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ambitious_wenchSunday Herald - 09 January 2005
Teach your children morals … send them to ‘knight school’
Class field trips to include lessons on old-style chivalry
By Alan Crawford, Special Correspondent
CHILDREN struggling to steer a path through today’s moral maze are being urged to forget Britney, bypass Big Brother, and model their lives on the mediaeval code of chivalry practised by knights of old.
From this spring, school-children who take day trips to some of the country’s finest castles are to be offered “knight school” classes which feed into the citizenship lessons now taught in the five-to-14 curriculum, educating young people about how to participate in society responsibly.
Under the tutelage of a fully fledged “knight”, Andrew de Moray, children from primaries four to seven will be taught to appreciate the values of loyalty, honesty and courage.
The children swear an oath of allegiance to the chivalric code and are then encouraged to write an essay or short story based on what they have learned. It is hoped that they will then tell their friends of their new-found morals.
The programme has so far been piloted at Edinburgh and Stirling castles and is to be rolled out to Bothwell Castle, near Glasgow, and Urquhart Castle on Loch Ness.
The courses have been developed for Historic Scotland by Ian Deveney, aka Andrew de Moray (a contemporary of William Wallace), whose Battle Scar Entertainment group is involved in recreating scenes from the mediaeval and Jacobite periods for corporate entertainment as well as educational purposes.
Calum Price, Historic Scotland’s education officer at Edinburgh Castle, said the classes teach children about more than just cleaving and codpieces.
“Ian brings in things that have been values over centuries: things like loyalty, courage and morality. He gets them to write a little story which brings out what these issues mean for them. So far the feedback from the schools has been really positive. Teachers were delighted because it covered so many parts of the curriculum for them.”
Deveney, who describes the 90-minute classes as “quite hands-on”, has piloted the course with the Edinburgh-based Royal Blind School as well as with able-bodied pupils.
He explained: “We put them through the programme of what a knight would have to go through. We try to teach the children the social structure of mediaeval times. When someone came along and wanted to be a knight, they would start as a page. They would then be responsible to the knight – carry and fetch, clean the chainmail and feed, water and muck out the horse.
“I’m dressed as a fully-fledged mediaeval knight and they’re dressed as pages. I take them on a tour of the castle and explain that, then we go up into a room where we can talk to the children more about the knight and the code of chivalry.
“We try to teach them about bravery, honesty and loyalty and try to get a spark of imagination and see if they have ever been loyal, honest, or dishonest, and try and bring back the old code of long ago.”
The next step is to make a helmet, the importance of which as part of their armour is emphasised to the children. They are then elevated to squires, a stage beyond which many prospective knights of old did not progress, since they could not afford armour.
Pupils of knight school, however, have the opportunity to advance still further by learning the art of jousting. They do this on foot, just as knights of yesteryear did before they advanced to mounted combat. Armed with their homemade helmets, they “charge across with their lance and try to hit a target”. They then perform the same feat mounted on a wooden horse with wheels.
“When they complete knight school we get them to swear an oath which a knight would have to swear,” Deveney added.
“Then, to finish off the programme, I need a short story telling me how they have been brave, honest or loyal. They post them off and I send them back a parchment letter saying, ‘Great, I can see you are being brave and courageous, now you can fight the good fight and teach everyone you know about loyalty and history’, and I declare them worthy of being a knight.”
The classes feed in to school units on “people in the past”, which includes the Scottish wars of independence and a module called knights and castles. Citizenship themes run throughout, Deveney said.
“A lot of children don’t have these values any more, with computer games in their rooms. In the olden days, people had these values throughout the world, they had comradeship and that’s being lost as the older generation passes on. I’m just trying to bring it back and give them some values.”
However, Sir Bernard Crick, emeritus professor of Birkbeck College, London, who chaired a committee tasked with advising the Labour government on citizenship lessons, was less impressed with knight school, arguing that it seemed more like moral education than his concept of citizenship.
“Who could be against loyalty, honesty and courage? But the main thrust of the citizenship advice for Scottish schools is to encourage active citizenship by discussing issues and problems, and to give kids not just the skills in writing but the oral skills so they can present arguments and issues in a reasonable, informed and responsible manner.”
He said that it was a “very big jump” to transpose mediaeval values to the modern world.
“The mediaeval idea of loyalty to the clan chief or feudal overlord, that’s a thoroughly regressive thing.
“I can’t see how meeting a knight and talking about feudal codes of honour would contribute to political literacy in the modern world.”
Copyright © 2005 smg sunday newspapers ltd. no.176088
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Teach your children morals … send them to ‘knight school’
Class field trips to include lessons on old-style chivalry
By Alan Crawford, Special Correspondent
CHILDREN struggling to steer a path through today’s moral maze are being urged to forget Britney, bypass Big Brother, and model their lives on the mediaeval code of chivalry practised by knights of old.
From this spring, school-children who take day trips to some of the country’s finest castles are to be offered “knight school” classes which feed into the citizenship lessons now taught in the five-to-14 curriculum, educating young people about how to participate in society responsibly.
Under the tutelage of a fully fledged “knight”, Andrew de Moray, children from primaries four to seven will be taught to appreciate the values of loyalty, honesty and courage.
The children swear an oath of allegiance to the chivalric code and are then encouraged to write an essay or short story based on what they have learned. It is hoped that they will then tell their friends of their new-found morals.
The programme has so far been piloted at Edinburgh and Stirling castles and is to be rolled out to Bothwell Castle, near Glasgow, and Urquhart Castle on Loch Ness.
The courses have been developed for Historic Scotland by Ian Deveney, aka Andrew de Moray (a contemporary of William Wallace), whose Battle Scar Entertainment group is involved in recreating scenes from the mediaeval and Jacobite periods for corporate entertainment as well as educational purposes.
Calum Price, Historic Scotland’s education officer at Edinburgh Castle, said the classes teach children about more than just cleaving and codpieces.
“Ian brings in things that have been values over centuries: things like loyalty, courage and morality. He gets them to write a little story which brings out what these issues mean for them. So far the feedback from the schools has been really positive. Teachers were delighted because it covered so many parts of the curriculum for them.”
Deveney, who describes the 90-minute classes as “quite hands-on”, has piloted the course with the Edinburgh-based Royal Blind School as well as with able-bodied pupils.
He explained: “We put them through the programme of what a knight would have to go through. We try to teach the children the social structure of mediaeval times. When someone came along and wanted to be a knight, they would start as a page. They would then be responsible to the knight – carry and fetch, clean the chainmail and feed, water and muck out the horse.
“I’m dressed as a fully-fledged mediaeval knight and they’re dressed as pages. I take them on a tour of the castle and explain that, then we go up into a room where we can talk to the children more about the knight and the code of chivalry.
“We try to teach them about bravery, honesty and loyalty and try to get a spark of imagination and see if they have ever been loyal, honest, or dishonest, and try and bring back the old code of long ago.”
The next step is to make a helmet, the importance of which as part of their armour is emphasised to the children. They are then elevated to squires, a stage beyond which many prospective knights of old did not progress, since they could not afford armour.
Pupils of knight school, however, have the opportunity to advance still further by learning the art of jousting. They do this on foot, just as knights of yesteryear did before they advanced to mounted combat. Armed with their homemade helmets, they “charge across with their lance and try to hit a target”. They then perform the same feat mounted on a wooden horse with wheels.
“When they complete knight school we get them to swear an oath which a knight would have to swear,” Deveney added.
“Then, to finish off the programme, I need a short story telling me how they have been brave, honest or loyal. They post them off and I send them back a parchment letter saying, ‘Great, I can see you are being brave and courageous, now you can fight the good fight and teach everyone you know about loyalty and history’, and I declare them worthy of being a knight.”
The classes feed in to school units on “people in the past”, which includes the Scottish wars of independence and a module called knights and castles. Citizenship themes run throughout, Deveney said.
“A lot of children don’t have these values any more, with computer games in their rooms. In the olden days, people had these values throughout the world, they had comradeship and that’s being lost as the older generation passes on. I’m just trying to bring it back and give them some values.”
However, Sir Bernard Crick, emeritus professor of Birkbeck College, London, who chaired a committee tasked with advising the Labour government on citizenship lessons, was less impressed with knight school, arguing that it seemed more like moral education than his concept of citizenship.
“Who could be against loyalty, honesty and courage? But the main thrust of the citizenship advice for Scottish schools is to encourage active citizenship by discussing issues and problems, and to give kids not just the skills in writing but the oral skills so they can present arguments and issues in a reasonable, informed and responsible manner.”
He said that it was a “very big jump” to transpose mediaeval values to the modern world.
“The mediaeval idea of loyalty to the clan chief or feudal overlord, that’s a thoroughly regressive thing.
“I can’t see how meeting a knight and talking about feudal codes of honour would contribute to political literacy in the modern world.”
Copyright © 2005 smg sunday newspapers ltd. no.176088
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Date: 2005-01-10 07:23 pm (UTC)