ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of citizenship and education for democracy in England. It explains the backdrop to New Labour’s initiative in 2000, and locates the particular form that citizenship education took within a historical context. This it attributes to economic and social policies that sought to increase the ‘responsibility’ of individuals and ensure that schools became sites for social regeneration and renewal, countering the worrying trend towards what some saw as civic and political apathy. The chapter suggests, however, that the role given to schools to develop young citizens may mean that they are now charged with an insurmountable task. Many of the problems facing what Crick (QCA, 1998 ) called ‘modern democracies’ may actually originate in combined issues: the decline in power of the nation state with the growth of global capitalism; the problem of developing a cohesive society where, as Putman ( 2000 ) put it, people ‘bowl alone’ or see themselves as belonging to disparate ethnic groups with multiple transnational identities; and the problem of a lack of trust in politicians and the political process.
