Dr Susannah Wright

Many voluntary associations during the interwar years promoted international understanding in the hope of avoiding another global war. The League of Nations Unions in Britain lobbied the government to advocate for the newly founded League of Nations, whilst also seeking to convince and educate a wider public, promoting a ‘world citizenship’ that crossed national boundaries. Children and young people were a key constituency for the LNU’s promotional efforts as they would be the ones to take its agenda forward in the future. To create world citizenship among this younger generation, the LNU argued that ‘new knowledge’ alone was insufficient; a ‘change of feeling and purpose’ was also required. This article focuses on the ‘change of feeling and purpose’, the emotional terrain of the LNU’s vision of world citizenship, with an emphasis on international friendship, hope and fear. Drawing on selected exemplars from the LNU’s Education Committee publications, school magazines, and memoirs and oral histories, it explores ways in this emotional terrain was envisaged by adults in the LNU, and was experienced and articulated by young people themselves.

This article explores war remembrance and ritual in English schools. The Remembrance in Schools project (2013-2020) investigated remembrance practices in schools in England through questionnaires, interviews and observations. Schools are unique as sites of remembrance because children constitute the majority of participants in rituals. School-based rituals of remembrance might potentially reproduce dominant discourses of war-normalisation that conflate military values and nationalism with morally ‘good’ values and an imagined community of the nation. They also provide a contested, ambivalent space in which ambiguities of practice and thinking may encourage the emergence, in small ways, of counter-narratives about war and its remembrance.

Reviewing the historiography of education provides insights into both the past and present of this growing area of research across the UK and Ireland. In the nineteenth century research reveals a close association with national identities. These were often Whig histories that celebrated the present and emphasised the progressive nature of educational development, sometimes characterised by an ‘acts and facts’ approach. From the 1960s, it is possible to identify a series of revisionist histories, which diversified further in the coming decades and morphed into the familiar patterns that we can identify today: theoretical and conceptual complexity; a concern with inequalities; an eclectic and widening interest in primary sources; a focus on schooling but moving beyond it, for instance to childhood, welfare and literacy; and a (re)discovery of new topics such as the emotions, senses and identities.

This article examines individual narratives of armistice observance in British schools at a moment of polarized public debate about war and peace. Teachers and pupils described what they did, thought, and felt during their school’s commemorations on November 11th, 1937, in accounts penned for the social research organisation Mass Observation. They experienced the symbols, rituals, and texts of acts of collective remembrance in complex ways. Whilst participating in compulsory acts of observance their articulation of a common civic act was shaped by the power dynamics and priorities of the school setting, and individual histories and ideological commitments.

Each November, commemoration of the First World War armistice (and subsequent military events and conflicts) is almost ubiquitous in UK schools and has been given increased importance during the centenary years of the First World War. Yet as seemingly isolated occasions outside the regular curriculum, school practices of remembrance, and the understandings and perceptions surrounding them, have been subject to surprisingly little scrutiny. The Remembrance in Schools project (2013–19) investigates armistice commemoration in primary and secondary schools in three counties in southern England. This paper considers the theorisation of public commemorative rituals and relates this to teachers’ reports of school-based events. It analyses teachers’ accounts and perceptions, from survey and interview data, of the ways in which the First World War and subsequent conflicts are remembered, presented and discussed through school commemoration events. We conclude that such events mirror the ‘social technologies’ of public remembrance rituals. However, behind almost ubiquitous practices (the two-minute silence) and symbols (the poppy), these accounts reveal nuanced variations in teachers’ views of the knowledge and values children gain from armistice commemoration in schools. These variations are inflected by individual schools’ histories, community contexts, and pupil demographics, as well as teachers’ own histories, values and ideals.

The League of Nations Union (LNU) was one among the many organisations, in different countries, that promoted internationalist education among the young in the interwar years. But it was a particularly large and prominent one and appealed to a wide cross-section of teachers and pupils in English schools. LNU junior branches were established in many English secondary schools. Occupying a space at the intersection of youth organisations, a larger political movement, and the school itself, these junior branches were part of a wider agenda of active citizenship through extra-curricular means. Their focus was a liberal-internationalist version of “world citizenship” which accommodated existing loyalties to nation and empire as well as loyalty to the wider international sphere, and which sought peace but would countenance the controlled use of armed force against breaches of international agreements. Case studies of junior branches in two girls’ schools and two boys’ schools draw on school magazines and other relevant sources to shed light on what world citizenship could look like in different school contexts. The traditions and cultures of these different schools, the LNU’s ideals and resources, and changing international events, all emerge as important shapers of junior branch activities, and the response to what junior branches offered. Examining the micro-contexts of junior branches in schools contributes new, grounded, insights to a historiography of internationalist education, indicating ways in which ideals of liberal-internationalist world citizenship were negotiated, promoted, taken up, passed on, altered, and, sometimes, challenged or ignored.

This article examines secularists’ efforts over 41 years to shape civic morality and civic culture in their own image. Through pressure groups – the Moral Instruction League (1897–c.1923) and the League of Nations Union (1919–1938) – activists aimed to create secular citizens in English schools. In so doing, they aimed to act as ‘agents of secularisation’. Some (limited) political influence was achieved, and their publications reached many thousands. Yet campaigners were unable to unite a majority of Christians, or even all secularists, behind their proposals. The process of forming the non-Christian citizen proved a complex one, involving shifting alliances, dialogue and compromise.