Why humanism and education are bound together

Andrew Copson 0:01

Welcome to Unholy Histories, the Humanist Heritage Podcast brought to you by Humanist UK. I'm Andrew Cobson, Chief Executive of Humanist UK.

Madeleine Goodall 0:09

And I'm Madeline Goodall, head of the Humanist Heritage Project.

Andrew Copson 0:13

We're the hosts of this new podcast series where we will be speaking with experts about Britain's humanist history.

Madeleine Goodall 0:18

Uncovering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped both humanist thought and our national life.

Andrew Copson 0:47

At the end of the 19th century, organizations like the Moral Instruction League began championing moral education free from religious authority, promoting critical thinking, empathy, and citizenship for all children. And since then, humanists have played important roles in education reform from the first International Moral Education Congress in 1908 to campaigns for the teaching of evolution in science, inclusive curricula, and comprehensive relationships and sex education. Today, obviously, we know debates continue about how children form their identities and worldviews and what it means to grow up non-religious in a society still shaped by religious traditions. In this episode of Unholy Histories, the Humanist Heritage Podcast, we explore the humanist influence on education, past and present, and what it reveals about how values are learned and lived. And to unpack these ideas and more, we're joined by Dr. Lois Lee, senior lecturer in secular studies at the University of Kent, whose research examines contemporary forms of non-religiosity, with recent research looking at the formation of humanism in childhood, and Dr. Susanna Wright, associate professor in the history of education at Oxford Brooks. Her key research and teaching interests are in the history of education and childhood, with a focus on the themes of secularism and of war and peace. And together we'll be looking at the story of moral education, childhood identity, and how humanist ideas continue to shape minds in the making.

Susannah Wright on moral education

Madeleine Goodall 2:08

As we heard in the introduction, there have always been really strong links between the humanist movement and education in general and lots of educationists within the humanist movement. But I think maybe it might make most sense to begin with a bit of context of both of you. So perhaps, Susanna, if you'd like to start off by just telling us a bit about your work, your interests, your areas of focus.

Susannah Wright 2:31

Okay. First of all, thank you very much for having me. It's great to be involved. But I started looking at history of education and particularly kind of interesting, I suppose broadly secularist approaches to it a while back when I was doing my um postgraduate degree. It kind of coalesced things that came out of my family background, but also my interest in topics of education from having parents as teachers. And I just think it's a very interesting area. You can look at history of education by focusing in on classrooms, or you can see how schools interact with wider ideological and social movements. And it was the latter that really attracted me. So that's where I've kind of sat. I've been looking at this area of modern education on and off for more than 20 years now. I can't believe that. But it's absolutely fascinating. And I think part of the interest for me is the way that it shows things that are distinctive about humanism and people involved, but also how they connected with wider currents of thought and other people around them. And I think that's something we'll probably unpack together a little bit today.

Madeleine Goodall 3:43

Fascinating. I just wonder if we should start off by defining what moral education was as a concept, because I don't know if that's something we regularly refer to now, or perhaps not in the same terms.

Susannah Wright 3:58

I don't think so. We're more likely now to hear other terms such as citizenship, or maybe even civic education, although even that sounds a tiny bit Victorian. But moral education is a term that was used, I think, by people from different ideological persuasions. So you might hear Christians in the period that we were talking about in the late 19th, early 20th century, talking about moral education, but the assumption would be that it would have an underpinning of theological belief and Christian morality. So moral education is talking about kind of individual morals, it's also talking about people being members of wider society and the kind of knowledge, behaviour, attitudes that go with them. And if you're looking at schools, it would be how schools could convey that. And the Moral Instruction League that we've already mentioned, formed in 1897, primarily looked at introducing all these things through schools. But they were also attentive to families and other educational contexts in which these things would be picked out. They tried to promote a kind of particular version of moral education that was non-theological, didn't necessarily rest on a particular religious or Christian belief. But moral education could have a range of different belief systems attached to it.

Andrew Copson 5:23

I think it's really interesting as well about how that was both individual morality and social morality too, the idea that there was both the sort of cultivation of this in the individual also wider. Because that was a really big concern, wasn't it, of the ethical societies, particularly humanists who were organizing in the 19th century.

Susannah Wright 5:40

Yes, no, absolutely. And I think every kind of version of it that came from the ethical society is the predecessor to humanists now, whether in this country or their international counterparts, was both looking at the individual and wider society. And I think that they saw individual virality as maybe the seat of social reform. And the two as being quite intimately connected.

Madeleine Goodall 6:04

And I suppose as children and the the role of education has been key to that as well, shaping these future citizens and potential future social reformers as well. Get them all the young. Yeah, exactly.

Lois Lee on the meaning that humanism provides children

Madeleine Goodall 6:17

So I don't know if that does lead quite nicely into Lois, and to you mentioning a bit about your research and your key interests.

Lois Lee 6:26

Yeah, it's really interesting that category of moral education, isn't it? And I wonder actually what the kind of slightly broader this is ignoring myself and the introduction, which I'll do in a moment, but think going asking Susanna about what the time frame of that category is. When does it sort of transition into that citizenship language? Because it's extraordinary. So I'm coming to this as with a first degree in history, but primarily working as a sociologist. So looking at more recent debates and starting off looking at this very broad category that initially we sort of sociologists see as created by sociologists of people who say they have no religion. And you have lots of people arguing that this category has no social meaning. It just arises when we force people to say they've got a religion on a survey or to opt out. But there were interesting kind of questions around what's going on with the decline of religion and other forms of worldview change that required us to say something about that population. So my work starts off as just saying, let's have some conversations with these people, whether those are survey conversations and interview conversations. And that kind of leads into saying, oh, this is a bit more of a substantial, a bit more of a kind of meaningful group. And being not religious matters to people in different kinds of ways. And underlying that are different kinds of worldview commitments that aren't always very visible. In this recent work that Andrew mentioned in the introduction around humanism in childhood, we make a distinction between capital H humanism, which still gets a lot of attention. So people who are able to identify themselves as a humanist in some way, and small age humanism, which is about a certain kind of broader ethic or morality, if we're going to think about moral education, that we think is really pervasive and has been for a very long time, but isn't visible because it's not attached to organizations in quite the same way as institutional religion is. That feels kind of anachronistic to use that distinction, though. That's a very contemporary sociological one that doesn't make sense when I'm reading Susanna's brilliant work around this because capital H humanism isn't necessarily we have the religion of humanity that comp's pushing for, and so on. It's not a non-existent concept, but there are groups that are operating under with other terms. But it's that distinction between organisations that know they care about this and people who are shaped, their lives are shaped in all kinds of ways, and they do care. That's what we're increasingly aware of, but don't necessarily know that in the sense that they can identify it and articulate it and so on. So thinking about those, that space between, it's looking back at Susanna's work, it's just it seems really similar kind of tensions between those two positions. In some ways, we'll come to this as we go along. There are points that I just thought, wow, there's no change at all in the last hundred years, which is quite striking in the context of really rapid change in other ways, the real growth of non-religion, the real growth of different forms of humanist values. We'll get to all that, but the moral education, while I was asking Susanna about what its kind of historical parameters are when it fades out.

From moral instruction to citizenship

Susannah Wright 9:39

It's hard to say because you started out with moral instruction, which, as Andrew said, is a lovely Victorian concept. And I suppose if you're thinking about it pedagogically, you're thinking of kind of chalk and talk approaches, really, and that's what instruction kind of conveys. So teacher learns a kind of set input that's received, moves on to the idea of education, which kind of embraces other approaches to learning alongside the core of instruction. But words like civic and citizenship were in there right from the start, from the turn of the 20th century. And the Moral Instruction League became the Moral Education League in 1908, and then the Civic and Moral Education League in I think it was 1914, and then that changed to the Civic Education League in 1919. So you can see some of the conceptual changes going along with the name changes. But the terminology of morality and moral instruction continued into the 1920s still. So there was change, but there wasn't, I don't think, an absolute break. I think it was more a change of emphasis and a move away from focusing on the individual and their behaviour and how you'd instill that to thinking of broader approaches and more of the individual in a social context, is the way I'd read that change.

Andrew Copson 11:03

Moral education obviously carried on, didn't it, too, then? Because there's still the journal for moral education still exists, you know, until quite recently, but still led by humanists. How do you characterize how those strands changed then into the 40s and onwards? Does citizenship and moral education become two different domains or are they still intertwined?

Susannah Wright 11:23

I think they're still intertwined, although I'm not sure whether some of the key later figures in citizenship would have talked about moral education. So I think by the time you got to the 60s and onwards, moral education became part of the domain of philosophers, I'd have said, maybe, is the impression I got. And civic education became a bit more politically oriented, maybe.

Andrew Copson 11:45

Definitely if you compare like the early editions of the Journal of Moral Education, which are very classroom-based, very practical, with an edition of the Journal for Moral Education today, which is very academic, and actually, unless you're inside the field, you can't even make sense of the language that they're using. It's so academic for educationists. And I think his largest readership now is in China, which make of that what you will. But it is very different. Whereas in the late 19th century and up to the 40s that your work is covering, I think of course there are professionals involved there, but there's also just enthusiasts who are driven by moral purpose.

Susannah Wright 12:19

Absolutely. So I think it was less. So there were people involved who had their kind of university philosophical studies. Just to pick a couple of names. Gustav Spiller, a key figure in the ethical movement, a Hungarian emigre. And he thought a lot, but he also organized a lot. So he actually got a lot done. So he was one of those people who wrote, but also did a lot of really practical work and seemed to have amazing networks. So he's quite interesting from that point of view. You got people from a more teacherly background, like Frederick James Gould, who was important in the Moran Instruction League, particularly for writing curriculum materials and for acting as a demonstrator, who went around selling the wares of what moral education could actually offer to teachers and to try to convince them this was something they could do. And then Harold Johnson, ex-Unitarian, became ethical movement, went back to the Unitarians in the end. Again, university education, someone like Frederick James Gould didn't. And this is where I'm actually going to hand straight over to Maddy about Zola Balance.

Andrew Copson 13:27

Oh, Zona Balance.

Susannah Wright 13:29

Who I love, I love her, but she's very unusual as a woman who took a kind of front and center role in an organization which, despite all the talk about morality and women at the time, was fronted by men.

Madeleine Goodall 13:43

Yeah, so

Zona Vallance's impact on secular education

Madeleine Goodall 13:44

she was the secretary, wasn't she, of the moral instruction as well as of the Union of Ethical Societies, now human STK, and various other things. She really did everything, Zona, Valence. But she clearly was very, again, very passionate about the ideas of moral education and wrote very, very powerfully as well about the role of women, but also about lots of other things in her ideas related to kind of her humanism and things. And she was one of quite a few women actually in the early ethical movement who were concerned with education as well as with that kind of burgeoning humanist movement, and some of whom were teachers or had been teachers. Sonia Valence herself was not a teacher, but she was involved in some of the kind of other early or educational efforts of, for example, like the secular Sunday school of the East London Ethical Society and things like that. So they were different ways in which the movement and the different ethical societies and the different individuals within them were getting involved with, again, young people and offering alternatives to what was traditionally either focused on or organised by religion or religious groups.

Susannah Wright 15:02

It's a little bit of a reminder to me, you mentioned secular Sunday schools, of how the Moral Instruction League drew their program and their ideas from sources outside of the humanist or ethical movement as well. So the secular Sunday schools, that was maybe a bit of a testing ground for some of the approaches, which they then tried to advocate for schools across the day schools, state schools across the country. And obviously, the members who were teachers, they drew on their own teaching practice, again, a bit outside the um remit of the humanist movement.

Lois Lee 15:37

Yeah, I've always been intrigued just to

Teachers and children as key humanist demographics

Lois Lee 15:40

jump in on that about the relationship between teachers and humanism and the early sociology of non-religion. So the first sort of publication on that and big piece of research in 1971, Colin Campbell did that piece of research and he surveyed the humanist membership. So it must have been the British Humanist Association at that stage, sort of late 60s, and found that the most common occupation for a humanist member at the time was to be a teacher. I've got to get that the right way around. The majority of humanists are teachers, but there does seem to be some sort of interesting affinity, not necessarily across the education sector in its entirety, but quite important threads within it that you see from this early history. But I think you're saying still today, Andrew.

Andrew Copson 16:32

Yeah, still today, but actually you're right about the history that's really common. And it's true in the 19th century of humanist and secularist organisations in specifically humanist organizations in the UK, but it's also true in other parts of Europe as well. In other secular leagues and ethical societies, for example, in Germany, teaching was a hugely popular profession for people who are involved, or maybe humanism was popular for teachers. I don't know which way around it goes. I think interestingly, in some of the writings of those secularists, if you think about it in France, the teacher is held forth as the antidote to the priest. It's that famous quote about it from the French context: in every village there is a priest and a schoolmaster, and the schoolmaster is there to feed the flame of reason and inquiry in the child, and the priest is there to snuff it out. Is very striking in the 19th century humanist literature. So I think just in fact, even still, that the biggest French organisation that is a member of Humanist International, International Humanist Movement, is the National Union of Teachers in France. Yeah, and they actually see themselves as a humanist organisation. So I think teachers are very much part of the and it makes sense with the history of organised humanism, because the history of organised humanism is that these people who by any measure are eccentric outliers in their Victorian society, let's be honest, have got to try and find ways to, as they see it, compete with huge institutions with history and money and social power. And so the way to do it is through other institutions. And especially when schools start setting up and the great struggle for secular control of schools, this is the way to do it, right? Because this is the institution that eventually, funded by the state as it comes to be, can actually compete in the battle of ideas with churches.

Lois Lee 18:32

Well, I was just going to come back to that to say that Colin Campbell argues that one of the kind of great statements of humanism that we see from the sort of mid-19th century onwards are the different kinds of formal statements of the various professions, which he sees as kind of essentially humanist tracts. So it's really interesting thinking what Andrew says about conquering secular institutions or engaging with secular institutions as a way of empowering humanist ideas that if you have head-on against the churches, you might be quite marginalized by comparison. So they do come to become very mainstream in our thinking. But I think there's something really distinctive about definitely today how we think about schools, because children are so important in humanism as well. So those kind of broad ideas of scientific knowledge and free thinking are, you can see that being a kind of crucial aspect of the appeal of education and the draw of humanist thinkers of all kinds. But also, children are so important when you come to see the human species as special, interesting, worth protecting, human dignity is fundamental, and children as kind of vulnerable species members have a kind of almost sacred status that comes through increasingly from the mid-20th century onwards. But I don't know if that resonates with the earlier history, Susanna, or if it's if the moral education is less centering, maybe that's a later development to see children as precious in that way.

Susannah Wright 20:00

I think it possibly is a bit later for that to be mainstream. It's not saying that people involved in a moral education league didn't really value children and tried to cater with them for the best of their ability. But I think that some of those ideas came a bit later. Obviously, the philosophical origins of children's special go back to post-Enlightenment thinking and so on. Rousseau and Emile and those discussions will have been around for many decades by the time the Mormon Instruction League comes. So it's not as if that thinking isn't in the ether for them to pick up. But looking back on the Moral Instruction League, I think it is perhaps fairly traditional in some ways in its approach to thinking about children and so on. And so maybe the more kind of real child-centred or child-led approaches might be a bit of a later development. But I think there's a bit of a tension between, yes, the idea that children are the future, are very important and they're the future of our movement, as well as the future of the race. So you've got to get them all there young, that being true of humanists as much as it was of Christians. And something that's a bit more calculated and strategic, which is this is where we can really get a bit of anchorage. And schools where there's the religious difficulty is where they could get a bit of purchase and maybe find some allies who were Christian and who didn't like the way that the religious or the church control of education was going.

Working with religious allies, and the role of parents

Andrew Copson 21:28

I mean, it's interesting the ways that those humanists involved in the late 19th and early 20th century in price and moral education were quite happy, in fact, sometimes quite keen to work with religious people, in contrast to some of the other secular groups.

Madeleine Goodall 21:40

I was just thinking that just made me think of some of the other figures and some of the other groups outside of something like the Moral Introduction League. So I'm thinking of someone like Annie Besant and her magazine that she had, Our Corner, where there was the little there were these series of biographical sketches of inspiring people from the Past, usually men and usually scientists, interestingly. But nevertheless, there was this idea about I guess inspiring children, but also encouraging them to decide for themselves whether that person was deserving of praise, was heroic, was so there was this idea of giving a little bit like you were saying, Andrew, giving young people the tools maybe to come up with those ideas on their own or to evaluate their own kind of opinions of things. I was also thinking as well of the kind of role of those organizations and say the Moral Instruction League as potentially being a bit of a bridge between the kind of schools and the approach the schools and teachers were taking, and then parents. So I know that one of the early interventions of the Moral Instruction League was to gather this, the signatures of various parents to prove that they actually didn't want straight Bible teaching in schools, which again that feels to me like it's echoed a bit later when it's kind of like now. Do you know that there's compulsory collective worship in schools, parents? Things like that. It feels like there was this kind of role they had as well, where it was almost, by the way, this is how this is done in schools, or this is what your child is learning.

Susannah Wright 23:18

Yeah, I think they definitely try to reach out to parents as part of their campaign that was really visible early on. I think later they got a bit more focused on the big guns in parliament. And so particularly once you had the Liberal government come in 1906, I believe it was, and they got a bit more kind of traction. But I think that kind of reaching out into households via children and via discussions about the education they were having was part of it. Some of the lessons if you actually go into the curriculum materials produced by the Maryland Instruction League a bit more. So again, I think there's a tension. I think there is uh here are the tools to think for yourselves, here's a figure who may inspire you, but you work it out. But also you look at the material and the lessons are laid out in there.

Respectability and acceptance since Margaret Knight

Lois Lee 24:11

But at the time, that's a really interesting point, Maddy. But I my sense is that the engagement at that point is about wanting to show that people have these views and they're respectable and they can be represented therefore in how we organise our education. Whereas that kind of um did you know sort of question that comes out today is more about people not connecting, I think. I'm wondering if there's it sounds like the kind of mechanisms and dynamics are really similar, where there are key actors that really shape our education in ways that perhaps the majority are not aware of. And I've often thought that as someone who's non-religious myself and grew up fairly, I would say fairly indifferent to that identity and now research extensively with people who say they're indifferent. And I sort of think, well, I'm not sure you're as indifferent as you are, but I'm projecting myself onto that. But part of it is thinking, I'm really grateful for the work that organizations like Humanist UK and really diverse actors do to make space for people like me in the education system and so on. But it's a different thing to think it's irrelevant and then have to come around to thinking, oh no, there's some really important things happening. Whereas my sense reading Susanna's histories is more that it's okay to have these views. Is that a fair characterisation, Susanna? Is that a real difference?

Susannah Wright 25:35

I think I'm gonna sit on the fence here, Lewis.

Lois Lee 25:41

Be agnostic.

Susannah Wright 25:42

Yeah, I'm gonna be agnostic.

Lois Lee 25:44

But I might as well profess it. Maybe I'm overstating. This is what happens when you're embedded in today. You overstate the differences with the past, don't you? And maybe that issue of respectability isn't as big a deal as I think it is.

Madeleine Goodall 25:55

If you think about the reaction that somebody like Margaret Knight and her broadcast, her memoirs without religion broadcast had in the 50s, there was still that. And I think to a certain extent, is still that argument for the respectability, the acceptability, the morality of the non-religious standpoint and the non-religious basis for ethics that I think to a certain extent does still play out today. I think certain where humanists struggle on sacras, for example, standing advisory councils on religious education, to have their voices heard in terms of how and what should be taught. I think there has been, I mean, I find that respectability element just endlessly fascinating anyway. And I think obviously the ethical societies were very concerned with that themselves.

Susannah Wright 26:42

Yeah, absolutely. And I think I sometimes do come back to the fact that some of the figures involved yes, they were a generation away from blasphemy trials and some of the more kind of severe penalties that could go, but some of the humanists still faced lack of promotion, being shut out from premises, job losses, those sorts of penalties. So there is a respectability issue for the public figures. They were putting themselves on the line to some extent. And my other thought on respectability is that if you go into schools or a system like that, you're attaching yourself to a respectable institution. It conveys its respectability when maybe the beliefs are a bit challenging. And I'm sure that the rhetoric of this is suitable for people of all religions or none was partly a humanist worldview or the ethical movement kind of predecessor of it. But it's also a route to respectability compared with the secularist approach of we don't even try to go anywhere near the religion side.

Andrew Copson 27:43

I think that Maddy put her finger on a really interesting historical moment when she brought in Margaret Knight, who made those broadcasts on the home service in the 1950s, talking about education of children without religion and moral formation. And, you know, it was a scandal. Bishops denounced her, people burnt copies of her book, it was on all the newspapers. It always seems to me that there was a bit of pearl clutching about that to some extent. That people did, I don't think people felt the man or woman on the street would not have felt that way. We know from research that was commissioned by the Ethical Union in the 40s that actually the people worked through mass observation, people were much more normal, ordinary people were much more of Margaret Knight's way of thinking than they were of the front page writers of the newspapers. But

Impact of the 1944 Education Act

Andrew Copson 28:25

in terms of the history of it, is this something that changes? Because I think that the if we look back at the time that you're thinking about, Susan, especially the early 20th century, it seems to me that the moral education campaigners, the humanists involved in this movement, were achieving respectability. That was happening, and that then they faced this big defeat in the 1944 Education Act, which puts compulsory religious instruction into every state school, very controversial at the time in Parliament, but not controversial enough to be voted down, unfortunately. And they sort of lose. And there's a revival of not popular religion but official religion in the state at that point. And Margaret Knight would not have been shocking to public opinion, I think, in the early 20th century, in the way that she was apparently, you know, or portrayed as shocking and outraging public opinion there in the 1950s. Is that right? In a moment, I think we'll come on to look at later in the 20th century, but before we leave them all educationally behind, they lost in 1944, didn't they? And then campaners had to go in a different direction, I think.

Susannah Wright 29:30

I think so. Yeah. During the war they barely held it together as an organization for obvious reasons. Yeah, people were dispersed, premises in London were subject to bombing and all those sorts of things. So yes, they did loss. And I think it's partly for fairly practical reasons, but yeah, the kind of assumptions of Christianity uh going alongside the Allied cause during the Second World War were very difficult to counteract. And that has been presented in a number of histories as a bit of a shift back to an assumption of a kind of cultural Christianity or yeah governmental level Christianity, which had been lesser during the 1920s and 1930s at least. So I think respectability may be pre-1914 questionable by the 1920s to some extent, maybe.

Andrew Copson 30:25

Yeah, I think so.

Susannah Wright 30:26

It's hard to predict, isn't it? We can't tell for sure. But yeah, I think she might have had a time of it in the 1930s.

The pervasive humanism of modern professional life

Lois Lee 30:33

I was just gonna say that at the same time, there seems to be a real victory for a vision of citizenship education that clearly these actors had a real key role in developing. And sometimes that happens with organizations, doesn't it? That they when they win major gains, they lose some of their visibility and force in other areas. And I don't know if that's maybe the key moment where we see a kind of fracturing of you mentioned individual and social morality at the beginning, Andrew, I think, and it's and that parallel, it runs through all of your history as well, Susanna, doesn't it? This sort of are we creating a sort of general secular form of morality that everyone can participate in, including the Christians who are the opponents by virtue of being the most powerful actors in this space at that point, or are we trying to offer an alternative morality that it does engage with kind of more existential, personal, ethical issues? And that reading that just was felt so prescient to the kinds of debates that I'm engaged with around education today, where you literally have these two subject areas of citizenship and studies and religious education, and that kind of citizenship study seems to have done so well. So to sort of hear he sort of saying, Well, there's a loss at that point just makes me think there was a big win there for a vision that that a lot of these people are really arguing for, and which really does dominate a lot of the discussion of morality in schools today. But then the other where they lose, there's sort of two sides of that coin, isn't there? That then religious education gets to be the preserve again or restored for classical religious approaches to meaning and existential value and all of that. And then that's where there's been very contemporary debates about making sure humanists are represented and other non-religious worldviews and so on. But it that sort of dual history, which is really current today, how do these two things do? Really interesting work by people like Martha Shaw and so on, who are looking at how citizenship studies and religious education do and fail to interact, ways they should be helping each other, ways in which they're paralleled. They're really contemporary discussions, and you see that all the way back in the Moral Education League and the Moral Instruction League, this sense that there are two things that they haven't quite worked out what the relationship between them ought to be. And I think that's probably still true today. But citizenship has to be a big winner in that story, doesn't it? A vision of secular citizenship.

Andrew Copson 33:08

Yeah, definitely. And I think I would add also whatever it ends up being called in the future, personal social health education, you know, related education, that is absolutely a humanist achievement, too. I think Lowe's completely right to identify that moral education maybe becomes a niche academic field and or is accepted as having lost a battle in the 40s. But then those humanists go off and do citizenship education, civic education. People like Susan Stäbbing writing in the 40s about how important it is in a new democracy, which the UK had become a democracy in this period, which it wasn't before, how important it is for citizens to actually be able to be citizens, and then later humanists like Bernard Quick. But then you're also involved in setting up the Citizenship Foundation and all the rest, and writing National Curriculum for Citizenship almost really, when it came around it in the late 20th century. And then you get that people like James Hemming, who comes from moral education background, but puts a lot of his time into relationships education, under the sort of education that not just biology of sex, but you know, relationships and human interdependence and so on and so forth, which really bears fruit in the personal health, social education, whatever it's been called so many different things over the decades. But then I think RE itself is highly influenced by humans. I mean, don't forget the British Humanists Associates, one of the founders of the RE council in the 70s, and campaigners like Harry Stokes Rowe in the Birmingham Agreed Syllabus in the 70s, getting humanism put in there for the first time. I think all of these people do go off through the mid to late 20th century to really influence and shape RE, PSHE and citizenship. All of them.

The pervasive humanism of modern professional life

Susannah Wright 34:50

So how much do people doing this kind of put their humanism or their kind of label of I am doing this on behalf of the humanist association? How far is that kind of up front, or how far do they try to go get the ideas through and get the practices through, but not necessarily own that identity? I'm thinking of this because this is a debate within the Moral Instruction League that went on. Do you badge yourself and potentially get slide lines but then kind of lose the credit for doing something? Or do you hide the label a little bit but get the route outreach there and get the ideas and the practices out there?

Andrew Copson 35:30

I don't know if Maddie has done any research into this, but my feeling is that in the 60s they're they are more out and proud as humanists. In the 70s, they start getting involved with other people and institution building, like forming things like the Social Morality Council to with Christians and Jews, forming the Religious Education Council with religious people and not burying, not subsuming, but engaging maybe with wider educational initiatives. But this is the interesting thing about the 20th century and humanists who get involved in any area of social policy, is they feel increasingly in the late 20th century that they're going with the grain, that background small age humanism has had such a wide social effect that all a lot of more humanist activists feel they need to do is just sort of keep it moving and be present when needed, but in general just keep things on track. Maddy, is that right, Janine?

Madeleine Goodall 36:21

I think that would have been probably my instinctive feeling as well, and maybe that there is less of that need for fighting against something and more of an opportunity to either fight with, as in alongside other people to keep change going or make change happen. And I was thinking too of Lois's work and that idea of when you've got this pervasive humanism in society for lots of young people growing up, for many of their kind of parents and caregivers. What's the kind of impact of that then on some of these things? Does it mean that actually, maybe a bit like we were saying earlier, actually teaching about humanism gets a bit lost because it's almost assumed that lots of these values are just they're just common sense values, they're just human values. And as is that a kind of mark of success, or is that something to be aware of in and of itself? I'm probably not putting that very well, Lois. Maybe you're not.

Andrew Copson 37:18

No, I think you are, and that's a bit that's a bit like what Lois was saying earlier when she was pointing out that Colin Campbell, the sociologist in the mid-20th century, pointed out that these professional constitutions of so many professions and the values and so on aren't are effectively humanist documents. That's right, isn't it, Lois? That's what you were saying, is what Maddy was just saying, I think.

Lois Lee 37:35

But I do uh I think we can't put too rose-tinted a picture on it, at least from a humanist perspective, in that so thinking about the recent debates around citizenship education, there was an article published this year by Anna Strahan and others, with that in the title, if people are interested in the findings, that talks about the forms of Christian privilege that are visible within citizenship education. And then on the other hand, although there's engaging with teachers and people in working in education in all kinds of ways, has been really instructive to me. There's so much innovation going on. Teachers are at the front line of engaging with a population that is a vast majority identify as non-religious. So they're in kind of having one of the most kind of intense encounters with non-religious of any sort of population. I think probably that's why there's such kind of innovation in that space for engaging with non-religious worldviews and humanism. And yet the balance of that education provision isn't what it should be really to represent, to reflect in any way that kind of balance. It's absolutely changing. It's that this is to honour the innovation and so on. But as you're saying, Maddy, things can bubble away without being noticed or the problems being visible to people because it seems okay. So some of the teachers we've interviewed in our research, for example, say, oh, we don't need to worry too much about non-religious worldviews in the RE classroom because they get taught that in science. And so to underline that is a whole set of issues that we could get into. But what concerns me is the kind of dissipation of space for talking about really existential ethical issues for non-religious people, because that is not irrelevant to the science classroom, but that's not its core objective. That's not the main sort of bread and butter of what's going on in the science classroom in the way it is in the RE classroom. So those sorts of different kinds of currents,

Visibility Meaning And Post-Religious Life

Lois Lee 39:23

for me, the big shift, we my education's been shaped by secularisation theory and this big battle, the grand battle between old theism and new atheism or different forms of different generations of atheists. And I increasingly think the real change is about the decline of existential institutions, by which I mean institutions and organizations that are dedicated to questions of meaning, moral questions, but specifically in relation to the good life and those kind of broader questions. Because that's true of Christians today as much as it is non-religious people today. Most Christians, people who have a Christian identity and a broad set of Christian beliefs, don't go to church, but those identities still matter to them. We've seen that in our politics in the UK and elsewhere in recent years quite clearly, the importance of these kinds of identities and forms of meaning that I think we need to take quite seriously. So it's that institutional shift, and you see that from this early history, this kind of sense of is, and that's the question you're putting out there, isn't it, Maddie? That does it matter that we're able to see and identify this part of our social life and our personal lives, or does it not matter? Does it mainly matter that there's a kind of generalized humanism? If you're a humanist, you think, well, there's a kind of generalized humanism, that's that's where we are, nothing to worry about. Or does visibility matter? And I think there are key points at which visibility does matter. And education is one of those spaces where things become visible to us. So yeah, if you see that tension already in that, you've described it really well, Susanna, about should I say I'm this or should I just let the argument go under the radar? Yeah. So it's really interesting seeing that not as a kind of grand story of social change and history, but as a really lived set of decisions that individuals and organizations are making in order to kind of as a sort of strategy is probably slightly too grand a word, because none of us are really live by strategy.

Madeleine Goodall 41:22

So we were we're just doing what we can. You saw that as well in other areas of activism in history. I always think of Barbara Smoker's humanista marching banner on the peace marches in the 60s and things. It's and that was a very conscious, as all these humanists marching as part of these, but not necessarily literally and figuratively under the banner of humanism. And it's important that we do, it's important that we that put that out there.

Andrew Copson 41:45

And

What can we still learn from the moralists?

Andrew Copson 41:46

is that, Lois, what we think the main thing that you think we can learn today from the historical figures that we've been talking about as we are now in this atheist age, this humanist age that we now live in, are there other things we can, other lessons we can learn as well?

Lois Lee 41:58

I found it so interesting engaging and re-engaging with this history because it does feel very current. It doesn't feel unrecognizable by any chalk. And I think this distinction between secular ethics about developing good citizens that are engaged with different kinds of human communities and a parallel thing, which is about existential pluralism and making space for different kinds of existential perspectives, some of which are humanist, you just see that kind of entangled and tangled up in that history in a way that I still don't think has really been resolved. And that as we go into a kind of atheist age to coin a phrase, but that there are a lot of atheists around, and we've become an atheist majority population for the first time in our recorded history in the last sort of five years or so. I think we are going to need to grapple with that, or there will be real kind of gaps in our education provision if we focus on that area, but also in our public and private life. What we haven't spoken about today is that kind of really important arm of humanist UK's, which is about pastoral care, which is about the funerals and all of that aspect. And again, that's always sat in the kind of interesting, you see that in humanist UK's and organizations today, that there's a kind of political campaigning bit that's look interested in seeing things in the round and these kind of particular areas of public policy and so on. And then you have people on the ground talking with people about their most important existential experiences. And there's two kind of distinct things that again come together in this organization, in a way, maybe done beautifully well. But just I think there's a broader conversation about making space, maybe in particular, for the post-religious existential aspect of life. And it's it's just fascinating to see that the beginnings of those conversations a hundred years from now.

Andrew Copson 43:46

And Susanna, what do you think the long term effects of the people and movements that you've studied have been in in our society? And what can we learn from them today?

Susannah Wright 43:54

I think we've already sort of mentioned that the long term effects are, I think, sometimes actually difficult. To detect for sure that we can see them, as in broadly humanist ideas within education, the professional statements, and so on. Could you argue that the results of all the surveys of Britain being a majority atheist population are a long-term effect? I think it's very difficult to establish the causal mechanisms, but you can perhaps see these things coming through. I'd say in terms of lessons, I think there's still something actually in the education sector, which is about the difficulty of how it engages with wider interest groups. I think that's always been a challenging area. That everything from teachers on the ground to government to the government policy level don't quite know how to do it properly, and in a way that's not going to be seen as being overly swayed by one interest group or as opposed to another. And people like the Moral Instruction League did try to make some space for education existential questions, but I don't think they fully resolved how to do that as opposed to deal with the more practical uh elements of morality and how you'd actually engage kids in the classroom. I think the thing that maybe we could think about more, which maybe the Moral Instruction League and its successor didn't really think about so much, is how to engage children in actually formulating some of these ideas. So yeah, but children very much as involved in the process as opposed to being the recipients of it, even though important and then in need of protection.

Favourite atheists from the history of moral education

Andrew Copson 45:32

There's so much more we could have talked about in about the history of humanists and education. What you were just saying then, Sadanna, made me think of Beacon Hill School, the school in the 20s that Bertrand Russell and Dora Russell set up, which was all about child-centred learning and then finding their own and humanists in education in the 19th and 20th century have been involved in so many different initiatives. We've only scratched the surface, although we've done it with very informed guests today, of the long history of humanists in education. Maddie.

Madeleine Goodall 45:58

As a final question of the episode, and I'll ask Susanna Wright and then come to you, Lois. Do you have a favourite atheist from history?

Susannah Wright 46:09

It's hard, but I have a soft spot for Frederick James Gilbert. Just the teacher, writer who got around, and I think possibly had a lot of impacts at that lower level compared to some of his some of his peers. And he did ceremonies too. And he did ceremonies, yeah. Yeah, so he tried to get in at all levels. And I think he covers that ground where he did stuff for people within the movement connecting with their important moments in life. But also reached out. So yeah. I didn't always like him. I think he was sometimes a little bit annoying, maybe, but yeah. He's a No, I find him to see interesting and a bit of an all-rounder. And Lois?

Lois Lee 46:54

I really resent this question. I think this should be some warning because what a fascinating area. Andrew said, think about someone in your research, and we're just having these wonderful conversations with children who don't have a belief in God, so they're atheist in that sense, and just come up with the most charming thoughts and ideas. And I would really like to choose one of one of them, but I can't think of you know an individual to put before us. And that's so I resent that. But then let's think about who we're this is representing children. We're doing this piece of work about the deep humanist meanings of Father Christmas for children and the way in which Father Christmas encaptures all kinds, a sense of magic that's embedded in the idea that children matter to us in a special. You know, Christmas is all about the child and these child-centered rituals. So I'm going to choose Father Christmas as a surprise atheist figure. And um, you have to listen to other humanist podcasts to know more about why I think that's the case. But he's really representative of all the lovely children that we've spoken with in the research.

Andrew Copson 48:01

I'm looking forward to reading the articles that coming out of that research, Lewis.

Lois Lee 48:04

Oh, I love the Father Christmas research. I really do.

Andrew Copson 48:07

Maddy, who's your favourite of the humanists in education?

Madeleine Goodall 48:11

Andrew mentioned Dora Russell, so I'm gonna say Dora Russell. I love her, I think she is endlessly fascinating. Beacon Hill was a really interesting experiment that she continued after Bertrand wasn't around anymore. And what's not to love about Dora Russell? She was probably quite formidable as a character, but she's my favourite.

Lois Lee 48:35

Actually, I'll say that Father Christmas is there's an argument that he's an important education figure as well. There's an extraordinary first paper published by Claude Levo Strauss, this very famous eminent anthropologist, after he did his PhD, the year after, is called Father Christmas Executed. And it's exactly about the way in which Father Christmas or Père Noël has infiltrated the supposedly lay school system and replaced Jesus as the moral centre of French education in the mid-20th century. I recommend that to you as well. So this is what you didn't know we needed to talk about today: Father Christmas and the humanist ethic in our schools.

Andrew Copson 49:17

That must be one of the most unexpected endings to it podcast.

Find out more about our guests and Humanists UK

Andrew Copson 49:23

Where can people find out more about your work before we end, Lois?

Lois Lee 49:27

We have just finished a very large project called Explaining Atheism, but there's a website of that name where you can see a lot of different research projects, some historical, many looking at more current, atheism through sociological and so on lenses. And you can even find out about our work on Father Christmas there.

Andrew Copson 49:44

And Susanna?

Susannah Wright 49:45

I don't have a big project website or anything that you can find out about my books from my institutional profile at Oxford Brooks and delve in a little bit more that way.

Andrew Copson 49:57

That's wonderful. Thank you both for being our guests today.

Susannah Wright 50:00

Thank you very much for having us.

Andrew Copson 50:02

Thank you for listening to Unholy Histories, the Humanist Heritage Podcast, brought to you by Humanists UK. To join, support, or find out more about Humanist UK's campaigns and services, visit humanists.uk or you can follow us on social media at Humanistsuk. This podcast was produced by Humanize Live. Find out more about creating content for compassionate communities at www.humanize.

Madeleine Goodall 50:25

You can find out more about the rich history and influence of humanism on the Humanist Heritage website at heritage.uk