The Newbolt Report, the problem of moral legitimacy and the turn to culture

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to locate the Newbolt Report, published in 1921, within a context of the weakening political authority of Britain’s ruling class. One indication of this is the fact that in 1917 200,000 workers were involved in strikes in 48 British towns. The moral and cultural dimensions of the problems facing the ruling class at this time point to the multi-dimensional significance of the Newbolt Report. Like all official documents, it is an articulation of competing interests of different social groups which are cohered into a world view that contributes to a hegemonic order. My paper examines the relationships between the Newbolt Report’s focus on English language and a wider attempt at the time to create a national identity legitimised through cultural claims rather than directly through politics. I offer a reading that attempts to elucidate the contradictory motivations of the Report’s making, as well as those contained within its own educational discourse. Culture came to be a site for the expression of political and social differences, as well as the medium for rendering them compatible. The Newbolt Report both exemplifies and, to an extent, resolves these tensions. By drawing on insights from history and sociology of education I substantiate this general description of the Newbolt Report as an example of a hegemonic, but nonetheless democratic, endeavour.

KEYWORDS:

• Newbolt Report
• education
• English language
• hegemony
• common culture
• national identity
• national inheritance
• english literature

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Alka Sehgal Cuthbert

Alka Sehgal Cuthbert is an educator of over 30 years’ experience. She has taught at various levels of education, from secondary school to university.  Since completing her doctorate in the philosophy and sociology of education at the University of Cambridge in 2017, she has co-written a book What Should Schools Teach? Disciplines, subjects and the pursuit of truth and other articles for public, professional and academic publications. She has sat on the advisory panel for Ofsted’s new inspection framework for English, and teaches English for an educational charity. Her research interests are aesthetics and the curriculum, and decolonising discourses in education.