ADOLESCENT DISCOURSE ON NATIONAL IDENTITY - VOICES OF CARE AND JUSTICE

In her highly publicised polemic, All Must Have Prizes (1996), Melanie Phillips launches a scathing attack upon the British educational esta blishment and various facets of policy and practice during the past th ree decades. She is especially critical of progressivism and approache s to teaching and learning supposedly predicated upon relativist princ iples (e.g. multicultural education). Our own research on primary-scho ol children's constructions of British identity (Carrington, B. & Shor t, G. (1995): What makes a person British? Children's conceptions of t heir national culture and identity, Educational Studies, 21, pp. 217-2 38) is singled-out for criticism. We begin this paper with a rejoinder to Phillips. Among other things, we take issue with her defence of an assimilationist approach to the curriculum. In the second part of the paper, we present the findings of a recently completed case-study of 22- and 13-year-olds' constructions of their national identity, which replicates the earlier work (criticised by Phillips) with 8- to 11-yea r-olds. We show that the young adolescents, in common with their count erparts in primary schools, tended to adopt a pluralist viewpoint. Onc e again, there was an almost complete dearth of comments that were rac ist or nationalistic. We conclude by briefly exploring the policy impl ications of the findings.