The food and parks are all well and good, but remind me why you're in England?

Ah yes, the aforementioned professional reasons for spending this year in England.  What is it that a(n) historian does on a daily basis, anyway?  Well, it depends on the day, but I'll describe today's activities to give you some sense of how I'm going to be spending the majority of my waking hours in the next ten months.

First, a bit of historical background (you'll be seeing a lot of this on the blog, I'm afraid).  The Education Act of 1944 (sometimes known as the Butler Act) established a tripartite system of secondary education in England.  You don't need to know what "tripartite system of secondary education" means, but if you're curious, the Wikipedia page I've linked to provides the details.  More importantly for my project (and therefore this blog post), the Butler Act also mandated religious education in schools supported by taxpayer funds.  To be specific, the act requires that "religious instruction [...] shall be given in every county school and in every voluntary school."

So, how do you get from the Butler Act to me spending my day at the London Metropolitan Archives?  Well, as you've probably heard by now, one of the topics I'm exploring in my dissertation is the history of religious education in state-supported schools in England after the Second World War.  England (like much of Europe) is typically understood as far more secular than the United States, but in the area of religion in the schools, the links between church and state in Britain are taken for granted in a way unheard of in the United States.  While religion has largely been banished from American public schools, it is, by law, required in English schools that receive funding support from the state.  So one of the big questions I'm exploring in my dissertation is how Christianity continued to be inculcated in English students, even while few of them went to church on Sundays and even fewer of them endured the traditional form of Christian socialization: Sunday school.

As it turns out, religious education (RE) is one of the few topics for which there is (and has never been) a national curriculum.  In other words, each local education authority (Americans, think: school board) determined on its own what RE would look like in its schools: what teacher qualifications to require, what students would learn about religion, and the like.  So if you're interested in the history of RE in postwar England, you have to look at what was occurring in individual local education authorities.

And that (with only four paragraphs of prelude!) is what I was doing today at the London Metropolitan Archives.  The main archives for the City of London and its surrounding (and ever-increasing) metropolis (see Becca's recent post for an overview of "What is London?"), the LMA holds the records of the Inner London Education Authority, which, from 1965 to 1990, was responsible for education in Inner London from 1965 to 1990 (before 1965, the London County Council held that responsibility; after 1990, each individual borough took over the administration of education within that borough).  Within the ILEA, the Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education (SACRE) was, you guessed it, responsible for the provision of religious education.

So I spent today (and will spend many more days) trawling through the records of the Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education of the Inner London Education Authority, trying to find the evidence that will help me answer a few key questions:

- How did religious education in London change in the decades after the Second World War?
- What forces were responsible for those changes?
- How should we understand those changes within the broader history of religion in twentieth-century Europe, which is typically understood as a history of crises and decline?

Today was a meaty day, as archival days go: the SACRE minutes.  Virtually every page of those minutes could turn out to be significant for my dissertation, so I had to pay close attention.  Or I would have had to pay close attention if I were actually taking notes.  Instead I decided (since virtually every page of those minutes could turn out to be significant for my dissertation) to photograph almost every page I looked at today.  Different historians take different approaches to taking photographs in the archives.  When it comes to sources (like so many other things!), I'm something of a completist: if there's any chance I'll find it useful, I'm making a record of it.  So I basically spent six hours today photographing as many documents as possible.

Even while racing through the files, though, I still took the time to skim through the documents for particularly juicy bits of information.  Today's haul drove home for me a key point about historical scholarship: any number of stories could be told using the evidence from a given set of sources.  I'm expecting to use these sources to tell a story about how the growing presence of religious minorities in London after the Second World War forced members of the Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education to adopt a more pluralist model of religious education.  But you could just as easily use these sources write a history of local government or a history of the relations between the Church of England, the Free Churches, and the Roman Catholic Church.  The basic point here is that historical sources do not speak for themselves.  They're the detritus of human existence and tell no story on their own.  It is only when historians come along and try to make sense of them that they seem to cohere into an intelligible narrative.

And that is a daunting task.  Some time next summer, I'm going to start to systematically work my way through what will by then amount to thousands of photographs of sources.  Some of them as seemingly banal as the one on the left asking the catering manager to bill a lunch to the proper budgeting code.  And others as telling as the letter I found last summer in which a Jewish woman complained to the London County Council that the school that employed her was prohibiting her from teaching religious education on the grounds of her religion.  It's that kind of source that can be more revealing that dozens of policy papers or committee minutes.  But you don't realize the significance of sources like that until you've immersed yourself in the documents and read each of them carefully.

For those of you who followed the hellish-ness that was my preparation for my preliminary exams last fall, I'd point out that what I'm doing now is virtually the exact opposite of what I did then.  In preparing for my prelims, I raced through 300 books, reading the introduction and conclusion carefully and, in some cases, doing little more than glancing at the body of each book.  The whole point was to grasp as quickly as possible what each historian was trying to say.  Here, I need to take my time with the sources.  They might be trying to tell me something, but it's ultimately up to me to put all the pieces together.  But for now, I'm just trying to find all the pieces.