Questioning Allegiance

Resituating Civic Education

Liz Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429788154
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Education about living in society and in the world is a vital task of schools. Yet such civic education is not always critically examined, and few among us have been encouraged to reflect on our civic education experiences. Around the world, one's civic education most often looks like a black box. How it works is unclear. When human harm, violence, and oppression can be seen in a wide variety of contexts, it is worth critically examining civic education. Could it be that civic education is not playing a helpful role in society? Can it be done differently and better? As one reflects on the contemporary social world, it is helpful to examine the assumptions surrounding education for living together, to think about current modes and possible alternatives. Otherwise, one might end up promoting allegiance to civic and partisan entities which are themselves black boxes (the 'nation', the 'people'), failing to notice when and how what goes on in civic education is morally questionable.

This book aims to elucidate some of the black box of civic education, and focuses on some of its main operations across contexts. Offering a new framework for students and academics, this book questions existing thinking and shifts the focus of attention from the right balance to strike between local, national, and global allegiances to the more fundamental question of what counts as 'local', 'national', and 'global', and what might be involved in cultivating allegiances to them. It looks at allegiance to not just transnational but also sub-global 'civilisations' and it problematises the notion of the 'local community' in new ways.

This book is the 2020 AESA Critics' Choice Book Award Winner.

1

The challenge of learning to live together

Learning to live together

This text aims to explore and respond to a major challenge related to human living together and education—how to best conceptualise moral living together, and its implications for education. In one sense, I am treading on well-worn ground. All of the world’s major political thinkers, historically and today, have commented on this challenge to some extent. Many of them have developed treatises on this, imagining that a finely honed system of caregiving and education can at least ameliorate some of the bad practices observed in living together, such as oppression, wrongful harm and violence, and war. The assumption across all such work is that young people need to be socialised appropriately for the relations they will or might find themselves in. That is, they need to be socialised to participate meaningfully in relations with others in society: not indoctrinated against their own best interests, but equipped to effectively understand and act within their social world.

Why is learning to live together a challenging task? One reason is that people have vastly different ideas about how people can and should live together. We see a great deal of deliberation on living together, in ancient Greek and Confucian dialogues, among others, and in contemporary scholarship. Living together has to do with relations, of individuals to one another, and groups with other groups, in one region of the world and beyond it. These relations change, and are complex, and increasing in complexity in line with political, industrial, and technological shifts. What to teach in this context is not obvious, as education ideally prepares young people to engage with new ideas and practices as they are unfolding, rather than simply produce or conserve a singular predesigned social end. It is not enough to introduce young people to the existing world; but empowering them to effectively interact with, reshape, and enhance the world is no simple task.

Civic education is the main approach to teaching how to live together. By ‘civic education’, I mean to refer to a wide variety of planned and unplanned teaching and learning practices for socialisation, which are conducted in diverse ways through schools, alongside other publicly oriented institutions. In some societies and contexts, civic education is conducted through an extracurricular or ‘hidden curriculum’ of school, and/or through media. In others, civic education consists of one or more formal class subjects.

In some cases, people may not realise they have been or were exposed to civic education. This could be because they were exposed to an organic style of civic education, which was never described as such (think of informal learning taking place outside of schools). Or their civic education could have been deliberately conducted in such a way as to obscure its operation—disabling people from realising how their deep beliefs and assumptions have been externally shaped (Nicoll, Fejes, Olson, Dahlstedt, & Biesta, 2013). In other cases, teachers unwittingly direct lessons on living together as automatic, unthinking acts. Such lessons may be held by those involved as natural, normal, and uncontroversial: ‘we support the government’; ‘foreigners are dangerous’. The teachers involved may not have thought about how their own beliefs were shaped. They may not be aware of how they are shaping students’ beliefs and attitudes. Yet many ideas that get transmitted through such civic education, such as the idea that ‘foreigners are dangerous’, are problematic, and they should not be taken for granted. More generally, when how to live together is contested deeply as it is, within and across societies, it is worth reflecting on these practices systematically, and considering what foundations exist for civic education, the perspectives they nourish, and the limitations they might have.

The predominant model for conceptualising human living together, in civic education and in societies around the world, can be generally described as the concentric circles model of relations. At the centre of the circles is the individual, and nearest the centre are those they are most closely and deeply related to (like family and friends). A slightly bigger, more distant circle encapsulates those who are not as close, but are still connected, to the person, and their inner circle—the local. A larger circle is for the broader society or nation-state. One sphere beyond that may include a larger grouping than the nation-state, such as the region or continent, or ‘civilisation’. The biggest circle is for all of humanity. One is thus seen to live in distinctive relations to all others in the world, from near to far.

Figure 1.1Concentric circles model of relations

The Stoics in ancient Greece are said to be the historical source for the concentric circles model in the west. The model aligns with their philosophical outlook toward expanding the sense of commitment and relation to distant others, and not relying on emotional relations with nearby others to guide behaviours and priorities (Ayaz Naseem & Hyslop-Margison, 2006; Baltzly, 2013; Nussbaum, 1997). The concentric circles model can be seen to underpin formal and non-formal approaches to civic education in modern societies around the world, although civic education takes different shapes across societies, and in some places the model may be used more explicitly than in others. Its periphery is invoked in the concept of ‘global citizenship education’, while citizenship is traditionally thought of as being related to a person’s roles and responsibilities inside a nation-state. The model’s interior is evident in education for ‘personal and social development’ or ‘personal moral development’: there is the individual, and there is the social, which begins with the familial and local.

In academic work, the concentric circles model is associated with Martha Nussbaum, whose political theories, grounded in Stoic and Aristotelian thought, have inspired ongoing debates about one particular challenge of thinking through living in concentric circles (Nussbaum, 1994/2002, 1997). The major question she and many others focus on in relation to living in concentric circles is this: How does one prioritise their rights and responsibilities, and develop a sense of who they are, amid the competing contexts of the circles—as part of local, national, and global life?

One’s answer to this question implies a particular direction for civic education, for teaching about how to live together. For many, the major debate here concerns the implications of global versus national allegiance (e.g., Appiah, 2002, 2006; Callan, 1997; Curren & Dorn, 2018; Nussbaum, 1994/2002). If one contends that national allegiance is vital, they consider how schools can most effectively convey and encourage national or patriotic commitment. Arguments emphasising the place of global citizenship over national allegiance identify different priorities for education.

This book takes a different approach to the challenge of thinking about and teaching about how to live together well and justly within concentric circles. It argues that the fundamental challenge of learning to live together is not about how to navigate competing priorities found across the spheres of national, local, and global. It does not deny that such competing priorities can be found. But that is not what I see as the most fundamental challenge about education for living together, and using the concentric circles model for conceptualising living together.

This book argues instead that the fundamental challenge of conceptualising living together well in concentric circles relates to understanding what is in each of the circles—the way to know about, and thus be part of, the local, the national, the global (and the cultural). Rarely acknowledged or explored in work on civic education is that the local, the national, and the global are contested concepts. The nature of those groups, their defining cultures and practices, and their implications for learning to live together, are under ongoing debate, as they also shift within their spheres, neither simple nor given. Indeed, for understanding some phenomena, it is not particularly helpful to try to reduce or isolate them to one sphere, such as the transnational indigenous movement, and ‘global’ terrorism. Many complex topics do not easily fit into the concentric circles framework, and are thus more difficult to understand and learn about when concentric spheres are the focus.

It is often assumed that the concentric circles as entities are known and given, when debating how to live together and how to learn to live together. But they are not a priori known, and they ought to be subjected to studied scrutiny. The challenge of identifying the nature of these social entities, and thus the meaning of membership within one’s locale, one’s nation-state, and global society, should be a focus of civic education.

Such an interrogative perspective on the nature of communities imagined can be found in some works on nationalism and globalism. Benedict Anderson is known for observing how nationalism is a historical practice and belief: a mythical sense of kinship with compatriots that may seemingly become naturalised, but is the result of particular political and social processes and circumstances, which have served specific social and political goals (1983; see also Ahmed, 2004; Spivak, 1985/1996). The multicultural movement also questions the national character, pointing out the tendency of nationalistic discourse to obscure belonging of minority groups in a society (Banks, 2008). Likewise, there is much debate about globalisation, and better and worse variants of global citizenship education, and whose interests those programmes may serve (Andreotti, 2011; Peters, Britton, & Blee, 2008; Roth & Gur-Ze’ev, 2007). However, this critical scrutiny has less often been focused on examining what is meant by the local, a newer context for civic education. And such interrogations of nationalism, globalism, and the like have not often been systematically related to the broad endeavour of education for living together, as a major domain where community imagining takes place.

Furthermore, the moral implications of recognising these spheres as sites of critical questioning and in some cases profound disagreement, in relation to the project of education for living together, have not been explored in depth, even in works that question nationalism or globalism in education. Controversial, not-yet-decidable issues have a distinctive place in education as a moral endeavour, apart from those matters of broad public, well-reasoned consensus. Thus, to the extent that the controversial nature of the substance of the spheres has gone unaddressed, so too have important questions about the moral status more generally of many common and basic lessons of civic education for living together.

The morality and cultural politics of civic education

As Michael Hand spells out (2018), moral standards that are controversial and not robustly justified (that is, the reasons given for them do not stand up to rational scrutiny) should only be taught about in a non-directive way. That is, they should be taught about, with the aim that young people develop their own substantive views. Such theories and standards should not be taught as if they should necessarily be subscribed to. If the theories and standards are controversial and not robustly justified, that one should teach them directively, so students subscribe to them, is not justified from a moral view.

Hand gives as examples for his arguments three cases of prohibition: against offensive speech, against privately educating children, and against homosexuality. He observes that in the first two cases there is reasonable disagreement about justifications. Therefore, when these standards are to be discussed in education, they should be taught about and considered, rather than taught as if they are moral standards one should live by. Because there is reasonable disagreement on these issues, to teach them as moral standards is to possibly preclude student recognition of reasonable disagreement, and to possibly preclude their developing the capability to make their own reasoned judgements about them as participants in society. Obscuring reasonable disagreement counts as indoctrination rather than as education for individual growth. It is morally problematic, as it can hinder moral development and judgement over time (Crittenden, 1999; Hand, 2018; Spiecker, 1999).

In the case of the prohibition of homosexuality, those supporting the prohibition give unreasonable justifications, which do not withstand scrutiny. In this case, because the justifications for the prohibition are unreasonable, a prohibition standard should be taught directively against, as unjustified (Hand, 2018). Because disagreement here is not reasonable, teachers should help students understand what is wrong with prohibitions of homosexuality. Seen here, moral education is a matter of learning to use reasoning, rather than to support dogma or to rely on personal preferences, in developing standards to guide personal action.

This book explores what is taught in civic education for living together. It argues that a great deal of what is normally counted as moral standards for how to live together in the concentric spheres of social life, as elements of a future-facing orientation, is reasonably contested, rather than robustly justified. More specifically, many ideas regarding the best particular forms of allegiance to be practised in local, national, cultural, and global life, looking forward, do not withstand reasonable scrutiny.

In some cases, as in the case for teaching against the prohibition of homosexuality, directive teaching against common principles is warranted. As I show in this text, ethno-nationalism and racial discrimination are visible, and explored and promoted (often in subtle ways) in civic education in a variety of contexts. Justifications for these views as ethical standards do not withstand critical scrutiny. Therefore, such standards should be taught against, as unreasonable and wrong. Young people should learn what is wrong with racism and ethnocentrism. In their place, fundamentally anti-ethnocentric and anti-racist principles should be promoted. To teach for racism and ethnocentrism, or about them in an open and neutral way, is not morally justified. Such teaching risks indoctrinating, as it does not adequately prepare young people to grow in their moral understandings of and approaches to the social world.

Other topics are morally disputable, where no overriding principles that withstand systematic scrutiny can be found. Such views are therefore in the category of things that should be taught about non-directively. These things should not be taught about directively, or subscriptively. Hand argues, for instance, that patriotism as love of country should be taught about as an idea, rather than as an overriding moral principle in education, given its contentious status (2010, 2011). To obscure reasonable disagreement about such an issue, by more simply teaching for love of country, is indoctrinatory. Yet as my analysis shows, often reasonable disagreement is hidden from view in relation to love of country in civic education, again resulting in an immoral, indoctrinatory approach.

This book elaborates and expands on these points, exploring the cultural politics of living in the concentric circles, as the cross-sections comprising the main topics in civic education. Cultural politics is at the heart of much of the controversy over the nature of the concentric circles and the best approaches to civic education, although such politics is often overlooked in its moral implications and in relation to teaching and learning. By discussing ‘cultural politics’ I mean to highlight here debates and controversies related to how cultures are constructed, understood, and navigated (Ahmed, 2004; Rosaldo, 1989). Culture is an umbrella term for that whic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The challenge of learning to live together:
• 2 Civilisation and culture in education:
• 3 Patriotism and nationalism in education:
• 4 Globalisation and education:
• 5 Localism in education:
• 6 Interpersonal relations in education:
• 7 The individual in education:
• 8 Media and civic education:
• 9 Rethinking civic education:
• 10 Conclusion:
• Index