n a briefing paper, the Parliament’s Think Tank describes citizenship education as being concerned with ‘establishing common values, and fostering certain behaviour and attitudes, both locally and in the EU’. Previously, the Council of Europe’s Standing Conference of Ministers of Education called for ‘a more proactive and European approach to the provision of quality citizenship education at all levels of education.’ It wants a new legal framework to compel states to ‘prepare learners to live as active citizens in a democratic society, where democratic values and competences are increasingly recognised as an important element of personal and professional development.’
Citizenship education is distinct from ‘civics’, that is, instruction in national systems of government and legislation. Despite the use of the word ‘education’, what is being proposed by the European Parliament is a political project that speaks to the concerns of an EU elite far more than the educational needs of the continent’s children.
Through studying subjects such as music, literature and history, children gain important knowledge as well as an understanding of their nation’s story and culture. For this reason, the American educationalist E. D. Hirsch writes, ‘Schooling in a democracy is not just schooling. It’s also citizen making.’ But longstanding elite antipathy to the nation state has led teachers to distance education from ‘citizen making’. As I have explored previously, in countries such as the UK, Australia and the US, the history curriculum consists of disparate topics often focused on shameful incidents, rather than telling a balanced national story. Children grow up without the shared cultural reference points that transcend divisions of race, gender and sexuality. As Hirsch notes, ‘we’re left with divided citizens who cannot communicate with one another, because they don’t have enough knowledge in common.’
National citizenship has long been viewed with suspicion. Campaigners deride those who defend national borders, or express pride in their country, as old fashioned and racist. ‘We are living in a global age,’ declared British sociologist Gerard Delanty in 2000, where ‘citizens are exposed to a far greater range of influences, resources and dangers than was formerly the case.’ At the turn of the millennium, the apparent economic success of globalization appeared to confirm that national citizenship was outdated and children needed to be taught to look beyond national borders in order to understand issues such as social justice, environmental sustainability and multiculturalism.
The widespread emergence of citizenship education from this time reflects two seemingly contradictory concerns among policy makers and educators. First, there is unease that traditional school subjects continue to promote an outdated sense of national identity. Citizenship education represents a conscious move to steer children away from such associations. Second, there is a growing concern with social exclusion and that youngsters are dislocated from democratic participation. What results, as we see with the EU, is a drive to engineer new loyalties through the promotion of global citizenship.
In the UK, citizenship education was introduced by the New Labour government which took office in 1997. It was viewed as a means of promoting civic responsibility and an antidote to the individualism of the previous Conservative government. A key report at this time ambitiously declared that the aim of citizenship education was, ‘no less than a change in the political culture of this country both nationally and locally’. Citizenship became part of the English National Curriculum in 2001.
Following a 2007 review, a revised curriculum set out that all young people should become ‘responsible citizens who make a positive contribution to society’. It introduced a new theme, ‘Identities and Diversity: living together in the UK’ which involved ‘appreciating that identities are complex’, ‘considering the connections between the UK, Europe and the rest of the world’ and ‘exploring the diverse national, regional, ethnic and religious cultures, groups and communities in the UK and the connections between them.’ This represented a shift towards global, rather than national, citizenship with an emphasis on ‘diversity’ rather than unity.
As an essentially abstract concept, ‘global citizenship’ can never unite a population in the same way as the more concrete reality of belonging to a nation state. Indeed, global citizenship undermines the nation state - the foundational democratic unit - by making it seem less significant than transnational institutions on one hand, or local action on the other. Promoting global citizenship through education risks exacerbating problems of social exclusion and democratic disengagement that such lessons are meant to address.
In 2013, following a change of government in the UK, the citizenship curriculum was again re-drafted. Its aim now is to ‘foster pupils’ keen awareness and understanding of democracy, government and how laws are made and upheld.’ It has a more national focus but remains an ill-defined subject that encompasses topics from personal financial planning to ‘how laws are shaped and enforced’. Such broad content, combined with a focus on practical, local activities, makes the subject open to the different political enthusiasms of individual schools and teachers.
The EU has clearly identified citizenship education as an important means of influencing the next generation. It wants schools to provide lessons in ‘European integration’ on the basis that ‘insufficient knowledge of or ignorance about the EU and poor understanding of its functioning’ is to blame for the EU’s lack of popular support. But using the school curriculum for ‘establishing common values, and fostering certain behaviour and attitudes’ is a political project that undermines the possibility for free intellectual inquiry and limits students’ freedom of conscience.
Through subjects such as literature and history, education has always played a role in ‘citizen making’. Citizenship education, in contrast, is a response to elite unease with this national project. However, it can only ever exacerbate the very problems it is intended to resolve.
