School "Culture Day' - why didn't school see this coming?

[mids2019]

https://www.joe.co.uk/news/school-issues-statement-after-sending-girl-home-for-wearing-union-jack-dress-496690?fbclid=IwY2xjawLkEB9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHmXD4szLMfsqNubbE12kCn_Noe5jb2VGlNFVU0_IUIevHxzByCQ-5GXFN8F8_aem_P-q7I_yFCq82TY-Qr8mGdw

A local school state d a huge debate by sending a girl home on school culture day for wearing a union Jack dress. The question is why the school should have naively held an event which actually least a to more division than unity?

My daughter (white British) attended a similar event, for which she paid a pound, and dressed in jeans and t shirt. I asked how she had decided upon the attire and she stated 'well I don't have a culture'. I then had to explain that she did have a culture and even the jeans and t shirt were a product of fashion changes in western liberal society. We had a discussion about all the great products of white British culture, the music,science, results of the industrial revolution, shared experience in great wars, monarchy etc.

There is a white British culture but going into detail about this obviously brings into focus cultural divide and opens up divisive areas whether white British culture benefited from colonialism and past oppression.

Of course culture day probably was meant to highlight minority cultures and act to promote dress etc. from ethnic minorities as a welcoming inclusive gesture but by allowing all pupils to think about their culture we have to define 'white British' culture and by defining 'white British' culture schools have inadvertently started a discussion they didn't intend.

I hate culture day in our school - it's so geared to cause problems and offence.
Flags / flag colours have been banned (some kids turned up with Palestinian flags one year..)
Football shirts - banned.
Jeans / t shirt - banned.

If you don't have a culture (ie are from England) you have to come in school uniform... so utterly singled out!

We are white British but always go down the Irish heritage route... for some reason it's ok to be Irish, Scottish, Welsh but not English or British.

Indeed. Secondary school inner Glasgow here & any Union Jack or Ulster or Irish flags or football tops would not be permitted (probably why we don't have a culture day). We still haveca chunk of pupils involved in the Orange Order & in marching season.

In the curriculum we have plenty anti-sectarian resources and lots of celebration of Scottish culture- country dancing/ Burns competitions/ Scots language/ Scots literature & Media/kids write in Scots. It's alive.

I wonder why the apology didn't reference any of the other kids who were apparently sent home too?

I’m not doubting you, but that’s terrible if true. You mean that dressing in Scottish themes is positively encouraged but someone who dressed in British themes would be sent home?

If the worry is sectarianism then surely both or neither has to be the rule.

I really do object to the way the extreme Lefty pps here have introduced quite gratuitously Tommy Robinson to the argument. That name was not in any of the reports or statements by the school or Parents that I have seen.

One way the school was spiteful by punishing her by keeping the girl in isolation. It would have been kinder to have allowed her to go home and change. But the Left don't do kindness, Stalin and Lenin saw it as weakness.

people are ‘ignoring’ the Steven Yatley /Tommy r connections because it is irrelevant. Luckily we live in a country where children aren’t punished for their parent’s political stance. And the dress is what it is - fine, regardless of the parents’ views. This kind of thing plays right into the far rights hands. And also we may feel uncomfortable talking about issues to do with race and integration but it isn’t illegal and people are allowed to feel put out if they feel that British culture is being sidelined - in fact it’s this feeling and the suppression of it that leads people towards Reform.

The kid dressed as a farmer made me laugh out loud although I’m not sure why! Just various images in my mind of what “dressing like a farmer” actually constitutes 🤣

I was born and grew up after WWII in Scotland. I now live in England. My ethnicity is Scots, English, Irish and a wee bit of Scandinavian. In the 1950s there was a feeling of some pride that the British had had no small part in defeating the Nazis. My dad was one of many who risked his life, and damaged his health to protect the country he loved. I’m not exactly proud to be British, however I recognise I am fortunate that I was born here.

I refuse to be embarrassed about the behaviour of the British centuries ago. Few countries would stand up to past scrutiny, and just look at how women and girls are being treated in some places today!

The school should be embarrassed, of course the ethnic British children should have the opportunity to celebrate their culture just as much as those from ethnic minorities, who after all, have made the choice to make the UK their home. Inclusivity means everyone.

A union jack dress isn't traditional British costume

But then what is? My ancestors are from places as exotic as Manchester on one side and Stoke on Trent on the other. What would I come as, a cup of tea with an Eccles cake?

I've just seen the actual leaflet the school sent out. It says that the day is about celebrating the rich cultural diversity at the school. Wear your traditional cultural dress. Your attire must reflect your nationality or family heritage'

So slightly confusing whether its just traditional dress or wider. but what the girl wore would definitely fit the last sentence.

I despair, Britain does have a culture, we have a very rich history, I wish people would stop putting it down and bigging up other cultures.

My sons secondary does that also he's white British he just wears he's uniform now as he said we can't wear football tops or jeans and a tee so does uniform instead he's yr 9 now

No? If the school had reason to believe that this child was being made a political pawn It would certainly help to explain why the school made the decision it did.

I bet the family has form for turning school events into political rallies.

I think it’s a huge mistake by this school and clearly most people agree.

We are effacing traditional British values both good and bad in the name of a revisionist retake of British history which has become reduced to “Britain=bad”. My daughter this year studied the British empire (year 9) entirely from the viewpoint of the colonised peoples which was really interesting. But it inevitably focused on dramatic and traumatic stories of terrible suffering - without any context (for example, might some of these colonised peoples have suffered in their own localised contexts anyway?). And then there was a one-liner about the benefits of imperialism (oh we built a few roads and gave them administrative and military improvements). There was absolutely no attempt to set the British context either - the struggles of the working and agricultural classes, of women in general. Just all things British must have been hypocritical, oppressive, greedy and non-Christian and no nuance that the ruling classes did awful things to their own people too so not surprising when they met people overseas they decided they were inferior and set about dominating them in the worst ways imaginable.

I do think it is a shame that we are throwing the baby out with the bath water. My DD’s school is majority non-white British and they are teaching her terrible shame of her own heritage - and teaching her peers to be utterly contemptuous of many things that I think we should value about British culture by ignoring or minimising the important things that are non entertaining for a modern generation of kids: whilst we have a lot of troubling history to confront, we can also be proud of our parliamentary democracy and separation of church, judiciary and state; our rich culture in terms of language, art and scientific discovery.

Recently my dd was tasked with a summer term competition writing a poem about women or a women at school and it was “judged” by the teacher . All the best scores went to girls who could produce an authentic ethnic “voice”. It was the same in y7 and y8. One girl actually pretended to speak a foreign language to try and up her non-British street cred (thank you Google translate).

My dd is as british as they come - her heritage is from a strong working-class and methodist mining background where the voice of women was very loud;her great-great-gran was a lay preacher and a midwife in the 19th century for example. But that was deemed unexciting in her poetry. Shame on the teacher for not knowing her history because it is those strong women who helped to raise a generation to carry us through two world wars, who insisted on having the vote, who made sure their young girls could read and write and hold down a job (DD’s great-gran was a milliner and a lay preacher).

If culture day means “non British culture day” it should be renamed.

All these dress up days can be fun but also quite non-inclusive as not everyone has parents who are able to or have the time to buy or make something to wear and it really is just homework for parents. At least she joined in, lots of kids might not have been able to.

Its the school that did this.

Their leaflet literally said wear something that reflects your nationality and she did.
Then they put her in isolation.

The school turned this into a political issue by doing that.

Schools banning representations of Britishness on a culture day is just ridiculously tone deaf. If they think there is likely to be a problem with politicisation or anti-inclusive messages based on the make up of their school community, they should be thinking of more appropriate ways to celebrate diversity.

And ultimately, when has a dress-up day of any kind ever been a useful way of marking anything at school?

Culture is not politics. The school didn't make it political, the speech did. And i bet it's not the first time.

Ok so it was ten years ago and I was doing support work for literacy with a teenage girl doing a college based nursery assistant training course. Her course required the students to research and write up two cultural events they might use as a basis for activities with the nursery children.My student was white British. She did one about Diwali and one about a traditional British wedding. Her tutor refused to accept the work about the wedding saying it wasn’t about a cultural event. I was working off site or I would have queried this with the tutor. This is the sort of thing which feeds right into the narrative of parties like Reform.

It's true. Some countries that are the most critical of other nationalities treated their own women and girls appallingly in the recent past.

I fail to understand why the school acted in the way it did. It was a culture day in an English school. England, where l live, is part of the UK. Even today, the vast majority of people who live in England are white British. Why should we be made to feel ashamed of this? I liked the dress this girl was wearing and thought it a clever idea to celebrate one aspect of Britishness. Why is it that the only times we are allowed to fly our flag are for royal events or international football matches? In the USA, there are so many stars and stripes flags being flown that you wonder if people are in danger of forgetting where they are. They are at least allowed to be proud of being American.
When I was at primary school, fifty plus years ago, we were taught to be proud of British achievements in many, many different areas. For a small island nation just off the coast of mainland Europe, our achievements throughout history have been astonishing and helped to shape the modern world. We learnt about these achievements and the heroes of British history enthusiastically. We are now told that we should be ashamed of our history and how it exploited others. I was always very proud of the fact that the UK, in the form of William Wilberforce, was the first country in the world to abolish the slave trade. These days, we are told that we should apologise for our slave owning ancestors' sins. I am not apologising because no one alive today in this country had anything to do with the slave trade. In any case, history is far more nuanced than goodies versus baddies. People in African countries sold their own people to be slaves, the slave traders often used their money to help build cities and fund charities. Also, the vast majority of our ancestors were not the slave trading wealthy land owners but were oppressed themselves. Many of my ancestors were coal miners. They would have been living in conditions at a subsistence level in the time of slavery; hardly better than the slaves.
When thinking back to this school and it's culture day, then, they should be celebrating all cultures in the school but, particularly in a British school, they should be celebrating all the British actors in history that have shaped our nation and, if someone wants to dress up in the symbols of our flag, they should be allowed to express their pride in this way. The teachers at this school should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

You don't live here, so you don't understand it. No Irish, Ulster or Union Jack flags are allowed due to connections with Sectarianism. Yes, that's tough if you identify with any of these, but in a school setting it could potentially be dangerous.

We don't have a culture day in my school deep in the East End, but my DS.school did in a different area. Only Scottish flags or those from a country of heritage (and yes he has Irish & English heritage from grand-parents , but understands that's not allowed). His was lovely with loads of kilts & lots of other national dress.

@GeneralPeter - it’s the link between the Union Jack/UK and Irish Protestant nationalism. Wearing a Union Jack (or an English football top) “outs” you as a catholic hating proddy to some folk. But there is an element of truth in it to be fair. My DH never wears his team’s football top nor allowed DC to wear one because of the sectarianism associated with it. Same reason we can’t have the big open top bus celebration tours at the end of the season. Bloody ridiculous.

Yes, I could slightly understand it in certain parts of NI but this was Warwickshire.