To think all schools should teach children the old traditional hymns

[Staringintothevoid616]

Just switching between channels and Songs of Praise came on. It was a run down of the most popular school hymns.complete with recorders It brought back many memories and how important communal singing is. It doesn’t matter what your religion is, everyone should know the most popular hymns as a way of uniting society.

As an atheist brought up in the days when we did sing hymns at school, I love some of the old hymn tunes, and one of my 'music for working' playlists on my Spotify is hymns - Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken, Thine Be the Glory, Lord of All Hopefulness etc.
I love communal singing, and am a member of a choir.
BUT I think it's a daft idea to try and reintroduce a shared knowledge of hymns as a UK cultural thing. The majority of the UK population are no longer regular church-goers (and an even smaller proportion go to churches where they sing traditional hymns with a decent-sized congregation and an organist). That ship has sailed.
Get the kids singing together with songs they know, whatever that is. And my dream is to have really well-funded music teaching in schools accessible to all, including playing an instrument and classical music not being seen as elitist or inaccessible. But I know what school budgets are nowadays...

I've explained the question about your user name in detail twice now. No gotcha. Just a polite and relevant question.

My favourite hymn at primary school was "when I needed a neighbour". It seems more apt than ever for our current times, but sadly, as a society, we don't seem to have absorbed the values that we were all singing about back in the 70s and 80s.

More recently, the most moving thing I remember my dd ever singing at primary school was Refuge by Howard Goodall. Not a hymn but I would certainly be happy for all children to be taught that song. It speaks of a compassion that we seem to have long since forgotten.

A very small sector of Christian society may be. Also built on the bones of the judged and the harmed.

the Minstrel Boy
Lavenders Blue
sundry sea chanties too many to list
Soldier won't you marry me?
Speed Bonny Boat
Blow the wind southerly
The Trout
Follow the noble hare
Summer is Icumen in
Thomas the Rhymer
All around my Hat
The Oggy Man

and that's just off the top of my head

Oh, I thought this was a thread about singing hymns because they are nice tunes and it's fun and good for mental health to sing together. Just read the posts about 'society being fragmented because we don't share the same culture'. Ah. Whole different agenda. 🙁

But anyone who's nostalgic for kids school assemblies of the 1980s or so, do check out Primary School Bangers on YouTube.

I dont agree that we are a culturally Christian country anymore. Only a tiny proportion regularly attend church. The christian church already has a disproportionate amount of influence in UK society (ridiculous how many cofe primary schools there when so few are practising christians) we dont need any more of it in our schools, we need less if anything.
There are plenty of nice childrens folk songs and nursery rhymes that can promote communal singing without dragging hymns back in.

Is it?

Why?

I find it sort of funny that some posters are saying "How will children learn the true reason for Christmas if it's not taught in school/they sing religious songs about it?".

Simple, the way American children learn about the meanings of religious holidays; their parents teach them in the home by their own holiday traditions and stories.

It's also a slur apparently.

Means loser, unworthy, incapable.

616 - Slang Meaning and Examples - FastSlang

The dangers of using random numbers :-)

Clearly not 22 August 1642.

Who is to say that Slade's Merry Christmas won't last for centuries?

Traditions last for centuries, and then fade. Traditional songs in 1600 no longer survive. Many will have faded by 1800. Likewise songs from 1800 will have already have faded by 2000.

Culture doesn't stand still. Even what we consider traditional is subject to taste - that why some traditional songs will survive for longer than others.

Traditional songs are merely popular old songs for the present.

yup. Like Dickens was originally serialised in magazines. "The classics" are simply the ones that have survived the sieve of time and popular opinion.

I’m perfectly well aware it’s not “the English National Anthem”. If you look at my post I said it was “the” National Anthem, which is what it’s called by nigh on everyone in the U.K. including the Royal Family website and in announcements at the London Oympics. I have no idea what your actual point was here.

The Protestant Christians of the 1600s regarded themselves as traditional.

They also frowned on any kind of music.

I have an opposition to anything that I think is destructive to society.

I think OP is suffering from toxic nostalgia, and is wearing rose tinted spectacles which are laser focused on The Good Old Days. Whenever those were.

Me, I prefer to look forward and do my best to make things better in the now.

I’m not sure they thought of themselves as “traditional” 😀

So when are you talking about it?

Well, that’s nice dear, but you’re incorrect . Only a fool looks forward without understanding the very thing that shaped them.

And this is the thing.

Most of these hymns are not part of British history and traditions like, for example, the story of Arthur and the Sword in the Stone. Those traditions have been part of our culture for centuries.

Those hymns that you are invoking probably represent around a hundred years of history: mid 19th to mid 20th century.

When I was teaching in the 1980s (that's 40+ years ago) we had given up on those Victorian hymns in favour of some slightly more spiritual, less CofE songs. How many people under 50 would even know most of them unless they were actually a practising Christian? Far less part of British culture than many an older person might think.

And how dismissive of actual Christianity is it to regard the sacred songs as a bit of a societal sticking plaster where the actual meaning is pretty much irrelevant?

They thought of themselves as getting back to the basics that society had forgotten in its decadence.

There are definitely parallels between today and the puritans.

I do understand where the OP is coming from, and I agree that singing hymns was generally uplifting (not always) and a great start to the school day, but I also appreciate that many of the old hymn lyrics are totally inappropriate. So, I think the answer is for someone to re-write the lyrics to the old tunes that leave out the reference to God but keeping them still recognisable as the same songs and maybe having themes of love, understanding, giving thanks etc:

All things bright and beautiful,
all creatures great and small,
all things wise and wonderful,
the Lord God made them all.

becomes:

All things bright and beautiful,
all creatures great and small,
all things wise and wonderful,
let's celebrate them all.

etc.

I'm not a lyricist but I'm sure someone could do some brilliant amended lyrics that everyone could enjoy and those of us who loved the old hymns would equally love the new ones.

That's a whole new can of worms.

Come on then, Start a list.

Can we skip defining what "destructive to society" means ? I think the definition might come from the list.

I'm an atheist who grew up singing hymns every day at school. For me, singing a hymn is not really an act of worship, it's just singing.

I'm quite wary of giving kids the idea that there's some kind of deep and meaningful or supernatural significance to singing words about God, so no one should do that unless they believe with a capital B.

I prefer the idea of gradual dilution and hymns becoming gradually seen as less religious, rather than removing hymns or anything with even a hint of religion or spirituality or ritual from schools.

I also wonder if community rituals like singing, and including a few hymns and songs with spiritual and ethical messages from a variety of sources, may actually inoculate people a bit against more extreme forms of religion, rather than making them more likely to fall into them. Not by making them hate spirituality but by just by providing the sort of minimal level of community ritual that's more than enough for most people.

Over the years I've come to the conclusion that religion isn't going anywhere, so possibly broad but very shallow participation in the most benign rituals from a variety of religions may end up being better for humanity than no religion for most and deep religious fervour from some.

So, for me it's not about prioritising hymns, it's just about not excluding them or trying for some kind of secular purity, because I don't think that will work, long term. I'd rather just treat them as songs that came from a religion, but anyone can sing them and enjoy the tunes, think about the ideas and so on, without that constituting some kind of declaration of belief. I think that would be a more positive thing for society long-term.