ABSTRACT
In Democracy and Education John Dewey observed that ‘democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living’ (Dewey, 1966/ 2002: 101). On this view, citizenship education is not simply about politics, it concerns how we live our lives. It concerns ethics because it is not just about how we live our lives, but concerns how we should live our lives. The term ‘Education for Democratic Citizenship’ (EDC) describes how certain people believe we should live, it does not simply denote education about democracy but education for democracy. Such an educational project is committed to the inculcation of particular beliefs and seeks to instill certain values. It fosters loyalty to a particular way of living and promotes certain allegiances. The ‘idea of citizenship-as-outcome reveals a strong instrumental orientation in the idea of citizenship education’ (Biesta and Lawy, 2006: 72) and the ‘transformative’ aims of the citizenship curriculum might be regarded, in McLaughlin’s (2000) terms, as ‘maximal’ not ‘minimal’. The research review of scholarly literature on EDC published between 1995
and 2005, conducted by Osler and Starkey (2005) on behalf of the British Educational Research Association (BERA), acknowledged that citizenship education ‘provokes heated debate and controversy in schools’ with ‘certain critics even questioning whether schools should be engaged in this area of learning’ (Osler and Starkey, 2005: 4). In this chapter I suggest that if citizenship is to be taught in school, teachers must be open with students about the beliefs and values upon which their citizenship education is based. Arguably, to seek to influence a child or young person’s beliefs and values through a particular curriculum without sufficient transparency about the values underpinning that curriculum is to treat such a learner more like a ‘subject’ than a ‘citizen’ (Pike, 2007). This is especially important if Education for Democratic Citizenship does not
so much entail children and young people being encouraged to reflect critically on the different ways of living offered by different political systems as it seeks to induct them into one particular system. In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill points out that, ‘He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice’ (Mill,
1909) and certain interpretations of democratic values have become so ‘customary’ in our society that they are rarely ‘chosen’ (Pike, 2009). Yet it is essential in a liberal, democratic society for students to gain sufficient critical distance from accustomed ways of living. If ‘liberal values permeate the curriculum of the common school generally, and the subject of citizenship in particular’ (Halstead and Pike, 2006: 23) then students should be helped to critically evaluate those values. In this way citizenship education can provide an opportunity for students to reflect on issues, on their own beliefs and values and on the society in which they wish to live. When discussing the aims of citizenship education, Andrew Peterson, in
Chapter 16, notes that young people are to learn certain values, attitudes and skills necessary for political participation and refers to liberal theorist Will Kymlicka (2003), who argues that this entails acquiring a range of dispositions, virtues and loyalties that are inseparable from the practice of democratic citizenship. Peterson’s chapter shows how the ‘civic republican’ tradition, which privileges political participation, was far from declared, open and transparent at the time of the Crick Report even though it is the political philosophy underpinning the Citizenship curriculum. Ian Davies’ chapter (Chapter 3) compares and contrasts the ‘communitarian’ and ‘civic republican’ roots of citizenship and cogently demonstrates that they are far from the ‘either/or’ option they are sometimes thought to be and that it would be a mistake to equate these with the Left or Right on the political spectrum. What is important to note, as far as the analysis in this chapter is concerned, is that curriculum models of education for citizenship derive from certain sets of beliefs (Arthur and Davison, 2002: 30).
