Citizenship Education around the World

Local Contexts and Global Possibilities

John Petrovic, Aaron Kuntz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317952220
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

Though certainly not a new idea, citizenship education manifests in unique and often unpredictable ways in our contemporary neoliberal era. The question of what it means to be a productive and recognized citizen must now be understood simultaneously along both global and local lines. This edited volume offers an international perspective on citizenship education enacted in specific socio-political contexts. Each chapter includes a pointed conceptualization of citizenship education—a philosophical framework—that is then applied to specific national cases across Europe, Asia, Canada and more. Chapters emphasize how such frameworks are implemented within local contexts, encouraging particular pedagogical/curricular practices even as they constrain others. Chapters conclude with suggestions for productive change and how educators might usefully engage contemporary contexts through citizenship education.

1 Citizenship Education in England in an Era of Perceived Globalisation

Recent Developments and Future Prospects

Ben Kisby

Introduction

This chapter¹ examines the development of citizenship education in England in the context of discourses of globalisation.² In particular, it discusses the notion of global citizenship education, which has gained prominence in the UK and elsewhere in recent years, especially amongst academics, teachers, and campaigners, in significant part as a result of the prevalence of debates about the meaning, nature, and impact of globalisation. The chapter argues that both the previous Labour government and the current Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition have tended to view the requirements of globalisation and the requirements of neoliberalism as one and the same.³ When last in power, Labour introduced a form of compulsory citizenship education into secondary schools in England that had a significant participative element, but at the same time the Labour government often advanced a very business-focused view of educational skill acquisition, especially with the international environment in mind. This chapter argues that this emphasis has intensified under the coalition government. It has adopted a lukewarm attitude toward citizenship lessons, proposing a very problematic, slimmed down citizenship curriculum, underpinned by a highly individualised, consumerist agenda. Moreover, it constructs the “international” in education largely in terms of young people as future workers and consumers in a competitive global economy, rather than as citizens acquiring knowledge, skills, and values that enable them to reflect on important historical and contemporary issues and to engage in forms of civic activity at both national and international levels. In light of these competing impulses, this chapter starts by asking: What is citizenship education?

What is Citizenship Education?

Citizenship is an “essentially contested concept” and, as such, citizenship education is a contested subject.⁴ At a basic level, citizenship can be defined in terms of an individual’s membership of a state or of a political community of some kind and the legal and moral rights and duties that this membership gives rise to. Citizenship then has legal dimensions, relating to both national and international law, defining who are and who are not citizens and who are and who are not accorded legal and other rights, and normative aspects, being concerned to specify how an individual citizen should behave and what it is about their behaviour that should be regarded as admirable or worthy of criticism. It can also be seen as relating to individual and group identities, to citizens’ possession of particular values and virtues, and their rights and responsibilities, broadly conceived. Citizenship is a concept regularly invoked in discussions surrounding globalisation, immigration, asylum, and nationality. It is possible to understand modern conceptions of the citizen and debates about the meaning and nature of citizenship as deriving from two historical traditions: liberal and republican citizenship, with the former emphasising citizens’ individual rights and the latter citizens’ civic duties.⁵ There are important contemporary debates around, for example, cosmopolitan, communitarian, multicultural, ecological, and feminist conceptions of citizenship, which seek in different ways to critique and/or build on these two core traditions.

Leaving aside those who are against citizenship education,⁶ there are considerable differences of opinion regarding the appropriate content of citizenship lessons and modes of delivery to students among those who are in favour. The chapter is concerned principally with citizenship lessons in secondary schools and colleges,⁷ as opposed to primary or higher education, or to forms of citizenship education for immigrants that are designed to enable non-citizens to become citizens. Whilst empirical studies can shed important light on the effectiveness or otherwise of particular forms of citizenship education, these issues are clearly, to a large extent, normative, since any attempt to address them necessarily relies on various assumptions about what the aims of citizenship education should be and how these objectives should manifest themselves in the citizenship syllabus; the role of schools, teachers, and students; and so on.

From the perspective advanced in this chapter, democracies need active and informed citizens, willing and able to play a part in the democratic process so as to safeguard and bolster democratic principles. Citizenship education seeks to address issues of general concern through collective action. It is important as a means of connecting young people to the political system, helping them make sense of a complex political world and thereby strengthening democracy. As such, citizenship education can be defined as a subject that is or ought to be concerned to provide students with knowledge and understanding of political ideas and concepts,⁸ and local, regional, national, and international political processes and institutions; to develop students’ skills so as to enable them to engage in decision making, critical thinking, debate, and (in ways of their own choosing) to participate effectively in political and democratic activities inside and outside school; and to instil in students particular values that make it likely they will want to engage in such activities.⁹ It is not about attempting to create “perfect” or “model” citizens. It should certainly be very concerned with issues around rights and pluralism in the contemporary world—key liberal preoccupations. But if the aim is to promote a form of citizenship education that enables and encourages students to think critically about contemporary issues and to engage actively in political and civic participation so as to address such matters, as well as to protect and promote rights rather than to merely be aware of already existing legal rights, then it ought also to be informed by a conception of citizenship that owes a great deal to the republican tradition, in which citizenship is conceived of primarily as an activity rather than a status. The next section provides an overview of how citizenship education in England has developed in recent years.

Citizenship Education in England

Since 2002, citizenship education in England has been part of the non-statutory personal, social, and health education framework at primary level and a statutory subject in secondary schools. Prior to this, citizenship lessons had never been compulsory in English schools, although citizenship had been one of five non-compulsory, cross-curricular themes of the National Curriculum since 1990.¹⁰ In fact, the history of citizenship education can be traced back much further than this—perhaps to 1934 and the formation of the Association for Education in Citizenship, which aimed to teach the children of ordinary people, and not just public school elites, about the merits of liberal democracy and the dangers of totalitarianism.¹¹ Indeed, some scholars trace political education in Britain back as far as the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to the university education of aspiring elites, which included some instruction in political leadership and patriotism.¹²

The decision to introduce citizenship as a statutory foundation subject in the National Curriculum was made clear by the incoming Labour government in its first education white paper, Excellence in Schools, published two months after the general election in May 1997. The white paper announced the formation of “an advisory group to discuss citizenship and the teaching of democracy” in schools.¹³ Later that year, David Blunkett, Education Secretary at the time, announced that the group would be chaired by the political theorist and commentator, the late Bernard Crick, one of the leading figures who had been pushing for the different but related concept of political education in schools since the 1970s. However, Blunkett’s view was that political education had too narrow an emphasis,¹⁴ being preoccupied with political literacy,¹⁵ and that citizenship education ought to be concerned more generally with how children should be taught to be citizens.

The Advisory Group on Citizenship (AGC) published its report, Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools, in September 1998 and was one of the immediate causes of the inclusion of citizenship in the National Curriculum. The AGC’s report provided the framework for citizenship education in England. It defined citizenship education in terms of three strands:

1. Social and moral responsibility—learning from the very beginning self-confidence and socially and morally responsible behaviour both in and beyond the classroom, both toward those in authority and toward each other;
2. Community involvement—learning and becoming helpfully involved in the life and concerns of their communities, including learning through community involvement and service to the community;
3. Political literacy—learning about and how to make themselves effective in public life through knowledge, skills, and values.¹⁶

Citizenship education was introduced in England principally because of concerns held by a range of actors, including politicians, academics, and pressure groups constituting an ideational policy network, about what they perceived as a decline in levels of social capital in Britain.¹⁷ Such individuals and groups were particularly influenced by the neo-Tocquevillian conception of social capital advanced by the US political scientist Robert Putnam, for whom the concept refers to the social networks, such as networks of friends and neighbours and organizations like trade unions, churches, and schools, and the norms and trust that such networks give rise to, which allow citizens to work together to achieve collective goals.¹⁸ Concerns about levels of social capital were a key driving force behind the development of New Labour’s third way philosophy both in opposition and government, and senior Labour Party figures explicitly linked worries about stocks of social capital with the need to introduce citizenship lessons in schools. For example, Blunkett argued that the state must enable citizens to lead autonomous lives, especially through citizenship education. For Blunkett,

it is clear that weak civic engagement and an absence of social capital deprives democracy of its vitality, health and legitimacy. A fully participatory democracy depends on sustained dialogue between free and equal, socially committed citizens … The State … can facilitate and provide the framework within which the greater strength of community and society can be brought to bear to support people in reaching their full potential … autonomy requires a rich and rounded education … If autonomy is dependent on education, and a fully autonomous person is also by definition an active citizen, then there needs to be explicit education for citizenship in the school and college curriculum.¹⁹

The impact of the concept of social capital on the citizenship education initiative can also be seen in the normative presuppositions underpinning the AGC report.²⁰ Putnam does not detail the model of citizenship he believes most enhances levels of social capital. Nevertheless, the outlines of such a model can be discerned from his analysis. One of Putnam’s key concerns is with political participation and arguably the biggest single influence upon his work is that of Tocqueville, usually regarded as a major thinker in the republican tradition.²¹ However, Putnam’s interest in civic virtue and emphasis on the extent to which this is reliant on community membership suggests that his thinking is also underpinned by a communitarian conception of citizenship. The normative model of citizenship that best corresponds to Putnam’s concerns can then be described as a “republican-communitarian” model, broadly of the kind developed by Michael Sandel.²² In Sandel’s conception of citizenship, community membership is viewed as the pre-political, primary constitutive attachment upon the individual citizen, but he also conceives of citizenship as an activity, whereby citizens are concerned with achieving common goods.²³ Similarly, the principal aims of citizenship education in England are to teach young people to become well-informed, responsible citizens engaged in mainstream political and civic activities, such as voting, and undertaking voluntary work, in particular, at a local community level.²⁴

The AGC report also marked an important shift away from the Marshallian conception of citizenship that had exerted a strong influence over the Labour Party in the postwar period until th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Prologue: Citizenship and the Purposes of Education
• 1. Citizenship Education in England in an Era of Perceived Globalisation: Recent Developments and Future Prospects
• 2. Who Belongs in What Hong Kong? Citizenship Education in the Special Administrative Region
• 3. Citizenship Education in China under Discourses of Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, Neoliberalism and Confucianism
• 4. Creating Citizens in a Capitalistic Democracy: A Struggle for the Soul of American Citizenship Education
• 5. Citizenship Education in Spain in the Twenty-First Century
• 6. Lost in Citizenship Education: Questions Faced by Amerasians in Japan
• 7. Citizenship Education and the Construction of Identity in Canada
• 8. Civic Education in Israel: Between National-Ethnocentricity and Universalism
• 9. On Hostipitality, Responsibility and Ubuntu: Some Philosophical Remarks on Teaching and Learning in South Africa
• 10. Citizenship Education in Colombia: Searching for the Political
• 11. Citizenship Education in Mexico
• 12. Tertiary Education and Critical Citizenship
• Epilogue: Reading Citizenship Education in Neoliberal Times
• Contributors
• Index