British values and virtues: schooling in Christianity and character?

This article examines the antecedents of the ‘British Values’ (democracy, rule of law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and the rights of all men and women to live free from persecution) which it is incumbent upon British schools to teach. But it also seeks to move the debate forward by pointing to the ‘British Virtues’ without which it is impossible to live by ‘British Values’. The argument advanced here is that the inculcation of virtues (moral habits and dispositions underpinning good character) as well as values (beliefs and ideals) is foundational in schooling for life in a liberal democracy. On the view that schools are both ‘by’ and ‘for’ society (being the products of the society they seek to serve) the article problematises attempts to conceive of schooling in general, and character education in particular, in exclusively post-Christian terms. Although increasingly secular, as British culture is not quite the palimpsest that easily permits a millennium of Christian social and legal ‘writing’ to be ‘over-written’, some of its central concepts are drawn upon in the recommendations made here for the curriculum and governance of schools.