The Faith of the Democrat: The Association for Education in Citizenship, 1934–1944

Abstract

In this chapter, Wright considers the Association for Education in Citizenship (AEC), a pressure group that aimed, through educational means, to protect parliamentary democracy against the perceived threat of totalitarianism overseas. The AEC’s founders, Ernest Simon and Eva Hubback, were agnostics but not attached to secularist organisations. They outlined a ‘humanist’ approach to education for democratic citizenship. Nevertheless, in an organisation containing many Christians, their position was stated alongside a Christian one. Christian versions of democratic citizenship won through in the form of the 1944 Education Act and its provisions for compulsory acts of worship and religious instruction, the cultural climate of the Second World War encouraging apparently widespread support for these proposals. Wright shows that secularists, by this time organisationally depleted, failed to coordinate a major opposition campaign.