Abstract
Citizenship education is a popular and contested phenomenon in liberal democratic societies. It is difficult to imagine a school system that does not contribute to the preservation and improvement of society through education of democratic, responsible and tolerant citizens. On the contrary, the execution of such education is full of caveats, controversy and resistance. This special issue examines the inherent tensions of citizenship education in a variety of national contexts (France, England, Sweden and Quebec) and from several theoretical and empirical perspectives. In this introductory article, we present an overview of the debates on citizenship education in academia and the media and propose a conceptual framework for the categorisation and comparison of the diversity of practices that relate to citizenship education. This model is then used to guide a brief presentation of the remaining articles in the special issue.
Keywords
The question of citizenship education
A perennial debate
In Book VII of The Republic, Plato (1993) presents his theory of education. At the age of 10, all boys and girls are to be separated from their parents to commence a long journey of intellectual and aesthetic development in gymnastics, music, religion and poetry (age 10–20 years), then mathematics (age 20–30 years) and finally philosophy (age 30–35 years). This last stage is reserved for a minority of the most gifted in each generation, since Plato considered philosophy to be the highest and most demanding form of knowledge. This small elite of philosophers, the so-called guardians, are the designated rulers of the state.
Plato’s theory of education is profoundly elitist and meritocratic. It is also deeply communitarian and state-centred in that the perceived main purpose of education is to provide the state with good citizens who will serve the public, in office as well as on the battlefields. The forming of such citizens can only take place if the students are isolated from parents, family and other private relations, according to Plato, because good citizenship presupposes complete subordination to the higher good of the society and the state. Only when the pupils’ familial ties and loyalties have been severed can they become true servants of the state.
No 21st century academic or politician, excepting the occasional totalitarian socialist, would support Plato’s stern views on education. Nevertheless, Plato still represents a very relevant, albeit extreme, example of the defining link between citizenship education and the state. Education serves many purposes, but the forming of citizens is an enterprise normally carried out by the state (through public schools) and for the (benefit of the) state. Its main end is to reproduce a political order through the forming of future generations with a desired set of qualities. Patriotism, obedience and fear of God are consistently promoted citizen virtues throughout history, though contemporary liberal citizenship demands have managed to evolve beyond strict mechanical complaisance.
In Plato’s theory of education, there is no obvious tension between citizens’ allegiance to the state and their other memberships and identities because the purpose of education is to replace the latter with the former. In modern liberal societies, however, the tension is prevalent and constantly debated. Liberal societies are defined by their acclaimed respect for diversity and individual liberty, which means that citizenship is just one of many memberships that people identify with and cherish (Levinson, 1999). Liberal societies are also defined by their opposition to state paternalism and ideological indoctrination, which means that schools must respect and recognise the individuality of each pupil. Will Galston (1991: 248–249) makes the point succinctly: Civic education poses a special difficulty for liberal democracy. Most forms of government, classical and contemporary, have tacitly embraced the Aristotelian [and Platonian] understanding of politics as the architectonic human association to which all others – family, tribe, economic grouping, even religious denomination – are rightly subordinated. […] In liberal societies, by contrast, the resolution of such conflicts is far less clear-cut. Reservations against public authority in the name of individual autonomy, parental rights, and religious conscience are both frequent and respectable.
The essential questions of citizenship education today are related to the tension that Galston identifies. How should schools inculcate the public virtues of citizenship without infringing on the diversity of private beliefs, ways of life and cultural identities of the young pupils and their parents? How can schools help create a coherent and integrated body of citizens while respecting individual liberty and the pupils’ and their parents’ right to choose? There is no absolute answer to these questions, only compromises between competing ideals that change over time and across contexts.
The articles collected in this special issue all address the inherent tensions of citizenship education. Expounding on a range of phenomena and theoretical perspectives, the articles highlight not only problems associated with citizenship education but also its fundamental importance – the associated political discourse is as relevant today as it was in Plato’s Greece. In fact, policy interest in these matters has steadily increased over the last two decades. Globalisation and internationalisation have necessitated efforts to prepare for a world that is more interdependent and mobile than ever before. Large-scale migration and increasing cultural diversity drive a renewed need to locate and (re)define the binding elements that unite the members of a society into a true citizenry. Segregation and social inequality – not to mention riots by disgruntled members of society – seem to call for a more inclusive and egalitarian political community. As a result, we see constant debates on the meaning and value of citizenship and the creation of reform programmes designed to realise such visions through education.
The objective of this special issue is to offer a collection of case studies that combine theoretical discussion and empirical analysis of existing policies in four different contexts: Sweden, England, France and Quebec (Canada). A related and overarching objective is to show that citizenship education research, a field that cuts across many different disciplines, has a lot to gain from integrating two approaches that too often seem to lead almost completely separate lives: philosophy of education (as found in political and education theory) and the empirical analysis of educational policy and practice. In this introductory article, we present a brief overview of the debates on citizenship education in academia (theoretical and normative issues) and in the media (concrete takes on schooling). We then suggest a conceptual framework for categorising and comparing different forms of, and activities in, citizenship education, which is then used to present the remaining articles.
Country selection
The four countries that are discussed in this special issue have not been arbitrarily selected. We started off by attempting to deduce a ‘space of policy approaches’ that ended up looking something like Figure 1.
A space of potential policy approaches.
The idea was then to contrast experiences that were relatively differently positioned in the identified space. Following a somewhat typecast initial postulation, we hypothesised that France would tend to gravitate towards the monistic position, Quebec (Canada) towards the multicultural position and England towards the market liberalism position, with Sweden somewhere in the middle but standing out for a relatively recent and relatively notable market-liberal shift. Even though things (unsurprisingly) turned out to be rather less tidily arranged, this four-way juxtaposition and comparison effort proved thought-provoking – in part surely because comparisons between different citizenship education contexts are notably rare (an aspect we will return to).
Citizenship education on the academic agenda
Citizenship education presupposes a reference ideal against which educational practices can be measured – a vision of the Good Citizen. The first question of citizenship education, then, concerns the nature of this envisioned citizen. What qualities and virtues should he or she have? What kind of society is he or she supposed to reproduce? What collective values and norms should he or she be ready to defend? The envisioned/desired citizen is not just the product of lofty ideals, however. He or she is also the product of the challenges and demands that anticipated societal changes will impose on rising generations. Very often, calls for invigorated and improved citizenship education programmes originate in perceived external threats, opportunities or turns of event that somehow affect the parameters of good citizenship. Put differently, citizenship education is as much a reactive response to societal change as a progressive means to accomplish envisioned societal changes.
Contemporary scholars of education often state that the highest ambition of education is to create democratically spirited citizens. Behind the generic term ‘democratic’ one normally finds a plethora of associated and more specific values: respect for the beliefs and opinions of others, the ability to cooperate with fellow citizens, a commitment to the rights of others and a general sense of justice. Democratic citizens should also possess the ability to think critically and independently and by these means form their own opinions. Citizens should further possess factual knowledge of the political system, the constitution and laws – including their own rights and duties – and about the history and the workings of society in general.
In liberal theory and practice, personal autonomy is often held to be more important than any other single value, as it encompasses many of the qualities otherwise attributed to democracy, such as critical thinking and independence, and with a firm focus on the individual capabilities that liberals cherish. The autonomous citizen is detached and independent from social conventions and loyalties in the sense that he or she is able continually to revise and reassess his or her commitments and way of life (see Ackerman, 1980: 139–140; Raz, 1986: 369). The ideal of autonomy can be and often is traced back to Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill whose liberal philosophies relied heavily on the enlightenment ideals of emancipation, individuality, self-improvement and self-realisation. Contemporary scholars who write in the spirit of Mill, such as Harry Brighouse (1998, 2006) and Brian Barry (2001), argue that liberal citizens should be citizens who confer their loyalty to the state not by default or by socialisation but after careful rational consideration and subsequent voluntary choice; citizens whose loyalty has to be earned by good governance and representation - not by shared nationality.
Although most scholars seem to agree that a general capacity for autonomous thought and action is a legitimate ideal to strive for, the more precise meaning and realisation of this ideal have been the subject of vigorous debate and controversy over the last decades. Personal autonomy, some critics argue, is not only an unrealistic but actually an undesirable ideal. One type of objections focuses on the disintegrating effects of a citizenship that celebrates not the common bonds between fellow citizens but rather the freedom and capacity of citizens to lead independent lives. Proponents of the integrative ambitions of citizenship stress the necessity to have shared values and norms – a ‘civil religion’ to speak with Rousseau – that unite citizens. That kind of unity, it is argued, creates citizens who are liable to make sacrifices for one another and to assume responsibility not just for their own lives and their families but also for their neighbours and society writ large. Fostering such common bonds and commitments is not just legitimate but necessary to maintain a viable liberal democratic state (cf. Galston, 1991, 2002; Callan, 1997).
A different type of objection targets the implicit discrimination built into the autonomy-maximising ideal of citizenship education. The autonomous life, these critics assert, is not a universal or neutral value, as it represents a typically Western, modernist, secular and/or Protestant way of life that favours individualism over solidarity, self-sufficiency over collaboration and rationality over traditional beliefs and world views (Taylor, 1985, 1994; Parekh, 1993, 2000). The proliferation of this autonomous way of life will encroach on other ways of life that are perfectly compatible with the liberal state, albeit not with the liberal lifestyle (Kukhatas, 1992; Galston, 2002; Pybas, 2004).
Real-life examples of conflicts over the ideal of the liberated, rational and autonomous citizen abound in contemporary society. In the United States, the trend among conservative religious groups such as Evangelical Christians to opt out of public schooling so that their children will not be exposed to godless ideas and lifestyles is a widely and hotly debated issue. So is the related phenomenon of home schooling – a rapidly growing trend among deeply devout parents in the United States who desire for their children a solid Christian upbringing (as opposed to the secular versions offered in public schools). In Europe, such conflicts often concern Muslim minorities that seek exemptions from dress codes (e.g. the prohibition of the hijab) and/or from certain school subjects (most notably world religions, sex education and physical education). They also concern aboriginal populations, such as the First Nations in Canada and the Sami of northern Scandinavia, who avail themselves of a level of educational autonomy to protect their culture and language from the eroding influence of mainstream liberal society. A similar situation is sometimes found in minority nations like Quebec, Scotland, Catalonia and the Basque country where separate schooling systems are established to preserve a distinct culture and language. The relation between religion and citizenship education in France is analysed in depth by Isabelle Saint-Martin in this issue. The question of nationalism and education is discussed by Kevin McDonough and Andrée-Anne Cormier (also in this issue).
The business end of citizenship education – the actual creation of citizens by means of instruction in school – is as complex and contested as the (citizenship) ideal it is to help realise. The legitimacy of the end product is contingent on the means by which it was brought about: a democratic citizenry cannot be created through coercion, an emancipated and autonomous citizenry cannot be created through indoctrination and so on. Much of the debate focuses on questions of power over, and responsibility for, education – and more specifically on the often conflicting interests of the state, the parents and the pupils themselves. This intractable three-way dilemma is normally framed using the familiar terminology of public–private boundary drawing, that is, as a difficult but necessary distinction between the mandate of public schools to foster good citizens who can contribute to society and the parental right to raise their children as they see fit.
Mill’s views on this matter, deriving from his typically liberal defence of the neutral state and the best interest of the child, are well attested. He was strongly opposed to the ideal of public education as he believed it to be a ‘mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another’ in order to please ‘the predominant power in government – whether this is a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation’ (Mill, 1998: 158). To avoid such ‘despotism of the mind’, he contended, education should be the right and responsibility of parents. At the same time, Mill recognised the possibility that parents might themselves come to act as despots or on some other way fail in their role as educators and guardians. In such cases, paternalistic intervention by the state to aid suffering children should not only be permissible but also be a moral obligation (Mill, 1998: 157).
Interestingly, Mill’s position offers support both for libertarians who argue against state paternalism and intervention in (private) matters of education and for egalitarians who stress every child’s right to equal opportunities and an unfenced future. The libertarian critique of public education and common schools comes in different forms. Sometimes it is advanced as a cost-effective way to manage schools and improve results (Chubb and Moe, 1990). In other cases, it is presented as a principled defence of private liberty and minimalistic government (Ruderman and Goodwin, 2000). Neither offers much support for citizenship education since the whole point is to safeguard the private, familial sphere from public intrusions (Fernández and Sundström, 2011: 373). A more accommodating position is found among scholars who favour the idea of citizenship education but in a diversified manner, so that minority nations and aboriginal and religious minorities may preserve and reproduce beliefs and ways of life that would otherwise be threatened by mainstream public schooling. This position is defended both by conservatives who fear the deracinating effects of liberal individualism and moral relativism and by multiculturalists who seek to protect minority cultures from assimilation. While many of these scholars oppose standardised state-designed moulds for citizenship education, they defend the need for schools to convey not only formal and neutral knowledge, but also the cultural and moral artefacts that help perpetuate particularistic norms and belief systems.
The centre stage of the debate on citizenship education is not to be found in the libertarian, conservative or multicultural camps of academia but in the mainstream liberal domains (Fernández and Sundström, 2011: 378–379). The key issue here is not the potential involvement of the state but the indoctrinating effects of citizenship (and other forms of) education. Is it permissible for schools to inculcate substantial values (such as, say, gender equality or anti-totalitarianism) in the pupils? Liberals with a strong belief in the Millian ideal of state neutrality argue that schools should help citizens-in-spe to develop an ability for critical thought and autonomous choice, so that they can form their own opinions, but that it must never tell pupils how to choose, or what to choose, by promoting certain norms, beliefs and ways of life. The liberal school is liberal precisely because of its resistance to indoctrination and its stalwart defence of the free mind (Ackerman, 1980; Flathman, 1996; Brighouse, 1998, 2006).
Liberals of a more perfectionist brand, to adopt Rawlsian terminology (Rawls, 1971), challenge this view, arguing that neutral schooling is both impossible and misleading as a guiding ideal. The provision of an open future of relevant and meaningful choices requires not only a capacity for autonomous choice but the whole system of references and norms that cultures consist of. A society with its own democratic norms and conceptions of the good life has a legitimate duty to convey these ideals to rising generations of citizens because they preserve the highest values of that particular society and so helps the citizens-to-be to live prosperous and good lives in that society (Gutmann, 1999: 37–39; cf. Macedo, 1995, 2000; Callan, 2000).
Viable or not, explicit deviations from the principle of neutrality have to be thoroughly motivated in liberal democracies, since schools are not expected to indoctrinate pupils. The case of democracy in education is illustrative. Ideally, young citizens will realise, using ‘impartial’ information and personal inferences, that democracy is superior to other forms of government. Schools may encourage such discovery by applying democratic methods in teaching (e.g. by letting pupils participate in decision-making and by encouraging them to collaborate). In Sweden, public schools have done this, or at least aspired to do it, for a long time. Even so, the support for democracy is in decline among young Swedes according to different polls (Lindberg and Svensson, 2012). In an effort to reverse this trend, the Swedish (social democratic) government launched an ambitious information campaign a decade ago, with the aim to educate Swedish pupils about the atrocities of Nazism before and during the Second World War. The campaign was met by accusations that the government was trying to indoctrinate pupils and that the neglect of equally horrendous acts by communist regimes was politically suspect (a new information campaign on the atrocities of communism is currently underway).
Questions of this kind are always present in teaching – and notably so in citizenship education – because teaching presupposes selection and selection presupposes a bias. What to present and how to present it are frequent points of controversy in citizen-informing subjects like history. Marc-André Ethier et al. discuss this question in a probing study of history textbooks in Quebec in this issue.
Citizenship education on the media agenda
As the contribution by Isabelle Côté et al. (this issue) makes plain, the societal raison d’être and citizenship impact of schooling are very differently debated topics in the three countries covered by the Schooling Debates Database (SDD), 1 and an observable level of debate idiosyncrasy tends to determine and constrict the scope of the debate in each country. If we assume that media debate patterns reflect the wider societal discourse on a given topic, this is an interesting if not wholly surprising finding. As we have suggested, the liberalisation of the schooling system and how it might affect the reproduction of Good Citizens is not some easily overlooked or ignored policy byway but a main, one might even say existential, issue. True enough, it manages to engage a range of different debaters, but the intriguing thing is what those debaters tend to focus on. With so much at stake, and with so many different types of stakeholders and pundits taking to the soapboxes, one could be forgiven for expecting a fairly generous discourse spread. In the event, a notable level of path dependency is in evidence – one that narrows and makes idiosyncratic the scope of the debate in each country.
Figure 2 illustrates the point. We here take note of all SDD-included articles (spanning more than 10 years) that discuss one or more of 12 pre-established schooling liberalisation dimensions and then (adjusting for the different total number of articles/records per country) compare debate patterns. Some differences are striking, for example the apparent lack of English interest in teaching models as a liberalisation dimension worth taking note of, or the relatively wide-ranging debate in France as compared to Sweden or (most notably) England.
Country comparison of discussed dimensions (normalised percentages).
SDD analysis indicates that debates are also constricted in an absolute sense. The database provides for a high level of granularity across a broad canvas of (preconceived) potential debate opportunities, and this makes the narrowness (or contextualised specificity) of the real-world debates all the more arresting (see Figure 3). As Éthier et al. (this issue) show, for instance, textbooks and other teaching aids can materially impact opportunities to impart citizen virtues, yet for whatever reason media interest in this aspect appears negligible. Board responsibility and questions of pupil admission dominate the agenda – possibly to the detriment of other potentially just as valid discourses (though causality cannot be affirmed by SDD data).
Percentage of articles (per country) discussing pre-conceptualised liberalism dimensions.
This example of how a tenable theoretical point is not reflected in the general debate is perhaps telling. Scholars appear relatively disinclined to partake in the general debate about ‘systemic’ schooling issues. In Sweden, 5.4% of the recorded and coded SDD entries for that country (n = 797) were made by scholars; in England the equivalent figure was 2.6% (n = 420). France stands out with 13.9% of all entries (n = 520) having been penned by scholars. It stands to reason that active scholars will improve chances that scholarly positions (whether presented as disinterested research findings or as partisan standpoints) will be picked up and potentially be amplified in the general debate (cf. Fernández and Sundström, 2011: 381).
To study different countries should bring cross-pollination opportunities (and opportunities to break possibly detrimental discourse path dependencies) as local debates are seeded with complementing experiences, but SDD data (covering more than 10 years) indicate that such seeding is exceedingly rare and also skewed, as the discussed, or at least mentioned, ‘other’ country’s approach is typically presented in an offhand and much simplified fashion.
Citizenship education on the policy agenda
Liberal democracies all have to face similar decisions about basic schooling system parameters; they all have to consider the resulting schooling system’s impact on the fundamental ability to safeguard and induce preferred societal ideals and governance tenets; they all have to weigh whether and to what extent such safeguarding and induction are in fact variables worth heeding – in absolute terms as well as relative to other conceivable goods (e.g. maximising future employability). This way, different ideals and differing experiences should be worth comparing even while actual ideals vary. Given this, we believe that the relative dearth of policy comparisons (by policy-makers as well as by the media, see above) across different national contexts represent opportunities missed.
In recent years, the ‘neoliberal turn’, as discussed by Lundahl and Olson (this issue), has become a potent change agent across much of the Western world. This influential discourse has come to challenge notions of a prevailing incompatibility between the different national schooling contexts, as it has proved possible to wedge the market cornerstone of freedom of choice (primarily on the part of pupils and parents) into schooling debates regardless of context-specific antecedents. By necessity, this has also reinvigorated discussions about how to weigh this freedom against things like societal atomisation and its potential impact on the long-term viability of liberal society itself. As evidenced by the 2010 pre-election debate in Britain, where the Conservative party held up Sweden as a model for ‘free schools’, policy information, and possible inspiration, in this field appears more ‘liquid’ than when it comes to core citizenship education ideals.
Policy spaces: state and society in citizenship education
As this special issue demonstrates, ‘citizenship education’ is a broadly accommodating policy term. A lot of attention will naturally fix on schools’ central teaching mission and how citizenship education can formally be taught. Such discussions include which citizen virtues should be taught (Saint-Martin, this issue), how they can be taught (McDonough and Cormier, this issue) and what material should be used to aid these endeavours (Éthier et al., this issue) to optimise results. However, it can also refer to how schools can promote democratic skills in practice (Lundahl and Olson, this issue) and opportunities to engender a citizen-fostering democratic ‘climate’ in school (Keating and Benton, this issue). Citizenship education can further refer to initiatives to foster preferred ideals outside of school (Birdwell et al., this issue). Regardless of the specifically discussed context(s), the policy discourse will also, by necessity, touch upon core societal ideals – that is after all what is supposed to be inculcated – as well as aspects that will in some fashion help or thwart efforts to disseminate them and have them endure.
To juxtapose articles that home in on different aspects of citizenship education, as has been done in this special issue, helps us typologise policy foci. This, in turn, will lead to a cleaner and more consistent way (Figure 4) to catalogue and present findings connected to the academic, media or policy agendas.
Citizen education – different policy spaces.
In the concluding part of this article, we will make use of the just illustrated classification structure to introduce, in somewhat greater detail, six of the remaining seven special issue articles (the media study having been discussed in a previous section).
Citizenship education in the classroom
How to teach and what to teach in the classrooms are, of course, eternally contested questions. As discussed above, principles of neutrality and objectivity are constantly used to justify or disqualify particular curriculum subjects, not just by academics but also by teachers, politicians and the general public. The precise meaning of neutrality and objectivity in teaching is far from obvious, and every society, theory and educational doctrine seems to have its own way of answering these questions.
One common sense meaning is that neutrality refers to norms that are perceived to be broadly accepted in mainstream national society, regardless of their content. This is seldom what liberal mean when they refer to neutrality, however. Such a definition would undermine the rights of minorities and individuals to be and stay different and would also block reappraisal and change of schooling and society – purely to safeguard social conventions that may be in fact illegitimate from a democratic or other viewpoint.
Another conceptualisation of neutrality is that it applies to the founding principles upon which a societal and political order rests – such as the rule of law, religious liberty, freedom of association, political equality, separation of state and church and so on. The active conveyance of such values by schools would qualify as ‘neutral’ because it sustains a political order that protects no specific way of life but rather a coexistence of many different ways of life that would not have been possible in a different political system. For schools, this version of neutrality implies that they should stick to bedrock norms and avoid private morality issues such as faith and religion. The legacy of laïcité in France, which sustains a strict separation between state and church, has in various ways blocked religion as a public school subject for related reasons.
A third interpretation is that neutrality in teaching can only be achieved or approximated by means of diversification. That is, neutrality should be pursued not by shying away from conspicuous differences but by exposing students to a reasonably full gamut of different beliefs, ways of life and lifestyles. This way, no one norm (be it patriarchy, Christianity, nationalism, liberal ideology, whiteness or heteronormativity or something else completely) will be allowed to predominate. Ideally, such exposure will reflect the diversity in society.
Three of the efforts in this issue explicitly grapple with the meaning of neutrality in teaching (though in different ways). Two articles focus on the classical question how to teach (or when to avoid) controversial subjects like religion and nation(alism). Isabelle Saint-Martin provides a detailed account of the French debate and reforms concerning the place of religion in public schools. The (in)famous affair du foulard, that began in 1989 when three Muslim girls were suspended for refusing to remove their hijabs in class, made France known globally for its ban on conspicuous religious symbols and for its alleged aversion to religious diversity. Saint-Martin’s important contribution explains the historical rationale of the ban and offers an informed description of the many changes that have taken place over the last years and are still ongoing. Her study shows the continuing influence of the norm of laïcité, which was established in the Third Republic and how this norm is widely acknowledged as the guardian of neutrality and objectivity – of, as it were, the universalist spirit of the Revolution. It also analyses the evolving meaning of laïcité against the backdrop of growing religious and other forms of diversity. As Saint-Martin shows, the subject of religion seems to be making its way back into public school curricula and constitutes a, if not the, pivotal aspect of French citizenship education. Citizenship education is intended to create deeper understanding of the country’s religious diversity but also of its Catholic heritage and cultural roots, which are abundantly present in literature, art, music and so on. These changes and the nuances of French laïcité have, with a few exceptions, been left unheeded by Anglophone academic writers, making Saint-Martin’s contribution particularly important.
In Kevin McDonough’s and Andrée-Anne Cormier’s article, the teaching of another controversial subject is under review: nationalism. Drawing on the ongoing theoretical debate about the legitimacy (or not) of patriotic citizenship education, McDonough and Cormier flesh out and defend a middle-ground position that builds on a rigorously developed understanding and assessment of different means and forms of nationalism. The authors show that teaching about nationalism is perfectly compatible with, and valuable to, a functional liberal democratic order. Their original and thought-provoking analysis also illustrates the delicate and contested distinction between the forms of nationalism that are legitimate, liberal and authentic and the forms that are not. They argue that teaching about nationalism in an objective way is both possible and desirable in liberal democracies, as it helps citizens-to-be understand controversies over secession, separatism, autonomy, group rights, bilingualism and so on – issues that are prevalent in many different parts of the world. The argument seems especially relevant in multinational (federal) states where nationalism anchors (formerly) oppressed minorities with legitimate and historical claims to specific territories. Acknowledging the legitimacy of such claims and the existential importance of linguistic and other rights is a potential antidote to the summary dismissal of nationalist movements by majorities who fail to recognise their own privileged positions. The case of Quebec in Canada strikes us as a particularly salient example, given the long history of French Canadians as an isolated minority on a continent of Anglophones. The post-war era has brought about rapid modernisation of French Canadian society in Quebec, especially from the so-called Quiet Revolution in the 1960s onward. In the wake of massive urbanisation, secularisation and liberalisation, the formerly agrarian, orthodox and deeply Catholic culture of French Canadians has gradually been replaced by a more secular and liberal culture centred on the French language and on the province (Quebec) as a territorially and institutionally defined political community.
Democracy as a norm in education for citizenship is far less controversial in liberal societies than either religion or nationalism but brings its own pedagogical challenges. We can think of democratic education as an explicit course subject or as a broader attitude and set of competences that are developed in extracurricular activities such as student councils and committees (see next section). A third alternative is that the democratic perspective is to inform teaching in sister subjects such as history and social science. In a critical analysis of middle- and high-school textbooks, Marc-André Ethier, David Lefrançois and Stéphanie Demers investigate the impact and potential implications of the history programme reforms in Quebec over the last decade. Their analysis begins with the assumption that there are no truly neutral and objective ways to narrate and teach history, as it requires selection and selection unavoidably promotes certain interests and perspectives over others.
Given this, a legitimate method in history teaching (to have it convey aspects of citizenship) is to make selections contingent on the overarching values of citizenship education – for example, critical thought, political literacy and other qualities that are associated with democratic citizenship. The authors specifically emphasise the role of historical agency (the role of individual and collective agents in the course of historical events and developments). Highlighting stories about and actions by individuals such as Spartacus shows pupils that political, social and economic history is not solely dependant on structural conditions alone but (also) made by human beings with interests, passions and visions. Such a claim is by no means uncontroversial, at least not if we by ‘history teaching’ mean objective description and causal explanation of actual events – although this is an epistemological rather than a normative or political point. From a citizenship education perspective, however, Ethier et al.’s argument is both compelling and attractive.
Citizenship education between the classrooms
Schools do not only inculcate civic virtues by means of theoretical teaching. Allowing pupils to take part in democratic processes that influence their own learning situation, and so give them reason genuinely to reflect on actual power structures and channels of influence, will, ideally, induce support for fundamental democratic tenets (cf. Biesta’s (2003) notions of formal and informal democracy education). The problem is that anything more than nominal or symbolic pupil influence will put pressure on the managerial style of individual schools. True democratic processes are by their very nature cumbersome and require patience and specifically devoted resources. Proponents of lean management may well baulk at the required commitments – particularly as the conjectured positive outcomes are difficult to turn into hard metrics.
Lisbeth Lundahl and Maria Olsson (this issue) show that formal democracy education is indeed threatened by efficiency and measurability demands. They point out that such demands have become more strident as a consequence of the marketisation of education and that there is a real risk that student influence is demoted to a purely symbolic status – and that this may, in turn, harm the learning-by-doing notion of formal democracy education.
Lundahl and Olsson also identify an intriguing challenge that follows the introduction of market logics – one that has seldom been the subject for academic scrutiny. The benefits of formal democracy education are in fact relative. Even limited influence in and by democratic bodies in schools may give pupils a level of satisfaction (and by extension added faith in democracy as a system of governance) if there are no alternative channels to compare with. When the schooling system is turned into a market, the pupil is turned into a consumer, and he or she is given real clout when selecting or exiting specific schools. Schools also tend to view pupils as assets to be used to sustain or increase a market share. Manifest consumer power is in this way pitted against the limited or symbolic influence exerted by pupil councils and similar bodies – and the pupils are likely to notice the power discrepancy. We believe that Lundahl and Olsson’s contribution provides food for thought for citizenship education theoreticians, policy-makers and school managers who want genuinely to promote democratic values.
The question, of course, is whether a solid democratic climate in school does indeed produce the positive outcomes that are often hypothesised. Avril Keating and Tom Benton’s analysis makes for sobering reading. In their ambitious explorative study of longitudinal survey data from a complete cohort of young people from a nationally representative sample of 112 maintained schools in England, they attempt to uncover the relationship between (a composite measure of) a democratic school climate and (a composite measure of) social cohesion – a good that is certainly compatible with citizenship education ideals. The possibly dispiriting, and certainly unignorable, finding is that ‘the democratic climate of a school had little or no effect on young people’s attitudes, attachments, and behaviours once other individual and school-level variables were taken into account’. Keating and Benton stress the explorative status of their study and note that previous research contradicts their results, but we suspect that the very fact that a sound and well-supported research effort fails unequivocally to affirm a correlation between a democratic school climate and community cohesion variables will be unsettling enough to proponents of formal and informal democracy education.
Keating and Benton also study whether ‘higher proportions of ethnic diversity in their school community will have a positive effect on the attitudes, behaviours and attachments that are usually associated with community cohesion’ (answer: not really) and whether ‘higher proportions of deprivation in the school community will have a negative effect on the attitudes, behaviours and attachments that are usually associated with community cohesion’ (rather the reverse, but only in some cases, and not consistently). What their results do show consistently is that relationships between predictors and outcomes in this field are fiercely complex and that simple ‘tinkering with the demographic make-up or democratic climate of schools’ will do little to improve matters – perhaps something for politicians to heed.
Citizenship education beyond the classroom
The current coalition government in the United Kingdom has made it a priority to instil a renewed sense of solidarity and empowerment in its citizenry. The 2011 London riots revealed serious tensions in British society and made Cameron’s notion of a Big Society of socially responsible citizens all the more appealing. In an attempt to improve matters, the government created the ‘National Citizen Service’, a 3-week voluntary programme where 16-year-olds were to experience team-building exercises away from home, participate in local community charities and develop and carry out a social action project in their local community – everything with the aim to complement school activities to bolster citizenship virtues. The name of the programme evokes traditional national service institutions – typically in the form of mandatory stints in the national military – and their purported capacity to boost a sense of community spirit (in several countries, the demise of such institutions have been lamented on these very grounds).
Jonathan Birdwell, Ralph Scott and Edward Horley study the effects of the National Citizen Service and how it can be related to more traditional ways to impart citizen virtues via the education system. They find that the results are mixed even though the programme has had a promising start by certain indicators. One problem is the voluntary nature of the programme, where there is a risk that those most in need of it will not attend and social mixing might be limited. On the other hand, making such a programme compulsory might ‘drain the moral force from the activity’ as the authors put it. Another issue is the short time span of the programme – to establish fundamental values by means of a 3-week course is asking a lot. The authors acknowledge the problem but, citing research about similar programmes elsewhere, argue that duration need not be a principal factor in increasing civic responsibility. One solution might be to integrate or at least link the programme with citizenship education in schools.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support by the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research.