ABSTRACT
Contemporary discussion of citizenship in the UK must start with Bernard Crick, David Blunkett’s guru and former tutor (as the Campaign for Real Education (CRE 2000) recently described him). Crick chaired the Citizenship Advisory Group (see CAG 1998), and the subsequent Advisory Group on Citizenship for 16-19 year-olds (see FEFC 2000). Crick is an old-fashioned republican drawing on a vision of citizenship originating in classical Greece, a vision most perfectly articulated in the funeral oration of Pericles reported by Thucydides:
our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters; for, unlike any other nation, . . . we Athenians are able to judge at all events if we cannot originate, and, instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all. . . . It was by courage, sense of duty, and a keen feeling of honour in action that men were enabled to win all this, and . . . no personal failure in an enterprise could make them consent to deprive their country of their valour, but they laid it at her feet as the most glorious contribution that they could offer.
