Quaker Peace and Social Witness

Transcription

There is increasingly a sense to what we're seeing in Britain is an official move towards deifying the military. Now there’s a sort of celebration of militarism and the armed forces and I think it’s Iraq and Afghanistan that was used to turn it around. What we’ve seen in the last 5-10 years is the British military being pushed into the public eye on a regular basis. This is a really worrying trend There has been an increase in the visibility of the armed forces within our society in the visibility on forces within our society and this isn't a coincidence. This is a strategy that has been worked out. The government and the military need the public to support their wars, to support military spending and they also need a small number of young people to be keen to join the military. <News voiceover> A package of measures has been announced to help school instil character in pupils including extra funding for projects run by former armed service personnel... Michael Gove MP: We will be launching our Troops to Teachers Programme so that we can draft gifted individuals from the armed services into the classroom from the armed services real into the classroom. Nicky Morgan MP: … that finding the right role-model for a young person and that’s what these military ethos programmes particularly offer: a particular- a group of young people themselves at risk of being disengaged- or of course for some people it might be that actually a career in the armed forces… The military would say, and maybe the government would say, that military ethos is about teamwork, discipline and duty. The military is selling that idea- selling that idea that that’s what military ethos is- to gain access to schools. Why do they want access to schools? They want to recruit children into the military but they also want to recruit the rest of those children into the idea that the British military is this noble institution that we should all honour. It’s always been the case, actually, that a lot of public schools had young armed forces groups- well now we’re getting those kind of initiatives in mainstream state schools, and I think it’s just a pivot of British society being moved towards militarism and celebrating warfare. The military ethos is that somehow this is character building. Who’s character? What character? It doesn’t mean a character as in a person- a full sense of a person. An enquiring person, learning about the things they like and want to engage with. What they actually mean is character as in someone who will follow orders without getting too upset about it, Those are completely different things. To me education is about teaching young people how to think: how to be rational, how to look at evidence, how to weigh up different points of view. When the military published its British Armed Forces learning resource, I was shocked at the claim this was a 'teaching pack'. This is little more than a glossy promotional booklet As a teacher, I find it fascinating to see lessons based upon the armed forces that are that seem vaguely celebratory. It certainly isn’t something I would allow- I would endorse it to be used in the school. We are told that military ethos is about team work and discipline, but actually military ethos is about obeying orders without question, removing the barrier to kill and creating a sense of loyalty to an institution, usually through the formation of a gang mentality. The risk of allowing a military source to infect our schools is that we'll have generation of children growing up and becoming members of society who do not question authority and who do not question orders. An increased military involvement in education is really skewing the education system in one particular direction. I think that schools need and learning ethos not a military ethos and by that I mean the whole environment within the school is about enabling every young person to learn effectively and there're all sorts a place for achieving that and a military ethos is certainly not the only way to achieve it and in many ways I'm not convinced that it's the right one . I think we should be concerned about this because there's something incredibly subtle and almost underhand about this. Any situation that involves the spending of taxpayers' money on my promoting a military ethos should be at best questioned. The government and the military are not being open as to why they're doing this. They're not being open as to how they're doing this. I think most people don't know and I think a lot of people would be very angry if they did know. They don’t want anyone to be criticising British soldiers as such but they don’t want the glorifying of war and militarisation, and that’s what’s going on quietly, and people need to know.