ABSTRACT
Citizenship education has a mixed ancestry. On one side of the family, it is the child of voluntarism and grass-roots politics; on the other, it is born of student-centred and experiential education. Voluntarism itself springs from two very different traditions in British social history: philanthropy and political radicalism. The philanthropic tradition is chiefly about ameliorating the plight of the unfortunate, while political radicalism aims to remove the causes that occasioned their plight in the first place. Crudely it is the difference between a soup kitchen and, say, a trade union.
