Should We Promote Patriotism in Schools?
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2010.00855.x |
| Published date | 01 June 2011 |
| Date | 01 June 2011 |
| Author | Michael Hand |
| Subject Matter | Article |
P O L I T I C A L S T U D I E S : 2 0 1 1 VO L 5 9 , 3 2 8 – 3 4 7
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2010.00855.x
Should We Promote Patriotism in Schools?post_855328..347
Michael Hand
Institute of Education, University of London
If patriotism is love of one’s country, the attempt to promote it in schools must count as a form of emotional
education. Emotional education is defensible in so far as it consists in offering pupils good reasons and effective
techniques for fostering or suppressing particular emotions. The question is whether we are in a position to offer
pupils good reasons for loving their countries. In this article I set out an account of the rationality of emotions in
general and of love in particular, and then identify two benefits and one drawback of patriotic attachment. I argue that
there is room for reasonable disagreement on the desirability of patriotism and that we therefore ought not to promote
it in schools but rather to teach it as a controversial issue.
There is, at present, a lively debate in philosophy of education about whether or not we
should promote patriotism in schools (see, for example, Archard, 1999; Ben-Porath, 2006;
2007; Brighouse, 2006; Callan, 1997; 2006; Gutmann, 2002; Merry, 2009; Miller, 2007;
Nussbaum, 1996; Stevens, 1999; White, 1996; 2001; Wingo, 2007). A striking feature of this
debate is the determination of each side to draw the line of battle in a different place.
Defenders of patriotic education focus their efforts on demonstrating the benefits of loving
one’s country: they take it as read, more or less, that showing patriotism to be generally
beneficial supplies the warrant for promoting it in schools. Opponents of patriotic educa-
tion, by contrast, pay little attention to the pros and cons of patriotic attachment, giving
centre stage instead to the practical difficulties of cultivating it. Chief among these is what
Harry Brighouse calls ‘the distortion problem’ ( Brighouse, 2006, p. 109), according to
which any attempt to persuade pupils to love a country is likely to involve misrepresenting
it. There is thus a curious failure of engagement between those on either side of the debate,
and a tendency for each to regard the arguments of the other as only marginally relevant
to the problem.
My aim in this article is to meet, and defeat, the advocates of patriotic education on their
own terms. I think they are right to focus on the question of whether or not patriotism is
a good thing, but wrong to suppose we can say with confidence that it is. I shall argue that
reasonable people can and do reasonably disagree about the desirability of loving one’s
country and, therefore, that patriotism should not be promoted in schools but rather taught
as a controversial issue.
I do not underestimate the seriousness of the distortion problem. It is undoubtedly true that
the great majority of efforts to promote patriotism in schools the world over have been, and
continue to be, severely compromised by their reliance on the perpetuation of national
myths, fantasies and falsehoods. Nor do I think it is adequate for defenders of patriotic
education to respond to this problem simply by accepting misrepresentation as a necessary
evil, in the manner of William Galston:
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rigorous historical research will almost certainly vindicate complex ‘revisionist’ accounts of key
figures in American history. Civic education, however, requires a more noble, moralizing
history: a pantheon of heroes who confer legitimacy on central institutions and constitute
worthy objects of emulation. It is unrealistic to believe that more than a few adults of liberal
societies will ever move beyond the kind of civic commitment engendered by such a pedagogy
(Galston, 1991, pp. 243–4).
If we can only promote love of a country by deliberately misrepresenting it, the price of
patriotic education is certainly too high to pay. An education that requires teachers to
‘select, exaggerate, forget, mythologize, fictionalise, and lie’ is, as David Archard insists, an
education ‘unworthy of its calling’ (Archard, 1999, p. 166).
But significant though the distortion problem is, pointing to the practical difficulties of
cultivating patriotic feeling is an unsatisfying and ultimately unpersuasive response to calls
for patriotic education. For if patriotism really is a significant good, we presumably have
reason to make fairly strenuous efforts to overcome whatever practical difficulties lie in the
way of ensuring that pupils benefit from it. Few take the view that believing falsehoods
about a country is a necessary condition of loving it, so why, in principle, should a way not
be found of promoting patriotism in schools without peddling national myths and fictions?
One defender of patriotic education undeterred by the distortion problem is John White.
He advocates the construction of a new, ethically defensible ‘idea of Britishness’ to serve as
the focus of national sentiment. In promoting this idea in the classroom we can explicitly
contrast it both with older, more dubious notions of Britishness and with the concrete,
complex, morally ambiguous realities of British national life. Thus ‘history lessons in schools
will show our warts and wens as well as beauty spots: there is no cause for deviations from
historians’ normal standards of objectivity’ ( White, 1996, p. 336). Whatever one thinks of
White’s proposal, it shows that defenders of patriotic education are obliged neither to
ignore the distortion problem nor to join Galston in accepting its implications; they can
urge instead that ways can and should be found to overcome it.
So I think it is a mistake for opponents of patriotic education to put all their eggs in the
practical difficulties basket.We should resist calls for the promotion of patriotism in schools
not (or not only) on the grounds that it is difficult in practice, but on the grounds that it
is unjustifiable in principle. Or so I shall argue in what follows.
What is Patriotism?
Patriotism is love of one’s country. It is a certain kind of emotional attachment to a certain
kind of object. To ask about the desirability of patriotism is to ask whether, on balance, it
is good or bad for people to have this feeling about this object.
A country comprises a national community and the land on which it resides. The unity of
these elements lies in the fact that nations are conceptually connected to their homelands:
a constitutive and distinguishing feature of national communities is a shared sense of
belonging to a particular geographical place. The object of patriotic attachment, then, is ‘a
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M I C H A E L H A N D
certain kind of territorially concentrated, intergenerational community to which the
patriot belongs and whose survival and prosperity she values deeply’ (Callan, 2006, p. 533).
It is helpful to distinguish patriotism from certain normative beliefs whose company it
sometimes keeps. One of these is the belief that one’s national community should enjoy
political independence, a view for which Archard recommends we reserve the term
‘nationalism’: ‘Nationalism is, as a political theory, a normative claim about the proper
consonance of nation and state; it claims that a nation should have independent sovereign
statehood and that states are political communities which should be bound together by a
single national identity’ (Archard, 1999, p. 159). While love for one’s country often goes
together with the belief that it should be a sovereign state, each is perfectly intelligible in
the absence of the other.
The other normative belief from which I would like to distinguish patriotism is the belief
that we have special obligations to our fellow nationals, over and above our general
obligations to all human beings. Special obligations between compatriots have found
capable defenders inYael Tamir (1993) and David Miller (1995), but their existence remains
hotly contested in contemporary political philosophy. Miller himself holds that they are
plausible only if one favours a particularist account of the structure of ethical thought:
ethical universalists, he thinks,‘should regard nationality not as a justifiable source of ethical
identity but as a limitation to be overcome’ (Miller, 1995, p. 64). The point to note here is
that there is no necessary connection between the position one takes on the ethical
significance of nationality and the feelings one has about one’s country. Patriots can
consistently either accept or deny special obligations between fellow nationals; or they can
decline to adopt any view on the matter at all.
Educating the Emotions
If patriotism is love of one’s country, the attempt to promote it in schools must count as a
form of emotional education. A few general remarks on the enterprise of educating the
emotions are therefore in order.
First, emotional education is a task to which schools should (and do) address themselves.
Although it is sometimes suggested that schools ought to steer clear of the affective domain
and confine their attention to matters of cognition, there are no very good arguments in
support of this view and some compelling ones against it. One such argument is that
cognition and affect are not at all easy to separate: an integral part of coming to understand
the facts, theories, texts and narratives...
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