In February 2022, and in response to the experience of an increasingly fraught discourse in the public spaces (actual and virtual) the Department for Education in England issued guidance on ensuring political impartiality. In his introduction to the Guidance the, then Secretary of State, observed that ‘Legal duties on political impartiality ultimately help schools command the confidence of our whole diverse and multi-opinioned society’. The Guidance then proceeds to suggest that while a teacher might legitimately encourage pupils to applaud the National Health Service they could not legitimately suggest to the same pupils that they might question the levels of funding and by extension the commitment of the Government. The grounds for such a distinction would appear to be that the latter displayed political bias but the former didn’t! The intervention, in its entirety, might be considered ill-conceived from an Arendtian perspective, given its deliberate intent to manipulate the boundaries of political discourse in the classroom. And, as I have argued elsewhere the impulse of governments and other political agencies to use schools as sites for the establishment of political preferences is as injurious as it is ubiquitous to the objects of good education. However, once the intervention is present what are we to make of it both educationally and philosophically. In this paper I will attempt to illustrate why the intervention was ill-conceived from the outset on not only Arendtian grounds but also on the basis of conceptual mis-steps (the injunction to foreground the celebratory is not apolitical in the way in which the advice seems to suggest) In doing so I will suggest that linguistic and para-linguistic moves such as clapping are no less performative than explicit questioning of resource allocation and because they are implicit potentially more harmful to the cause of education. Moreover, I will illustrate that the elision of the distinctions (evident in the advice) between the irrational, non-rational and rational leads not to more desirable educational and social outcomes but to undermining a key morally educative imperative – judgment.

Conroy, J.(2020) Caught in the Middle: Arendt, childhood and Responsibility, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 54:1, 23-42. Taylor, D. (2002) Hannah Arendt on Judgment: Thinking for Politics, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 10:2, 151-169. The Department for Education (2022) Political Impartiality in Schools https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/political-impartiality-in-schools, downloaded 18th March 2023. The Department for Education (2022) Extra Support to Safeguard Political Impartiality in schools https://www.gov.uk/government/news/extra-support-to-safeguard-political-impartiality-in-schools