reading in my husband which eventually led him to read English Literature at Oxford University.
The really interesting thing is that he was taking CSE English at a Secondary Modern school, a school to which he had been condemned by failing the 11 plus. CSEs were widely seen as useless qualifications for thickies, but I would contend that anyone who was given that list and had a crack at reading six books on it, would find something  enjoyable and challenging to read which might inspire them to read more in the future.

Our daughter took GCSE English recently, studying anthologies of poetry and short stories, a few scenes from Macbeth and Of Mice and Men; a syllabus which seemed to be designed for kids with short concentration spans. Of Mice and Men was the only text she read that ran to any length at all - all 107 pages of it. I have nothing against Steinbeck's classic, and certainly nothing against Macbeth, I am sure that the anthologies contained good material, but I have to admit to a great deal of parental frustration as I watched my daughter thoroughly turned off by this thin fare, and irritated by being asked to compare World War One poetry with Macbeth, an exam question that she found pointless and off-putting. .
I am writing this, of course, because of the recent kerfuffle over GCSE English, a row in which facts got lost to prejudice (for and against Michael Gove, for and against American literature, for and against Dickens and other nineteenth century authors).
Depending on who you read, Gove had personally interfered to ban books, or had bravely intervened to widen the curriculum, or Gove had nothing to do with any of it. As the saying goes, fools rush in, where angels fear to tread: it seemed as though the way the changes to GCSE English were reported and discussed was designed to make everyone look foolish (a Machiavellian plot by Gove himself, perhaps?)
I watched the row develop with increasing frustration, as it had so little to do with the actual crisis facing British children's literacy. Libraries are closing! Schools are being designed without libraries! Reading is being re-defined as deciphering phonics! School library services are closing! Children are spending more and more time glued to screens and less and less time reading for pleasure! These are the real crises, not whether Of Mice and Men remains on the school syllabus.
 When I read that Bailey's Prize winner Eimear McBride wants to spend some of her £30,000 prize money buying copies of Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird to give free to teenagers, I want to scream. These books haven't been banned, Eimear! Schools have so many copies that they will, no doubt, find a way of using them, perhaps by teaching them to Y9 pupils.  Instead, please give your money to the Siobhan Dowd Trust which has the simple and essential aim of promoting the love of reading among disadvantaged children and young adults.
Yesterday the review section of The Guardian newspaper asked a select group of authors and academics to pick GCSE texts (no librarians, English teachers or children's writers among them). The choice that make me giggle the most was put forward by Linda Grant: Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth. And the one with which I agreed  whole-heartedly was Hilary Mantel:
Should we play the Gove game, by setting up opposing lists? Or should we ask, which Gradgrind thought up the idea of set texts in the first place? Why should students be condemned to thrash to death a novel or a corpus of poetry, week after week, month after month? No novel was ever penned to puzzle and punish the young. Plays are meant to be played at. Poetry is not written for Paxmanites. Literature is a creative discipline, not just for writer but for reader. Is the exam hall its correct context? We educate our children not as if we love them but as if we need to control and coerce them, bullying them over obstacles and drilling them like squaddies; and even the most inspired and loving teachers have to serve the system. We have laws against physical abuse. We can try to legislate against emotional abuse. So why do we think it's fine to abuse the imagination, and on an industrial scale? What would serve children is a love of reading, and the habit of it. I wonder if the present system creates either.

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The British GCSE exam board has dropped U.S. literary classics from John Steinbeck and Harper Lee from its English Literature syllabus in a move to push for a more British-centric curriculum. According to the new document issued by the exam board, "students should study a range of high quality, intellectually challenging, and substantial whole texts in detail. These must include:

•  at least one play by Shakespeare
• at least one 19th century novel 2
• a selection3 of poetry since 1789, including representative Romantic poetry  fiction or drama from the British Isles from 1914 onwards."

The change has prompted criticism from writers and readers online, leading many people to believe that the books were banned. British education secretary Michael Gove has defended the move, claiming that the books are not banned. "Teachers are as free to introduce children to the brilliant writing of Lee, Steinbeck and Miller today as they were yesterday and nothing this government is doing will change that in the future," he told The Guardian.

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By David Ellwood

“The Americanisation of British politics has been striking this conference season,” declared The Economist last autumn. “British politicians and civil servants love freebies to the US ‘to see how they do things,’” reported Simon Jenkins in The Guardian in November. Among the keenest such travellers is Michael Gove, the Education Secretary. Talking to the Daily Telegraph in February 2014, Gove spoke of the entrepreneurial spirit he found in California, and how his contacts with Microsoft and Google were helping him bring the skills of Silicon Valley to Britain. Perhaps Gove simply didn’t know how many UK governments of recent decades have journeyed along the same road, with the same aims. When Chancellor, Gordon Brown was tireless in his efforts to get British business “to rival America’s entrepreneurial dash,” as he told the same Daily Telegraph in December 2003, with speeches, conferences, educational programmes and other gestures, including visits from stars such as Bill Gates and Alan Greenspan.

One of the resources the British governing class most often turns to in its search for a successful, competitve identity for their country is ‘America’. Not American policy or money of course, not even that ‘Special Relationship’ which London clings on to so forlornly. Instead it’s an inspirational version of the United States: a source of models, examples, energies, ideas, standards; an invoked America whose soft power influence and prestige never fade. It is a form of virtual political capital which governments from Thatcher to Cameron feel they can draw on to compensate them for all their frustrations in Europe, their humiliations in the wider world and the intractability of their problems at home.

Overlooked by all the commentators without exception, there has long been an American question in Britain’s identity debate. It has not been put there by artists, experts, army officers, sports personalities or even Rupert Murdoch. It has been imported systematically and with great persistence by the governments of the last thirty years, and with it they have brought a series of possible answers. The underlying purpose has been to solve the identity crisis by way of ceaseless efforts to ‘modernise’ the nation, to renew its democracy but also to raise its ranking in those league tables of world competitiveness which the land of Darwin takes so seriously, and — of course — to distinguish it from everything supposedly going on in the European Union. Where better than America to find inspiration and encouragement for this permanent revolution of change the governing class repeatedly insists on?

A visionary image of the United States was central to Margaret Thatcher’s political revolution of the 1980s. As she told a Joint Session of Congress in 1985: “We are having to recover the spirit of enterprise which you never lost. Many of the policies you are following are the ones we are following.” Employment policy was one of the first examples, with reforms explicitly modelled on Reaganite ideology and experience. Even the wording of legislation was directly copied. Under Thatcher, Blair and Brown, certain public sectors, in particular the school and university systems, were reformed again and again in the hope of hooking them up to the motor of economic growth in the way their equivalents were thought to function in the United States. Since the 1980s, the Home Office has been the most zealous of departments in importing American methods and innovations. Simon Jenkins says: “An American friend of mine spent much of his time showing British officials around New York’s police department after its recent success in cutting crime.” Labour’s recent prime ministers were both enthralled by America’s examples. Gordon Brown proposed that school children should swear allegiance to the Union Jack, that there be a British Fourth of July, and a museum celebrating great documents of British democracy. Blair and Brown were the ones who started introducing American private health care firms into the running of the NHS.

David Cameron has followed the American path laid down by Thatcher, Blair, and Brown with zeal and ambition at least equal to theirs. The Tory foreign policy platform for the 2010 election was written by a Brit sitting in the Heritage Foundation in Washington. Just as the outgoing Labour administration created a British Supreme Court, the incoming coalition has set up a new National Security Council, with a National Security Adviser. In November 2012 the country was called upon to elect its first police commissioners, and there was talk of a single school commissioner. Now the Prime Minister talks of life sentences really meaning life in prison. All of this is based on American precedents. But Cameron’s affiliations in America seem to be deepest in parts of California where even Tony Blair did not reach, in particular the Google Corporation. A featured speaker at Google Zeitgeist conferences, Cameron is said to believe that the internet revolution as configured by Google, “meshes with the modern conservative mission – flattening hierarchies and empowering people…” Across Silicon Valley, Cameron and his strategists see a land where “a dynamic economy meets the family-friendly work-place…where hard-headed businessmen drink fruit smoothies and walk around in recycled trainers,” as an admiring journalist put it.

The evidence of the last 40-odd years suggests that in their failure to invent a generally agreed moral theme or narrative of change for their society, the British governing class clings to the America of their imaginations to fill the void. Not because the creed of Americanism as such, far less American politics as currently displayed, can provide the cohesiveness required but simply because US experience over time appears to show how a uniquely powerful machine of national pride and aspiration, embodied in institutions, rituals, stories, and proclaimed values, can keep a multicultural nation glued together and provide ever-lasting hope of renewal. With its exceptional levels of child poverty, social inequality and numbers of people in jail, the governments of the last 30 years may not have got the Americanised Britain they dreamed of. But this has not discouraged them. After all, Ministers know that their enthusiasms can always count on a far warmer reception across the Atlantic than anywhere else in the world, including in Britain itself.

David Ellwood is Senior Adjunct Professor of European Studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Bologna Center. He is the author of The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century. His first major book was Italy 1943-1945: The Politics of Liberation (1985) then came Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America and Postwar Reconstruction (1992). The fundamental theme of his research — the function of American power in contemporary European history — has shifted over the years to emphasize cultural power, particularly that of the American cinema industry. He was President of the International Association of Media and History 1999-2004 and a Fellow of the Rothermere America Institute, Oxford, in 2006. Read more from David Ellwood on OUPblog.

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Image credit: Supreme Court of the United States. By US Capitol. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

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