JET has recently published research examining the way in which a government policy focused on security (so-called ‘securitisation’) can be rephrased as one concerned with defending ‘dominant values’ (see Peterson and Bentley Citation2016). This is clearly an issue which appears to represent the current zeitgeist for political, ethical and educational thinking and so JET was delighted to accept Professor Vini Lander’s proposal to guest edit a Special Issue of the journal on the topic of Fundamental British Values.
The six papers in this issue of the journal continue JET’s tradition of speaking evidence-based truth to policy-makers and, as Vini Lander points out in her introduction, represents the first extended research unpicking the confusions created when two separate English government policies (one concerned with counter-terrorism and the other with the professional standards of teachers) intersect in talk of fundamental British values. The resulting tangled web of simplistic and dangerous stereotypes about race and religion, especially how through the new Teachers’ Standards in England the practice of teachers and teacher educators are connected to these policies, are effectively unpicked and their interconnections, sound or otherwise, laid bare in this issue of the journal.
In reading this issue your Editor, in seeing the way in which the concept of ‘the other’ recurs in the papers, was reminded of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius’s identification of the term. Writing some 2000 years ago his Meditations identifies the key point to bear in mind perfectly: ‘We are the other of the other’.
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