Remembrance and ritual in English schools

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.