Controversial statues have an educational purpose in the UK

The argument

There is no doubt that the UK's colonial and Imperial success was grounded in racism. The question this argument raises is what follows from that — and the answer it gives is that the statues of some of the men responsible are more useful standing than destroyed, because we can learn from them. The starting point is a caution about method rather than about aims. Social justice campaigns can often be ineffective, and can sometimes hinder their own cause in unintended ways. The protests are credited with a real achievement: they have brought needed light onto the acts of the people represented by the statues. But the proposed remedy may work against that achievement. Removing the statues may remove the prompt that made the conversation happen, and with it the reminder of the history behind them. Education is the value at stake. Understanding how and why society must make the changes necessary for a better future depends on knowing what is being changed from, and that knowledge is harder to keep alive once its physical reminders are gone. The people commemorated are a part of the history of the UK, good or bad, and a history edited down to its creditable parts is a poorer guide to the present than one left intact. A statue also carries information beyond the person it depicts. It records what an earlier society chose to honour and why — the values and perspectives of the people responsible for the statue, at the time it was put up. That is historical context of a kind that cannot be reconstructed after the fact, and it is an extremely important part of history precisely because it is uncomfortable. Hence the call for caution. Statues can be learned from, and what is learned from them is what keeps a society from repeating the history they document.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Statues are not an educational tool, but rather a commemoration. History is learned through things like museums, books, and other educational resources that are specifically intended to educate rather than commemorate.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Learning from a figure does not require honouring them in bronze: the premise treats the statue as the vehicle of the lesson when it is the record — archives, museums, curricula — that carries the history. [Rejecting P2] Removal does not erase a reminder. A statue taken down becomes part of the history of its own removal, often more discussed than it ever was while standing, and many people learned who Colston was precisely because the statue came down. [Rejecting P3] A monument records what its commissioners wanted celebrated rather than the values of an era as a whole — those it excluded had no part in raising it — and it carries no counter-perspective, which is what learning from a period requires.