ABSTRACT
Dating back to the role of the individual in the Greek city state – with ideas of rights, of duties to society, of equality before the law, of the privileges and responsibilities of political office, of the processes of democracy and governance – citizenship retains a conceptual resonance today that would be recognisable to the Greeks. Though citizenship has a place in the ancient as well as modern history of ideas, the contemporary world in which citizenship is debated would be far less than familiar to the Greeks. Paramount here would be the notion that human beings were inherently equal, a notion at odds with the kinds of philosophy we find in Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Politics. Yet even in antiquity, tensions existed between whether citizenship applied to a narrow city state (the polis) or whether a wider notion of citizenship across states, the universal state (cosmopolis, from which we derive cosmopolitan) was a more unifying definition, stressing what human beings share rather than the geopolitical differences of city states by which they were divided in culture, language and religion. Today, challenged in national contexts where national identity is uncertain, and in global terms, where religious traditions encourage transnational allegiances, where cosmological and theological identity are more important than relations with earthly states, citizenship lacks consensus in both definition and sociopolitical application. Citizenship thus retains some of its characteristics from antiquity in contemporary context and, as it was in ancient times, it remains a contested concept. That in part is what gives the subject its educational, sociocultural, political and philosophical vitality. Learning to Teach Citizenship in the Secondary School engages with the theoretical and practical elements of a highly vital multidisciplinary subject, providing expert perspectives and pedagogical guidance for student teachers on how to engage children and young people with ancient notions of citizenship in contemporary context.
