Educating the Secular Citizen in English Schools, 1897–1938 (original) (raw)

2018, Cultural and Social History

None of the major English secularist organisations1 in the early twentieth century could boast about membership figures as an indicator of their strength and influence. Compared with most Christian churches, and as a proportion of the general population, they were small. They did, however, claim to have achieved a diffuse impact on wider societal thinking and debate. National Secular Society (NSS) leaders, for example, asserted that the ideals and ideas that they stood for had gained "a hold on the public mind". Oxford classicist Professor Gilbert Murray stated that the "spirit" of Positivism had "got abroad" at a time when only remnants of Positivist organisations remained.2 These were outcomes that secularists strove, actively, to achieve. Energetic and canny publicists, they disseminated their ideas in letters and personal conversation, on the platform, and in print. Their influence in scientific, literary and left-leaning political circles has been noted; by the early twentieth century, a growing scientific and social-scientific elite, influential in governance and welfare movements, might not have joined secularist bodies, but sympathised with some of their arguments.3 Secularists also targeted the captive audience of young people who were compelled to spend five days a week, over much of the year, in schools. Through pressure groups, they lobbied educational authorities, and produced teaching aids, aiming to shape the teaching in schools in ways that would promote their interests. Not least among these interests was the desire to instil the knowledge, values and behaviours that would prepare pupils for their future lives as adult citizens, but outside of a Christian framework. This desire sat within a broad discourse about the purposes of schooling in England, one of longstanding which pre-and postdates the timeframe of the analysis here. As well as imparting academic knowledge, schools, it was argued, should develop in pupils the knowledge, values, and behaviours that they would require as adult citizens. These were concerns which appear to have taken on a particular urgency in the early twentieth century, owing to widespread perceptions of intense, and unprecedented, social, cultural, political, and ideological change.4 Secularists sought to shape the civic morality that would be taught in schools in their own image. Through influencing policy-makers, teachers and pupils, secularist campaigners, some of whom were or had been teachers or inspectors themselves, challenged assumptions that England was inherently, and inevitably, Christian.5 But the process of shaping a non-Christian civic morality was a complex one, involving shifting alliances, dialogue, and compromises between different secularists, and between secularists and Christians.6