Adolescent Discourse on National Identity‐‐voices of care and justice? [1

Abstract

Summary In her highly publicised polemic, All Must Have Prizes (1996), Melanie Phillips launches a scathing attack upon the British educational establishment and various facets of policy and practice during the past three decades. She is especially critical of progressivism and approaches to teaching and learning supposedly predicated upon relativist principles (e.g. multicultural education). Our own research on primary‐school children's constructions of British identity (Carrington, B. & Short, G. (1995): What makes a person British? Children's conceptions of their national culture and identity, Educational Studies, 21, pp. 217‐238) is singled‐out for criticism. We begin this paper with a rejoinder to Phillips. Among other things, we take issue with her defence of an assimilationist approach to the curriculum. In the second part of the paper, we present the findings of a recently completed case‐study of 12‐ and 13‐year‐olds’ constructions of their national identity, which replicates the earlier work (criticised by Phillips) with 8‐ to 11‐year‐olds. We show that the young adolescents, in common with their counterparts in primary schools, tended to adopt a pluralist viewpoint. Once again, there was an almost complete dearth of comments that were racist or nationalistic. We conclude by briefly exploring the policy implications of the findings. [1] Paper presented to the 1997 Conference of the Association for Moral Education: The Voices of Care and Justice‐enhancing dialogue among theorists, researchers and practitioners, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA.