Education is a moral project
We need to consider whether a classical approach to schooling might provide children with a new outlook on life.
Today, I will speak at a conference in Belgrade, organised by Mathias Corvinus Collegium, on the theme of Reclaiming Classical Education. This is what I will say.
Britain currently faces many problems, but today I will focus on just two: the growing number of young people who consider themselves to have some form of mental health problem and the sizable proportion of Gen Z who do not think their country is worth defending. Both issues are exacerbated by our current approach to education and could be mitigated by adopting a more classical curriculum.
Research conducted for The Times newspaper last year found that only 11 per cent of people aged 18 - 27 would fight for Britain. Four out of ten said there were no circumstances whatsoever in which they would take up arms for their country. One reason for this sentiment is surely the decline in the number of people who say they feel proud to be British. Only 41 per cent of young people now say they are proud to be British, down from 80 per cent in 2004.
Why do so few members of Gen Z feel proud to be British? One statistic from The Times’ research is particularly revealing: almost half of those aged 18 to 27 think that Britain is a racist country. For many in this cohort, racism is not viewed as ‘wrong’ or even as ‘bad’, but as an unforgivable and irredeemable moral stain, akin to a form of original sin. Gen Z can no more imagine defending someone accused of racism than they can imagine fighting in defence of a racist country.
Almost 70 per cent of 16-18-year-olds interviewed by the think tank Civitas said they had learnt at school that Britain used to be a racist country, and 42 per cent said they had been taught that Britain is a racist country today. These findings echo research from Policy Exchange, which found that almost 60 per cent of British school children had encountered Critical Race Theory-inspired terms such as ‘white privilege’, ‘unconscious bias’ and ‘systemic racism’ while at school.
Children learn that Britain is racist through both the formal and informal curriculum. They see which playground offences are most severely dealt with. They learn about ‘white privilege’ in Personal, Social and Health Education classes. And they learn about Britain’s problematic past in history lessons that focus on the sins of empire, the slave trade, and the treatment of migrants to the UK. Special lessons or modules on ‘black history’ send children the message that, rather than a single national story, history is fragmented and partial.
Campaigns to decolonise reading lists or the school curriculum reinforce the idea that Britain’s past was too dominated by white people and shaped by ‘white’ perspectives. The logic of this view is that lessons about Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Pythagoras, Beethoven, or British history normalise a Eurocentric, Enlightenment-focused view of the world and so need to be rejected or contextualised with reminders of Britain’s original sin.
Clearly, a balanced approach to history demands that pupils learn about the negative incidents in their country’s past. But when children are taught history solely to condemn their nation, they are left estranged from the past, alienated from the present, and distanced from older generations who do not buy into such national self-loathing. Teachers who successfully encourage pupils to believe that Britain is a systemically racist country leave children feeling at odds with the values of their family, community and nation.
For such children, their sense of where they fit into society and their own identity is called into question. In turn, schools respond to this crisis through a therapeutic ethos that prompts children to turn inwards and focus on their own mental health and vulnerability.
Britain certainly appears to be suffering from an epidemic of childhood mental illness. According to NHS England, in 2023, about 1 in 5 children and young people aged 8 to 25 years had a probable mental disorder. Between 2012 and 2022, more than 500 children a day were referred to mental health services for anxiety. Alongside increased diagnosis of mental illness sit growing numbers of children with learning difficulties and developmental disorders such as autism, dyslexia and dyspraxia. Five per cent of children are now diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
In response, teachers increasingly employ a range of therapeutic interventions in the classroom, such as circle time, where children are encouraged to share their thoughts and feelings; worry boxes, where children write down their concerns; guided meditation and mindfulness exercises; or yoga. More concerning is an approach to pedagogy that focuses on the emotional aspects of learning, in other words, asking children to reflect upon how they feel about maths, not just what they know.
This therapeutic approach to teaching means schools go beyond responding to an existing crisis and instead contribute towards a climate in which children come to see themselves as mentally vulnerable, with normal emotions - feeling sad, worried, lonely, bored or angry - as mental health problems in need of treatment.
We need to consider whether a classical approach to schooling might provide children with a new outlook on life.
Classical education is academically rigorous and knowledge-centred, unlike progressive education, which claims to be child-centred. Teachers induct children into a conversation between the generations, as they pass on to them the best that has been thought and said in the world. Classical education aims to cultivate wisdom, virtue and wonder at humanity’s accomplishments. This is the tradition through which Western civilisation and the intellectual gains of the Enlightenment have been preserved; not set in aspic, but passed on down the generations, as an intellectual birthright, absorbed, perhaps critiqued, but most especially loved.
In this way, pupils do not grow up alienated from their country’s history and traditions, but can take pride in past achievements and feel part of a shared cultural legacy. They are encouraged to feel a sense of attachment to and responsibility for their nation. At the same time, learning about historical figures introduces children to man’s potential and provides them with heroes to emulate. In this way, education becomes bound up with the promotion of beliefs, attitudes and values. Literature, history, and even mathematics convey assumptions about what it means to be human and a member of society at a particular point in time. Teaching is fundamentally a moral project.
The teacher’s job, then, is not simply to transmit facts but to cultivate the child’s moral sensitivity. The sociologist Emile Durkheim argued that ‘the way of developing the child morally is not to repeat to him, with however much emotion and conviction, a certain number of very general maxims valid eternally and everywhere; but to make him understand his country and his times, to make him feel his responsibilities, to initiate him into life and thus to prepare him to take his part in the collective tasks awaiting him.’ We urgently need to channel this spirit today.
Rather than teaching children to feel disdain towards their country, we need a school curriculum that introduces them to both the positive and negative elements of their nation’s story within the context of the moral and intellectual gains of Western civilisation. And rather than encouraging children to dwell on their own vulnerability, we need to open their minds to humanity’s tremendous potential.