Globalization, the Nation-State and the Citizen

Dilemmas and Directions for Civics and Citizenship Education

Alan Reid, Judith Gill, Alan Sears, Alan Reid, Judith Gill, Alan Sears

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136995293
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

The past decade has seen an explosion of interest in civics and citizenship education. There have been unprecedented developments in citizenship education taking place in schools, adult education centers, or in the less formally structured spaces of media images and commentary around the world. This book provides an overview of the development of civics and citizenship education policy across a range of nation states. The contributors, all widely respected scholars in the field of civics and citizenship education, provide a thorough understanding of the different ways in which citizenship has been taken up by educators, governments and the wider public. Citizenship is never a single given, unproblematic concept, but rather its meanings have to be worked through and developed in terms of the particularities of socio-political location and history. This volume promotes a wider and more grounded understanding of the ways in which citizenship education is enacted across different nation states in order to develop education for active and participatory citizenry in both local and global contexts.

Part B
Case Studies

2
In Whose Interest?

Australian Schooling and the Changing Contexts of Citizenship

Alan Reid and Judith Gill

CIVICS EDUCATION AS A PROJECT OF SCHOOLING: THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

In this chapter we want to assess the educational responses to globalisation in Australia in terms of their consistency with the kind of democracy and citizenship that we will argue is needed to meet the challenges of a globalising world. In particular we will critically explore how Australian governments over the past decade have understood the challenges to Australian democracy and the ways in which these understandings have been reflected in policy related to civics and citizenship education in schools. In order to place the task in context, we begin with a brief historical overview of the role that civics and citizenship education has played in Australian education.

As was argued in the introduction to this book, issues of civics and citizenship have been central across the curriculum and in the forms and structures of schools ever since the start of formal schooling in Australia (Grundy 1994). That is, constructing a national identity is embedded in the ‘grammars’ of schooling (Tyack & Tobin 1994). Thus, the introduction of state-provided education (public schools) by the Australian colonies in the 1870s was motivated by the need for social order (especially among the working classes), and for social cohesion (Grundy 1970; Miller 1986). For the next fifty years, state schools were elementary (primary) schools, at the end of which stage most working-class students left. The children of the middle classes and elites, on the other hand, largely attended private (church) schools which offered post-primary education and formed the pathway to university and white-collar employment (McCalman 1993). Even as state-provided, post-primary opportunities expanded in the first half of the twentieth century to meet the needs of an industrialising economy, so school structures were stratified with technical schools (trade and domestic) for working-class boys and girls, and high schools for the more socially mobile (Hyams & Bessant 1972; Miller 1986). In this way the structure of schooling reflected, normalised and reproduced the unequal power and social relationships that existed, first in the colonies and, following Federation in 1901, in the states. This situation constituted a powerful and continuing form of pedagogy for citizenship, brought to life through the very structure and organisation of schooling. It taught students, from an early age, about their proper place in society.

At the same time, throughout the period until the 1950s, the culture and processes of schools, and the official curriculum, melded two apparently contradictory roles in relation to civics and citizenship education. They taught and reinforced loyalty to the mother country (Great Britain) and to the British Empire. In addition, and with increasing intensity after Federation, they inculcated a sense of nationalism, fanned by writers and artists around the turn of the century, which developed pride in a new country that was free from some of the ingrained customs and divisions of the old: ‘a new land is for new ideas!’ (Goldstein 1918).

In the first half of the twentieth century at weekly assemblies, school-children sang the national anthem (‘God Save the King/Queen’); recited the Oath of Allegiance (‘I will serve the King/Queen, honour the flag and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers and the laws’; Education Department of South Australia 1953); raised the flag and marched in to class to the steady beat of a fife and drum band. When in class, students were instructed in a small number of tightly prescribed subjects, including arithmetic, English literature and British history. It was through these subjects, and particularly the stand-alone subject of civics, that young people were taught to become loyal subjects of the King and Empire, to vote and pay taxes and, if the need arose, to enlist and fight for country and Empire (Education Department of South Australia 1953). In these and other ways, schools were sites for nation-building and national identity formation—mediating a particular view of what it meant to be an Australian citizen, based on strong ties to Great Britain and an awareness of a new ‘Australianness’ (Musgrave 1979).

Over time the emphasis on the strong ties to Great Britain and the Empire weakened. The profound social changes that began in the post–World War II period were accompanied by an influx of non-British peoples from southern and eastern Europe who brought with them cultures and customs distinctly different from the dominant British culture. This influence, and the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s, resulted in Australia slowly becoming, from the early 1970s, a more tolerant and cosmopolitan society—at least on the surface. There was a growing awareness of Australia’s place in Asia, a focus on multiculturalism rather than assimilation or integration and a growing appreciation of the need for reconciliation with Aboriginal Australians (Manne 2001).

These developments inevitably challenged accepted practices in education. By the mid to late 1970s, most young people were experiencing at least two or three years of secondary schooling, increasing numbers of girls were completing secondary school, the stratified technical and high schools divisions were abandoned in favour of comprehensive high schools and the traditional competitive academic curriculum came under challenge (Connell et al. 1982). In addition, by the late 1980s the Australian university system had become a mass system, which encouraged a greater proportion of the population to think of themselves as university material, entitled to attend and take out degrees. Thus, education structures systematically began to mirror the social changes that were occurring in the wider society.

With the relative prosperity brought about by the population increase and the ready availability of work, more Australian families began to look to extended educational experiences as an important means of upward mobility for their children. Developments in the discipline of psychology lent weight to the idea that learning should be understood as an individual endeavour and that educational achievement was produced in terms of a good relationship between teacher and individual student. Teachers also embraced the idea of needing to gear their classroom treatments to each student rather than the group and ‘treat them as individuals’ became the new credo in teacher education (Grundy & Hatton 1996).

In this environment the older style of teaching for civics and citizenship education—both across the curriculum and as a stand-alone subject— appeared increasingly irrelevant. Schools became less regulated in terms of ritual ceremonies; Monday assemblies gradually abandoned the Oath of Allegiance and children no longer marched into class. The rigid seating patterns that had dominated classrooms in the pre-war years were replaced by more casual arrangements. The organisational culture of the school was no longer characterised by a military discipline but rather an atmosphere that included alternative elements, open space classrooms and group work.

Formal areas of study were also changing. By the 1970s, teachers were gaining a larger share of popular respect as professionals and were increasingly empowered to develop their own curricula in keeping with the perceived needs of the students and the teachers’ particular skills (Jones 1971). Student demands for curricula to be relevant added to the push for education to become more flexible, with much attention to process as well as to the repeatedly stated commitment to maximise individual student potential. By the 1980s then, the civics and citizenship education function of the school, as represented in the hidden curriculum of school structures and process, was now a very different function from the one that had been performed in the first half of the twentieth century.

One outcome of these changes was to cause the study of civics to fall into serious decline as a formal area of study in schools. It had tended to be rejected by students as dry and boring and was an early victim of the progressive movement in education, which championed the call for relevance of curriculum content to student experience. The subject of civics was now subsumed by the broader, interdisciplinary subject of social studies where it dealt more with current issues than the structure and functions of government. As the Civics Expert Group was to note later:

There is no clear point at which Civics was submerged in Australian schooling, but by the late 1960s, social studies was disowning its civic function and declaring itself to be more concerned with ‘current realities’ than with the formal institutions and methods by which they were shaped. (Civics Expert Group 1994, p. 31)

This brief sweep across Australian educational history has served two purposes. First, it demonstrates that there is a close connection between the state, forms of democracy and school curricula. This is not a one-way relationship involving state-imposed policy and compliant teachers. Curriculum policy is always and rightly a site of struggle. But the dominant elites do have an edge in this struggle, and in the last instance the state will serve their interests (Bernstein 1971; Apple 1996). We have shown how schooling is organised, structured and practised by the state to serve particular versions of what it means to be a citizen in Australian democracy at specific historical moments. Second, our historical overview confirms the proposition put in the introduction to this volume: that the civics and citizenship function of schools is delivered through at least three modalities of the schooling project:

1. The structure of schooling: The ways in which formal schooling is organised in a society—the balance of public and private schools, funding arrangements, types of schools, processes of policy making and so on—which contain powerful messages about how the society is/should be structured, ordered and maintained.

2. The culture and processes of schools: The inculcation of the values and dispositions associated with citizenship seen in the organisational culture of the schools through such processes and events as its ceremonies, class organisation and pedagogy, discipline structures, traditions and relationships.

3. Formal representations of civics and citizenship in the curriculum: The formalised knowledge represented in the curriculum as ‘civics and citizenship’, usually concerned with the structures of power and governance, citizens’ rights and responsibilities, and the skills and dispositions for participation in the polity and civil society. This area may have constituted a separate subject as in the first half of the twentieth century, but since the 1960s it has usually been taught across the curriculum, particularly within social studies or through a strand of what is now known as Studies of Society and the Environment (SOSE), as well as through the more traditional subjects such as history, geography, literature, science and the arts.

In the next section we use these three modalities as the theoretical framework for an analysis of contemporary approaches to civics and citizenship education. But since these modalities occur in and indeed are shaped by the wider context in which the state functions, we will start by describing some of the features of political life during the eleven years of the Howard government (1996–2007). We will then explore the extent to which these features influenced education, and specifically curriculum, policy.

THE CONTEMPORARY PERIOD: CHANGING GOVERNMENT IDEOLOGY, CHANGING SCHOOLING?

The Context

In 1996 the Liberal/National Party Coalition won government under the leadership of John Howard and the direction of Australian politics changed dramatically. Bearing an amalgam of neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideology, successive Howard governments reconfigured the multicultural settlement of the 1980s and challenged the ways in which concepts like citizen and citizenship are understood and used in the public sphere. Not surprisingly, attempts were made to co-opt schools into the service of this agenda, particularly their role in forming the citizen subject.

Before Howard’s election, the Hawke and Keating Labour governments (1983–1996) had been attempting to complete Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s project from twenty years earlier—described by Manne as ‘the transformation of Australia from a postcolonial British settler society to fully independent nationhood’ (2001, p. 2). This included an embrace of multiculturalism, recognition of the need for Australia to have deeper links with countries in the Asian region, a proposal for Australia to free itself from its colonial past by becoming a republic and an assertion of the need for reconciliation with Indigenous Australians. From the outset, the new Howard government set about dismantling these policy directions.

Within a decade of winning government, Howard was able to boast in his 2006 Australia Day speech that Australia had now successfully rebalanced national identity and cultural and ethnic diversity:

We’ve drawn back from being too obsessed with diversity to a point where Australians are now better able to appreciate the enduring values of the national character that we proudly celebrate and pres...

Table of contents

• Routledge Research in Education
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part A Introduction
• Part B Case Studies
• Section C Reflections and Analysis
• Contributors
• Index