Education for Democratic Citizenship

Issues of Theory and Practice

Bernard Crick, Andrew Lockyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351941563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This important volume provides a comprehensive study of the concept of democratic citizenship (including its conditions and pre-requisites), which has an established place in higher education courses in politics, social policy, sociology and social philosophy. The contributing political philosophers and educational theorists collectively provide a critical commentary on the assumptions, principles and presuppositions associated with the idea of education for active democratic citizenship. This book presents an invaluable combination of original essays from established authors and previously published seminal articles specially revised for the volume.

1

The English Citizenship Order 1999: Context, Content and Presuppositions

Bernard Crick

Considering how much political philosophy – and in modern times how many political philosophers – have been embedded in education, it is curious how little attention university political philosophers have paid to what is taught in schools. For it is here that all the practical implications of differing concepts of freedom and authority and their varying relationships first come together. We note in passing, of course, the importance that Aristotle, Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill (even Hobbes, though coming to a perverse conclusion) attached to education, as the right schooling of the young, as the precondition for a just state – notice, but usually pass on. Perhaps one should also add the name of John Dewey, who saw a radically more democratic schooling as the essential precondition for (in his sense) a genuinely democratic society. But despite a magisterial effort at revival (Ryan, 1995), few thinkers in the United Kingdom outside schools of education see him as part of the canon of political thought.

The existence of citizenship as a subject in schools has, in the main, been driven by political events rather than political thought. The teaching of citizenship arose in high schools in the United States and paralleled the rise of Political Science in the colleges, as a response to mass immigration in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In Mexico it followed the revolution, just as in the postwar Federal Republic of Germany (indeed, in most of continental Europe) and in Japan, it was seen as an essential part of postwar reconstruction. In France it was introduced into schools after the defeat of 1870 as part of a patriotic revival, but soon degenerated into learning the constitution by heart (as could be the all-too-common nervous line of least resistance elsewhere) when faced with deeply and bitterly divided views on the true nature of La Patrie (Heater, 1990; Oliver and Heater, 1994).

However, whatever the history and context surrounding such potentially major changes, the actual form they take must everywhere contain some philosophical, or at least theoretical, presuppositions. One thinks of J.M. Keynes’ remark that the economist who boasts of being purely practical is usually parroting the views of an academic scribbler of yesterday. And one might also think of Collingwood or Oakeshott. But before coming to presuppositions, some context is needed to explain why citizenship was introduced so late to English schools.

The Context

Dr Johnson once said, while considering in didactic mode ‘the nature of fancy’, the ‘purpose of life’ and ‘why were we born?’ that the real question was ‘why were we not born before?’ Why, indeed, did it take so long for England to make citizenship a statutory subject in a National Curriculum? Only since 1986 has England had a statutory National Curriculum, and only in 2002 was citizenship added to the six compulsory subjects. It was legislated for in 1999, but schools were given two-and-a-half years to prepare – in fact longer, because in 1997 the new Labour Government announced its intention to introduce citizenship, but left its definition largely to an independent committee (the Advisory Group, which I chaired). The Advisory Group’s report came out quickly the following year as Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools (Crick Report, 1998).¹

Britain was the last country in Europe to add citizenship to the curriculum. Previously we had thought that we did not need it. Were we not the ‘Mother of Parliaments’? Had we not won the war – well, with a little help from the Americans and the Soviet Union, of course? And had not our private, independent schools produced a famous ethos of public service and leadership, albeit in empire, army, church and the higher civil service? But by 1997 it was clear that most of the products of the independent schools were going into business, not public service, and that in the common schools where about 90 per cent of our children were educated (the local authority schools, commonly called ‘state schools’), there was no consistent of effective preparation for participation in community, local and national affairs, or for leadership in more democratic contexts. And it was not unnoticed, even amid the euphoria of the leaders of New Labour at their sweeping electoral victory, that victory was won on the lowest turnout ever – and that of all age groups, turnout was lowest among the 18- to 24-year-olds, only about 44 per cent of whom claim to have voted (Park, 1999). Moreover, a lot of the non-voting was widely reported to be deliberate and pointed – ‘What’s the use?’, ‘What’s the difference?’, ‘They are all in it for what they can get’, ‘A plague on both your houses’. Politicians, pundits, programme-makers and parents became worried about the behaviour of youth, about increased petty crime, drug-taking and alcohol abuse, as well as cynicism about politics and politicians. Quite apart from these worries, some public-spirited voluntary bodies had long campaigned for schools, as part of preparation for adult life, to equip young people with the skills as well as the knowledge they needed to be effective in a democracy – indeed, to give them positive experiences of participation and responsibility.

The terms of reference given to the Advisory Group are interesting:

To provide advice on effective education for citizenship in schools – to include the nature and practices of participation in democracy; the duties, responsibilities and rights of individuals as citizens; and the values to individuals and society of community activity (Crick Report, 1998, p. 4).

Someone had been doing a little thinking. There was a lot in that tight space to unpack. The official language was by no means bland. ‘Effective education for citizenship’ presumed political action and social engineering – and why not? ‘Participation’ went beyond individualism. ‘Rights and duties’ had a fine civic, republican ring to it, somewhat modifying Quentin Skinner’s recent pessimism on that score (Skinner, 1998), even if ‘responsibility’ might only be as yet undefined moral rhetoric. ‘Community activity’ broadened the older concept of political education into citizenship education.

Back in the 1970s there had been a voluntary movement for schools, campaigning for what we then called education for political literacy. Some may suspect a mere politic play with words in moving from ‘political education’ to ‘citizenship education’: opinion surveys showed that parents favoured the idea of citizenship education, but political education would perhaps always have worried them. But there is classic political philosophy behind this shift. Did not De Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, argue that the very foundations of liberty depend on ‘corporations’ or self-governing groups intermediary between the state and the individual (Oldfield, 1990)? Edmund Burke extolled ‘the small platoon’ as a pillar of the state, and also the revival of an old term of the Scottish eighteenth-century enlightenment, ‘civil society’ (a rare example of a learned term becoming widely familiar), referring to all those groups intermediary between the individual and the state – numerous and vibrant in Western Europe, sadly lacking, diminished or destroyed in old countries formerly under Communist rule. Aristotle had argued in The Politics that if a tyrant was to be secure he must destroy all intermediary groups, because however apolitical they were, it was participation in such social groups which created mutual trust between individuals. Mutual trust was an essential precondition for the polis or citizen state, without which opposition to tyranny and misgovernment in general was futile.

The political context was that of a reforming government, anxious to convince its new voters (and the hitherto Conservative voters whose deliberate abstention was an important factor) that New Labour was more democratic than it was socialist – if people still thought that it perpetuated the democratic socialist tradition. But why then was there no Conservative attack on the Crick Report and the subsequent curriculum order? Cries of ‘indoctrination’ had been expected, however balanced the report in tone and conclusions. It was very balanced, but there was also considerable public support (less at first among overburdened and over-managed teachers) for the idea, even if partly based on a misunderstanding: that citizenship meant good citizenship – that is, good behaviour – and not also active citizenship – that is, acting together to change things or to resist change.

Tocqueville is again helpful. There are great social changes and there are contingencies, whether benign or malign. In his Souvenirs, he says that when great changes take place politicians believe that it is because they have pulled the right strings, whereas men of letters believe that they can identify general causes underlying and unfolding social forces, laws of society and of history. He says that they are both wrong, or perhaps half right. These underlying forces come to nothing if particular men do not seize the opportunity and act, but men of action can effect nothing if the time is not ripe (Tocqueville, 1948). The time was ripe: the old hierarchical orders of British society were breaking down. Both in a Thatcherite and a slightly different Blairite mode, the common man was replacing the gentleman as the preferred social image. The particular enthusiasm of the then Secretary of State for Education, David Blunkett, was crucial – perhaps taking the view that if he could no longer hope to be creating socialism, he could at least help fashion a more radically democratic society (Blunkett and Crick, 1988; Blunkett, 2001). And there was also the former Secretary of State for Education, Kenneth Baker, the architect of the National Curriculum itself, quite new to England – in force only since 1986. He had let it be known that he had favoured making citizenship a compulsory subject in ‘his’ National Curriculum, but that ‘she’ had quite simply said ‘no’. Her reasons have to be imagined, since she did not waste time in argument. In joining the Advisory Group, Lord Baker was not merely immensely supportive and useful in preventing the proposed curriculum being attacked by his former colleagues as Blairite or indoctrinatory; he was also crucial to the group’s decision to advise that citizenship must be compulsory, not just advisory. He had seen to it, at the time of the National Curriculum, that some excellent cross-curricular advisory papers were produced, including one on citizenship. But he told the group that they had all been ignored and had had very little influence at all. With such a full, crowded National Curriculum, any major new initiative must either be statutory or else it would be a faint prayer (Crick, 2002).

So the Advisory Group were unanimous in wanting citizenship made statutory in secondary schools. The history of take-up for the voluntary cross-curricular guidance papers had, indeed, been derisory. Also, the very idea of democratic citizenship must surely be a universal one. So it had to be a universal entitlement. Admittedly, one can take a horse to water and it may not drink. But unless water is provided it cannot drink at all. The civic ‘drink’ must be a universal entitlement, clearly there for all. The government accepted that. But in the way governments work, especially Tony Blair’s, it cannot be ascribed just to the enthusiasm of one departmental minister and a few allies. If any ministers had doubts that citizenship should be compulsory, three broad considerations prevailed:

1.Citizenship education in schools and FE colleges was seen as a necessary condition for the success of constitutional reform, if part of its object is gradually to create a more participative, self-sustaining and genuinely democratic society.

2.Citizenship education in schools and further education colleges is a necessary condition for a more inclusive society, or for helping to diminish exclusion from schools, cynicism, welfare-dependency, apathy, petty criminality and vandalism, and the kind of could-not-care-lessitude towards voting and public issues unhappily prevalent among young people.

3.After all, Britain is a democracy, however imperfect, and its legal citizens should know how it works, and how it could be improved if we could change our collective mentality from being subjects of the Crown to being both good and active citizens. This is all part of a liberal education, part of liberalism in the broadest sense.

The Content

The Report that led to the Order made a bold declaration:

We aim at no less than a change in the political culture of this country both nationally and locally: for people to think of themselves as active citizens, willing, able and equipped to have an influence in public life and with the critical capacities to weigh evidence before speaking and acting; to build on and to extend radically to young people the best in existing traditions of community involvement and public service, and to make them individually confident in finding new forms of involvement and action among themselves (Crick Report, 1998, 1.5).

But it came down to earth, stating three ‘practical ideals’ later developed into what Blunkett called a ‘light touch’ curriculum:

Firstly, children learning from the very beginning self-confidence and social and moral responsible behaviour both in and beyond the classroom, both towards those in authority and towards each other. … Secondly, learning about and becoming helpfully involved in the life and concerns of their communities, including learning through community involvement and service to the community. … Thirdly, pupils learning about and how to make themselves effective in public life through knowledge, skills and values – what can be called ‘political literacy’, seeking for a term that is wider than political knowledge alone (Crick Report, 1998, 2.11).

The Citizenship Order itself was ‘light touch’ in that it was, although a statutory Order, remarkably shorter and less detailed than the other National Curriculum subjects (Department for Education and Employment, 1999). The virtue of the Order was that its generality left schools and teachers with a great freedom and discretion, more so than in the other subjects. Some were dismayed, having unhappily grown used to precise directives, while others were delighted to be given some freedom and professional discretion for once. In any case, plenty of advisory materials and lesson plans began to appear, but not from the government itself (e.g. Alexander, 2001; Association for Citizenship Teaching, 2001; Citizenship Foundation, 2002; Community Service Volunteers, 2000; Potter, 2002; Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, 2002). This occurred, I think, for two reasons. Firstly, it would not be appropriate for the government to give precise prescriptions on some politically or morally sensitive matters – the detail should be at arm’s length from the state (it will be for school inspectors, local authority advisers and school governors to watch for gross bias or bad teaching). Secondly, in the very nature of citizenship (somewhat concerned with enhancing freedom, after all) there must be local discretion. It would have been paradoxical for a subject designed to encourage thought and action, action based on thought, to be too prescriptive. For instance, the Order prescribes inter alia that:

Pupils should be taught to:

(a)research a topical political, spiritual, moral, social or cultural issue, problem or event by analysing information from different sources …

(b)express, justify and defend orally and in writing a personal opinion about such issues, problems and events

(c)contribute to group and exploratory class discussions, and take part in formal debates (DfEE, 1999, p. 15).

But that is all – there is no p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction and Review
• 1. The English Citizenship Order 1999: Context, Content and Presuppositions
• 2. Citizenship Education: Reproductive and Remedial
• 3. Two Dilemmas of Citizenship Education in Pluralist Societies
• 4. Citizenship Education: Anti-political Culture and Political Education in Britain
• 5. Aims in Citizenship Education: Responsibility, Identity, Inclusion
• 6. Citizenship Education and Multiculturalism
• 7. Citizenship Education and Gender
• 8. The Political Status of Children and Young People
• 9. Community, Politics and Citizenship Education
• 10. Teaching Controversial Issues in Citizenship Education
• 11. Developing Education for Citizenship
• Index