(Published in Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Newsletter 2007-2008.)

Fifteen minutes of infamy

Michael Hand

Institute of Education, University of London

In early 2007, in an effort to prove to my HEI that philosophy and funded research are not mutually exclusive categories, I applied for and secured a small grant from the Nuffield Foundation to do some research on patriotism in schools. The research was part philosophical and part empirical, the former asking how patriotic ideas and sentiments should be handled in classrooms, the latter how they actually are handled. The project ran from February to October, much of the data collection and analysis being undertaken by my excellent research assistant, Jo Pearce. We found that most teachers and students thought schools should be neutral on patriotism and that the dominant approach to teaching about it was open discussion combined with correction of factual errors. Our philosophical inquiries vindicated this approach: because there are credible arguments both for and against loving one’s country, patriotism is too controversial an issue to be either promoted or discouraged in schools.

I was first tipped off about the level of media interest in this topic when, just a few weeks into the study, I was contacted by a correspondent for the Education Guardian, keen to run a story on our interim findings. I fended her off for as long as I could, but in the end sent her a summary of our first few sets of completed questionnaires. Her story appeared on the front page on 17 July. We were therefore reasonably optimistic about getting some further press coverage on completion of the research. But we were wholly unprepared for the media feeding frenzy that lay ahead of us.

As we put the finishing touches on our final project report in December 2007, I contacted my HEI’s press officer for some advice on disseminating our findings. She suggested that we do a press release, to be sent out on the evening of Thursday 31 January. There followed a month of haggling over wording: me drafting ever more concise and pared down outlines of our philosophical argument, she simply deleting these and replacing them with punchy statistics from our empirical work. I stuck to my guns, however, and we eventually settled on a version that gave due prominence to our normative conclusion and the philosophical case for it.

My recollection of the sequence of events on Friday 1 February is somewhat hazy, such was the disorientating speed and brutal efficiency with which the media machine flipped me onto its conveyer belt and processed and packaged me for public consumption. That day I gave three television interviews (one on BBC Breakfast, two on BBC London News) and five radio interviews (Radio 5 Live, Asian Network, LBC, Independent Radio News and Colourful Radio). I was hurriedly chauffeured from one recording studio to the next, greeted with exaggerated warmth by hip young producers, parked in tiny greenrooms with reality television contestants and child prodigies, and booted unceremoniously out of the door immediately after each interview. My interviewers, with the exception of the openly and dauntingly hostile Nick Ferrari at LBC, were friendly, professional and courteous, even when it was clear that they disagreed with what I was saying. Not so the viewing and listening public. ‘Would you like to hear some of the messages we’ve been getting?’, I was asked on air by 5 Live’s Nicky Campbell. ‘‘PC nonsense!’ ‘This man is nuts!’ ‘Get this idiot off the radio - if he has a problem with Britain, then leave!’’

The report was extensively covered by the national press. Between Friday and Sunday, substantial pieces appeared in The Times, the TES, The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Daily Star, the Morning Star, The Mail on Sunday and the News of the World. Some of these articles were accurate, measured and even-handed; others less so. In the considered judgment of the Daily Star, the report was ‘tripe’ and ‘PC mumbo-jumbo’, as proven by the plentiful and incontrovertible evidence of Britain’s superiority to all other countries. Readers were invited to admire the ‘two good reasons to love Britain’ possessed by the buxom, underwear-clad model whose image occupied the rest of the page. In the News of the World, columnist Carole Malone described Jo and me as ‘tofu-eating tank tops’ and ‘hairy, sandal-wearing academics’ (in my own case, the latter description is fairer than the former), and wished upon me a rather uncomfortable fate: ‘I’d like to see Dr Hand and his cronies tell an American he should be ashamed of his country. Or tell an Aussie he shouldn’t fly his flag for fear of causing offence. I suspect the flag would be lodged somewhere that would make Dr Hand unable to produce any more silly surveys.’

It was not only the media who got hot under the collar about the report: politicians also took an interest. In the aftermath of the media storm, the Director of my HEI received a furious letter from a Member of European Parliament: ‘How anyone, let alone an institution concerned with education, can express such opinions in defiance our history and our culture truly beggars belief.’ And in March a Labour MP asked the Minister of State for Schools and Learners in the House of Commons ‘what assessment he has made of the recent report of the Institute of Education on the teaching of patriotism in schools’ and ‘what plans he has to review the level of funding to the Institute’. (Causing the latter question to be asked in Parliament is not generally thought to enhance one’s prospects of promotion at my HEI.)

And then there was the avalanche of letters and emails from members of the public, apoplectic with rage about the contribution we were making to the corruption of the young, the corrosion of British national identity and the collapse of civilisation as we know it. These communications ranged from terse one-liners inviting us to leave the country, to a twelve-page, hand-written epistle chronicling the glorious history of the British Isles. ‘I know exactly where you are coming from with your friends in the Labour Party who seek to destroy this country and its identity’, ranted one. ‘To find a man in your position making this disgraceful comment is bordering on treason’, raved another.

And then, mercifully and disappointingly, it was all over. I dropped off the end of the media conveyor belt and the calls from producers and journalists, the letters from the public and the postings from bloggers stopped as quickly as they had started.

Did our fifteen minutes of infamy serve a useful purpose? It’s difficult to say, but my feeling is that it did. Notwithstanding the presposterous flag-waving of some of the tabloids, the media coverage of the research was by and large accurate, and gave centre stage to our basic philosophical argument. Patriotism is a controversial issue because for every consideration in its favour there appears to be an equally strong consideration against it. If it is Britain’s achievements and virtues that are supposed to constitute our reasons for loving it, then its failures and vices must constitute reasons for withholding our love. And if it is the danger of citizens being insufficiently motivated to do their civic duty that makes it reasonable to be patriotic, then the danger of citizens’ political judgments being clouded and distorted by national sentiment must make it reasonable not to be. This is not an easy controversy to find one’s way into, but nor is it so difficult as to be impenetrable; and, in the context of calls from across the political spectrum for the promotion of patriotism in schools, there is an urgent need for the controversy to be better understood and intelligently debated in public fora. I think, and hope, that the media coverage of our report took a few faltering steps towards meeting that need.