A Royal Education?

As reported in my last blog, Hello! magazine has recently conducted a survey whose results have shown that there is great support for the Queen. In addition a report by the Daily Mail following the celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee showed that 90% of us are happy with the way the queen is ‘doing her job’ and even 77% of people are satisfied with the British monarchy as a whole. Despite these staggering and greatly pleasing (to me as an ardent monarchist) figures of support, the question must be asked, how much do we really know about the monarchy? And do we know and are we being taught enough?

I am a history student. That is, I’m a student of languages who reads history in his own time. British history is my speciality and I consider myself to have a healthy knowledge of the British royal family, past and present and of their role in our society. So why don’t I study history at university instead of deigning to read languages? The simple answer to this question is that I don’t have so much as a GCSE in history. Why? Because the high school that I attended only taught history classes (after Key Stage 3) on subjects such as the world wars, the assassination of President Kennedy and the wartime atomic bomb attack on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Of course, I don’t doubt the importance of educating young people on these periods of history but when it came to choose which subjects I wanted to continue studying, this modern history pathway didn’t incite any interest in me. Without doubt, there are many history students who like nothing better to ignore periods before the outbreak of the Great War. But surely when one constant aspect of Britain’s story that still appears in our lives today, the monarchy, there should be some teaching on the role of, at least, the incumbent monarch if not her forbears.

Paying myself the compliment that I don’t believe that we should adopt an American stance and have daily flag raising and swearing of allegiance or that we should revive the custom of having a small, framed picture of the queen hanging in our classrooms, what does concern me is the lack of knowledge about British history when so many school pupils know more about the biography of Big Brother winners than they do of Elizabeth II. If I were to ask my peers for some simple facts about, say, the Battle of Trafalgar, such as who fought in this battle, or which empire was the largest in history, the majority would struggle to find an answer. While it’s easy to act like those who can’t answer are less intelligent, it would be fairer to acknowledge that the British education system fails in teaching most pupils about the basic facts of their own history. And where this may become an issue is when, with so much support for the Queen, people are treating Her Majesty more as a celebrity than a true head of state and descendant of history.

On a recent trip abroad, I had the misfortune of watching a television programme created for BBC America and presented by our very own Cat Deely called Royally Mad. Five self-declared royalty buffs from the United States were sent on a royal-themed tour around London prior to the wedding of Prince William. What struck me the most was not that these so called mad royalists didn’t seem to have the faintest idea of the history surrounding the monarchy - rather they were more interested in the more celebrity-style aspects of the royal family – or that they were obviously much more interested in Prince William and Kate Middleton than they were in the Queen. Rather the most strikingly painful part of watching this programme was that I have noticed these same American attitudes in Brits, who really ought to know better.

Not everyone needs to know the genealogy of more obscure royals like Princess Michael of Kent nor do they need to understand the ins and outs of the Victorian social calendar but what should be taught is why the husband of the queen at present is not called king, why symbols representing the queen show the letters E.R. and, most importantly, what the Queen, as well as The Duke of Edinburgh and The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the future of the monarchy do for Britain and the Commonwealth and for us as a nation and as a people.