We live in a pedagogic state. Twenty-first-century western societies often see social problems in educational terms. Education, among other things, should counter racism and sexism; schools should contain crime by promoting school attendance.1 Citizens should also live more healthy lives: in 2018, the Dutch government concluded a âNational Prevention Dealâ with 70 civil society organizations, countering tobacco, alcoholism and obesity. Instead of strict measures, state secretary Paul Blokhuis wants to âhelp people make the right choicesâ, making them aware of a healthy lifestyle. He derides claims that this is patronizing as âretardedâ: âthere is broad support for changing social normsâ.2
There is also a near-universal consensus that schools should raise children to citizenship. A growing sense of urgency can be observed among public officials in the western world, as on the verge of the 2020s, liberal democracy in the western world is ubiquitously believed to be in peril, or at least in a state of crisis.3 With good reason: leaders with a populist, authoritarian style of leadership such as Trump, Orban and Putin are on the rise; public confidence in political parties as well as democracy in general is decreasing, as does participation in elections. The sense of alarm is aggravated by research surveys that show a waning belief among millennials and younger generations in democracy as the best political system, or at least the least bad one.4
The causes of this crisis are sought in a diversity of places: stagnating solidarity between elites and people; neoliberal policies without alternatives; and commercialized and misinformative traditional and social media among them.5 One of the most important in this list is the political competence of citizens. Many see civic participation as basic to democracy. That makes apathy of citizens and ignorance about politics a core problem. This even leads to arguments against democracy, and occasional op-eds by academics arguing to make voting dependent upon having passed a test, clearly not seeing themselves as the target group of such proposals.6
A critical strand of political theorists conversely points out that the fault for disaffectedness should not be sought with citizens, but in politics itself; a cynical, unrelatable system breeds the citizens it deserves. According to Colin Hay in Why we hate politics, globalized neoliberalism has fostered an antipolitical culture, and the impression of a duplicitous, untrustworthy caste of politicians as âself-serving and self-interested rational utility-maximizersâ; politicians cannot lay the blame solely with the âdemand sideâ, but should reflect on their role in this process.7 Following De Luca, apathy may be an involuntary result of the political system, or even be an active political stance towards a system that fails to represent citizens, especially when unparliamentary forms of participation are counted among it.8 Still, critics of our present politics also see civic education as a potential remedy.9 As Yascha Mounk writes in his bestselling The People versus Democracy:
Thus, whether it is blamed on an opaque political system, a disinforming media culture or on the moral character of citizens themselves, the result is a plea for more and better civic education. Teaching of the values and practice of democracy should foster the political literacy of mature, well-informed citizens. And indeed, since the beginning of the twenty-first century worries about democracy coincide with governmental programmes for civic education, referring to random violence in nightlife and other social situations, the upsurge of populist parties and general disappointment in politics.11 The German historian Gerrit Mambour aptly describes how in historical crisis discourses about democracy, education serves simultaneously as scapegoat and fire brigade.12While we cannot recreate the threat of communism or fascism, we can remember that civics education is an essential bulwark against authoritarian temptations. And so, the best way to defend liberal democracy remains what it has always been: to take seriously the task of turning children into citizens.10
Worries about lack of civic competence date back to the emergence of modern democracy in the eighteenth century. Ever since the invention of popular sovereignty, public elites and also the labour movement deem civic ignorance and apathy disturbing phenomena. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a strong proponent of inculcating citizenship, and also of a civil religion to bind the citizens of the nation together.13 In the nineteenth century, political citizenship was seen as requiring certain abilities.14 Political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, Rousseauâs compatriot, doubted whether voters indeed possessed these skills, arguing for education in democracy, through the formal education system as well as associations, political parties and court juries.15
Ever since, pleas and programmes for civic education to sustain democracy persist: in the French Third Republic, Republican Minister Jules Ferry proclaimed education as the key to creating a functioning democratic republic, to which purpose he introduced instruction moral et civique in French schools in 1882.16 The English liberal politician James Bryce wrote in 1921 that âa democracy that has been taught only to read, and not also to reflect and judge, will not be the better for the ability to readâ.17 One of the supposed reasons for the failure of the Weimar Republic was the lack of teacher support for democracy; immediately after the occupation of Germany, the United States started re-education programmes to democratize Germans. And finally, in the new democracies that emerged after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, civic education was an instrument to instil the democratic culture new regimes hoped to create amongst a population grown up under communism. Indeed, according to one scholar, this explains current differences in the political culture of Hungary and Poland.18
The Netherlands, a small Western European country, is no exception. It stands at the crossroads of cultural currents from neighbouring countries, towards whose influences it traditionally has been highly absorbent. The call for political education reappears continuously. In the struggle for extension of the suffrage, leading to the introduction of universal male (1917) and female suffrage (1919), concerns regarding the competencies of the extending electorate were a key issue.19 In the interwar period, when mass democracy was a definitive fact, civic education came to the fore in programmes of cultural and political elevation among Protestant, Catholic and socialist minorities, and continued during post-war reconstruction.
From the second half of the 1960s up until the 1990s, a progressive republican drive for democratization led to a taboo on the word burger (citizen) as typical of petty bourgeois conservatism. This period actually saw an explosion of civic activism though: the Netherlands became the mecca of social movements, from pacifists to environmentalists, feminists and urban squatters. Essential in this neo-republican fervour was civic education: labelled politieke vorming (political education), it was an integral part of criticism of the existing political system and the drive to emancipate citizens.20 The re-emergence at the turn of the 1990s of âcitizenshipâ was connected with concerns about political apathy, citizens behaving like passive consumers of the welfare state, and declining social cohesion.21 Against the backdrop of the âdebate about multiculturalismâ, Education Minister Arie Slob now admonishes schools to make their civic education programmes more concrete.22
Underlying the discourse of civic competencies is an assumption of consensus about the democratic values to be transmitted. This consensus though is an illusion. What constitutes democratic citizenship is the subject of fierce and never-ending debate. These discussions show a deep dissensus about who is going to tell what story about democracy to whom. The acrimonious culture wars in Dutch society after 2002 illustrate this. Is democratic education about a liberal individualistic culture, to which everyone should assimilate, or is it about the acceptance of difference? Should immigrants be educated in western values, or should native-born Europeans be raised to multicultural values? There is no sign of these disputes ending anywhere soon.
This however does mean that arguments for citizenship education directly relate to historical and current debates about democracy. Teaching democracy often leads to an articulation of what it means to the speaker, and forces oneâs opponents to make their conception of democracy explicit. Conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck points out the importance of these moments of articulation.23 Classical conceptual history still concentrates on sources such as dictionaries and articulations at the top level of political theorists and high politics.
In t...