Remembrance and ritual in English schools

Abstract

This article explores war remembrance and ritual in English schools. The Remembrance in Schools project (2013–2020) investigated remembrance practices in schools in England through questionnaires, interviews and observations. Schools are unique as sites of remembrance because children constitute the majority of participants in rituals. School-based rituals of remembrance might potentially reproduce dominant discourses of war-normalisation that conflate military values and nationalism with morally ‘good’ values and an imagined community of the nation. They also provide a contested, ambivalent space in which ambiguities of practice and thinking may encourage the emergence, in small ways, of counter-narratives about war and its remembrance.