Education for Civic and Political Participation

A Critical Approach

Reinhold Hedtke, Tatiana Zimenkova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135073558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Participation as an element of active citizenship in democracies is a key project of international and national educational policy. Institutionalized approaches for compulsory schools provide participatory access to all young European citizens. But does this picture depict the possibilities and practices of participation appropriately? Can this standard approach to participation be translated into action in view of diverse polities, policies, political cultures, institutions and practices of participation? This book explores what prerequisites must be given for a successful implementation of such a comprehensive international project.

Part I

Taken-for-Grantedness and Hidden Normativity?

Foundations and Framings of Participatory Education Policies

1 Dealing with Dissatisfaction

Role, Skills and Meta-Competencies of Participatory Citizenship Education

Detlef Sack

Introduction

Participatory citizenship education (PCE) strives to encourage young people to be actively engaged in social and political affairs. It is aimed at educating the democratic citizen. Programmes have been set up to support teachers and other practitioners to promote the willingness of young people to be active and participatory. Regarding its programmatic character, PCE is a rather ambivalent practice. It occurs as a top-down policy by ‘the state’ which summons citizens to question, at least partly, existing institutions in order to revamp and sustain their democratic character. Thereby, state institutions aim to enhance diffuse support and strengthen the established system of political rule. Thus, PCE is a twofold exercise encompassing both emancipative activation as well as social engineering which aims to bring forth opportunistic citizens. PCE is aimed at educating young people in a specific way. It strives to constitute a particular conception of a ‘participative citizen’. The ambivalent intervention from above should result in a specified governmentality, i.e. a particular conduct of the self (Dean 1999; Miller and Rose 2008). The attitudes and perceptions, i.e. the mindset of the subjects to be governed, should include a willingness to participate and the acceptance of the institutions being established. Hence, PCE’s conception encompasses particular skills and requirements which will be described in the following. In addition, PCE sets up a governmentality which does not assure but is likely to be confronted with failures. Democratic participation in particular entails dissatisfaction because democracy is a promise that will be broken. Dissatisfaction with the idea of democracy derives from both the inherent deficiencies of “models of democracy” (Held 2006) and the shortcomings within current political systems, be it “post-democracies” (Crouch 2004) or “constitutional anomy” (Flinders 2010).

Starting from these observations, this chapter is aimed at pointing out the challenges of PCE from the perspective of political theory. Models of democracy are taken as normative reference points and conceptions which deploy specific citizen skills and competencies to be educated for. Hence, the chapter contributes to the observation that PCE is a variegated policy arena by displaying the rather overloaded and inconsistent catalogue of its tasks. It argues that PCE is a political project with inherent deficiencies. Because of both the high number of required skills and the inherent deficiencies of the conception, PCE makes excessive demands on students, teachers and other practitioners. In view of future use of PCE, I propose an intervention from above by a countering bottom-up practice. This adaption of PCE will be completed by invoking two ‘meta-competencies’, i.e. provident irony and learning social capital.

The argument of this chapter is fourfold. First, it discusses PCE as an element of a general policy for more participation and deliberative governance set up from above. Nation-states and the European Union pursue participatory policies and respective programmes to increase the diffuse support for the political system. Teachers and researchers should see themselves as being interwoven in a field of strategic intervention from above in which a specific governmentality is striven for. Students, teachers and other practitioners have to match the expectations of the specific educational policy. However, beyond critical issues of PCE, such as being a variegated policy arena, and the complex process of political socialisation, it is the conception of PCE which has to become subject to scrutiny.

Second, the underlying conception of the governmentality will be unfolded. PCE is aimed at shaping active and participative citizens in a democracy. My contribution to the research on this specific kind of subjectivation comes from the perspective of political theory. Different “models of democracy” (Held 2006) are mapped because they reflect distinct skills of the citizens. A differentiated discussion of these skills includes communicating the requirements for PCE in a reflexive, concise and comparative way. Within the range of elitist, pluralist, deliberative and participatory models of democracy, as well as in feminist, Marxist/social-democratic, intercultural and cosmopolitan debates, a number of competencies have been discussed which are of importance for the respective conception. One result of this debate is a list of distinct citizen’s competencies to be educated for.

Third, democracy is a promise that is likely to be broken. Since democracy passed its euphoric early years, its pitfalls and shortcomings have become obvious. All of the models of democracy reveal inherent problems and dilemmas of participation. In addition, the empirical state of European democracies shows defective political regimes, new democracies with low political support and mature Western European “post-democracies” (Crouch 2004). In sum, theoretical and empirical evidence highlights that teachers and researchers cannot pursue PCE in a simple, let alone naïve way. For several reasons, dissatisfaction belongs to democracy. The conception of PCE is risky. It encompasses both an overloaded catalogue of skills to be taught and the acknowledgment of inherent deficiencies. Thus, PCE is prone to making excessive demands on the subjects.

Fourth and finally, students, teachers and other practitioners are called to deal reflexively with this intervention from above. I tentatively suggest within this chapter to take two interrelated routes: Through countering practices, PCE should be turned into a bottom-up process which abstains from affirmative institutionalism and takes students as experts of their needs and interests. However, as these proposed redefining practices inevitably stay involved in PCE policy, two cross-cutting meta-competencies are proposed. These should make it possible to cope with the expansive and fragile project of democratic participation. Provident irony is an individual attitude coping with the gap between aspiration and reality. Learning social capital comprehends explorative and inclusive networking, which is not restricted to PCE but encompasses cooperative learning processes in general. Both a reflexive individual stance and social embeddedness are needed to prepare for the likely failure of active democratic participation.

Intervention from Above—PCE and Governmentality

By launching and supporting PCE, ‘the state’ initiates and promotes active participation. Therewith, PCE announce a certain state of democracy: The struggle for citizenship, voting rights, control of governments’ action and deliberative procedures brought forward by different social groups has not come to an end. The scope of citizenship, the parity of political representation and the sphere of ‘the political’ are still on the agenda. However, at least some of these emancipative struggles have become institutionalised throughout the decades and centuries, for instance, equal voting rights, parliamentary control rights and affirmative action, to name but a few. Achievements of emancipative social movements shape the rules and organisations of the state. Therewith, norms that had once been struggled for have changed their character; they have become rationalised and externalised. Over the decades and generations, they have become rules taken for granted, daunting laws and failing procedures. However, these institutionalised achievements and the political systems as a whole depend on the diffuse support of the citizens to be governed, on the perceived legitimacy of democratic domination (Easton 1965). Some current contributions to the problem of the acceptance of democracy indicate a semantic shift of democracy from an input-oriented to a more output-oriented legitimacy. Thus, acceptance and diffuse support of political systems might rather derive from the results and the ‘government for the people’ than from participation and the ‘government by the people’. This semantic shift to the ‘rationalisation’ of democracy (Buchstein and Jörke 2003; Scharpf 1999), in turn addresses the participation of the citizens, but it values the input from society in a different way: Because ‘good results’ in a complex, denationalised and functionally differentiated society do not derive from governments’ top-down steering but from mixes of different governance modes such as cooperation or networking (Kooiman 2003), active participation is back on the agenda. It gains importance as “self-governance” (Sørensen and Triantafillou 2009:2) contributing to good policy results—thus to output-legitimacy—by injecting expertise and bringing in resources for high standard public service delivery. Thus, from a functionalist and state-oriented point of view, active participation is twofold. For institutions of democratic domination, public awareness on issues, political actions like demonstrations, flash mobs, and so on, as well as high voter turnouts signal the state of input-legitimacy. In addition, delivering sufficient policy outputs in a complex society and gaining legitimacy by ‘good results’ only works by including active citizens and their resources, be it local expertise, time to be engaged or donations. Institutions of democratic domination only work—or seem to work—with active participation by the subjects involved.

With this said, it does not come as a surprise that promoting active participation occurs as an intervention from above. Policy of education is aimed at supporting polity. Based on the delineated rationality of established democratic institutions, programmes and technologies are to be set up which shape convenient subjectivities. Referring to Michel Foucault, governmentality studies apply to the process how and why “many socially legitimated authorities seek to interfere in the lives of individuals” (Miller and Rose 2008:1) and focus on the “constitution of new forms of governable subjects” (Newman 2005:12). As a practice of power, governing is aimed at allowing and restricting certain individual behaviour. It is aimed at dealing with perceptions, attitudes and appraisals of the individual in order to conduct the conduct of the self. The subject to be governed should adopt a certain mentality. This mindset is drawn upon respective conceptions of a ‘good’ student, worker, wife or citizen. These conceptions are to be identified within advisory guidelines, poems, novels, oral history or theoretical texts, to name but a few. Governmentality links the ‘truth’ of these conceptions and the exercise of power for the subject to be governed (Burchell, Gordon and Miller 1991; Dean 1999; Miller and Rose 2008).

Thus, enhancing active participation from above is deliberately aimed at a certain governmentality, i.e. mindset of the subject to be governed. PCE, in particular, applies social engineering and educational practices in order to revamp and support political institutions by invoking the ‘active citizen’. Documents and initiatives of European PCE illustrate the reflections on ‘problems’ to be addressed by increasing participation. The economically driven Lisbon Agenda from 2000 included social and civic knowledge “as part of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that all Europeans will need for active citizenship and social inclusion” (Kerr 2008:174). Whereas the output dimension is addressed in this document, the White Book of the Commission of the European Communities on “European Governance”, dating from mid-2001, focussed explicitly on the lack of diffuse support on the input side of the political system. It denotes that “people increasingly distrust institutions and politics or are simply not interested in them” (ibid.:3). In other words: “Yet despite its achievements, many Europeans feel alienated from the Union’s work” (ibid.:7).

This assumption is based upon two empirical phenomena. First, the voter turnout in elections for the European Parliament declined. The first direct elections (1979) started with 62 per cent. In 2009, only 43 per cent of the eligible population turned to the ballots. ‘Old’ member countries like Italy, the Netherlands, France and Germany lost around 20 per cent of voters within three decades. Particularly the populations of Eastern European states are adverse regarding elections. Slovakia and Lithuania showed the lowest voter turnout in 2009 (about 20 per cent). Second, Eurobarometer data show that, within the ‘old Europe’ (EU 15) between 1990 and 2008, about 40 per cent of the respondents were constantly not satisfied with the “way democracy works”.

In view of this loss of support, the White Book on “European Governance” then emphasises the role of active engagement: “The quality, relevance and effectiveness of EU policies depend on ensuring wide participation throughout the policy chain—from conception to implementation. Improved participation is likely to create more confidence in the end result and in the institutions which deliver policies” (European Commission 2001:10). This narrative characterises the policy rhetoric of PCE. Students should be taught to be active, responsible, informed (Georgi 2008:16–7; Chapter 2, this volume). This “making of citizens in Europe” (Georgi 2008) addresses children and young people as subjects to be equipped with skills along a certain set of competencies. Thus, PCE is to be understood as a programme for the governmentality of active participation.

However, PCE as an intervention from above lacks top-down linearity. This is due to four characteristics of the programme. First, the policy of PCE is “characterised by a rather high degree of explicit or implicit diversity” (Hedtke and Zimenkova 2008:6). Different interests, organisations and norms within a multilevel polity shape the arena of PCE. Different expectations are addressed to PCE (ibid.:17). Second, because of its enabling as well as its social engineering features, implementation within this policy arena is likely to combine various hierarchical and cooperative governance modes like quality assurance, benchmarks, network building and dissemination of best practices (Georgi 2008) with emancipative empowerment. Thus, policy outcomes are not easily to be pursued, let alone assessed. Third, PCE is restricted to schools and public rooms whereas young people are also politically socialised by their families and their peers. Some, if not most, of the social context of the subject to be governed is beyond PCE techniques. Fourth, the reason for the multiple and controversial character of PCE seems to be more substantial. PCE simply cannot start from a coherent leitmotif. There is no distinct, convincing and stabilising ideational conception which directs governmentality and the efforts of social engineering. There are tensions within the overloaded catalogue of competencies from the beginning, let alone disappointing experiences with the current state of democratic participation. It is its inconsistent character that makes PCE likely to experience multiple stream policy processes, organisational hypocrisy and ad hoc governance arrangements and to be fended off by the socialising context of the individual.

Models of Democracy as Conception of PCE

On which conceptions of the citizen, his/her skills and tasks, is the intervention from above based? Instead of one there are many relevant ideational references to be taken into account to identify the catalogue of requirements and competencies to be educated for by PCE. By discussing the role of active participation within different “models of democracy” (Held 2006), this chapter aims at mapping the communication embedding the debate on concepts and techniques of PCE. Models of democracy spell out the ideational conception on which the pursued governmentality is drawn upon. Hence, the position taken up in this chapter is that efforts for active participation are rather to be derived from a multifaceted set of different contributions theorising democracy than to be extracted intentionally and coherently from one model or the other. Interrelated, the plural landscape of theoretical approaches is considered as a meandering communication which involves politicians, scientists, teachers, practitioners, parents and students, on the one hand, and shapes the curriculum of social science studies and particular PCE programmes, on the other.

Thus, the pursued governmentality by which the diffuse support of existing institutions is to be strengthened addresses the idea of ‘democracy’. The conception is drawn upon the discourse on democracy. Its models work as conceptual reference points of PCE. Thus, skills of the citizens to be educated were developed within this normative framework. Beyond the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Critical Approaches to Education for Civic and Political Participation
• Part I: Taken-for-Grantedness and Hidden Normativity? Foundations and Framings of Participatory Education Policies
• Part II: Ambitious Policies, Ambiguous Practices? Approaches and Impacts of Participatory Education in Schools and Beyond
• Part III: Included by Education, Excluded by Politics? Tensions, Gaps and Contradictions of Participatory Education
• Part IV: Shadows of the Pasts, Privacies in the Present? Tracing Participatory Education Back to Soviet and Authoritarian Systems
• Part V: Conclusion
• References
• Contributors
• Index