Children and War: A Historical Anthology

8. Representations of War and Martial Heroes in English Elementary School Reading and Rituals, 1885–1914

Chapter Eight Representations of War and Martial Heroes in English Elementary School Reading and Rituals, 1885–1914 Stephen Heathorn It is a characteristic of a healthy child’s nature to delight in action. Stirring events, such as battles at sea and on land, and adventures of all kinds, have a strong attraction for boys. Nor need we hesitate to indulge this natural taste, so long as we keep within reasonable bounds. Whatever may be thought of “drum and trumpet”history, as it is termed, its influence in giving a liking for the subject is important, and should be kept in view in school teaching. So wrote John Landon in his teachers’ manual of 1894.1 Landon, while clearly addressing objections to this position, was certainly not alone in his views. In English elementary schools in the period 1885–1914, workingand lower-middle-class students, particularly but not exclusively the boys, were explicitly instructed in the importance of martial values. Representations of warfare and warrior heroes literally surrounded schoolchildren from a very early age:War was a central theme in the books that taught them to read; classroom decorations were often prints of famous battles, of soldiers and sailors in uniform,or of historic battleships; war games structured schoolyard play; military drill was the preferred means of physical education ; and the memorializing of great wartime victories was the rationale for special celebration days and rituals in the school calendar. This short essay 103 can only hint at the myriad ways in which a glamorous image of war saturated the reading and rituals of the English working-class elementary school at the turn of the century.2 Yet, even a cursory inspection reveals that the omnipresence of martial values in these schools was both a form of social prescription and a symptom of what John Gillis and Geoffrey Best have called the cultural militarization of British society in the three decades before World War I.3 Citizenship, Patriotism, and the Glory of the Battlefield Although education remained class-stratified in nineteenth-century England , elementary schooling had become both compulsory and subsidized by local taxes by the 1880s.4 However, the rise of a more democratic polity caused by the Third Reform (1884) and Redistribution Acts (1885) generated concern that teaching the“three Rs” (reading, writing, and arithmetic) was insufficient education for the increasingly enfranchised masses. Classroom instruction in“good citizenship”was now advocated as a means to inculcate working-class boys into the dictates of social respectability, national responsibility,and imperial duty.Meanwhile,instruction in domestic duties and “racial motherhood” was advocated for working-class girls.5 The advocates of using elementary schools as workshops of civic training came from all political positions and parties. Both liberals and conservatives approved of educating students in their “imperial duties,” although what this meant was debated between the liberal advocates of “national efficiency” and the more conservative proponents of aggressively advancing the empire or enacting peace-time conscription.6 Some liberals and socialists objected to the “flag-waving imperialism” and “war-mongering” in the later 1890s, and especially during and after the Boer War. However, most of the objections raised about the content of the elementary curriculum tended to focus on denominational religious issues rather than on implicit nationalism. Moreover , the objections raised by pacifist and socialist groups tended to be politely received by local school officials at public hearings, only to be totally ignored when it came to educational practice.7 For boys especially, martial values and corporatist ideals were prescribed as central to the aim of imparting these ideas of good citizenship in the elementary school.8 Fear of falling behind continental neighbors, the military security of the empire, and the possibility of the collapse of Britain’s com104 s t e p h e n h e at h  r n mercial world-leadership,were all connected to the need to reform schools.9 Curriculum reform couched in militarist rhetoric was increasingly mirrored in classroom culture, which came to depict war and martial values as romantic and chivalrous in order to reinforce youthful nationalism. Although present throughout the period 1885–1914, this militarism in the classroom was especially marked in the years after the Boer War (1899–1902). A whole spate of teachers’ instructional manuals propounded the importance of the teaching of citizenship and patriotism in the elementary classroom in the later 1880s...