ABSTRACT
Citizenship curricula across the world have traditionally focused on the nation and national institutions, values and legacies as a means of legitimising the nation-state. However, the emergence of alternative institutions (for example, regional and supra-national governance structures) and multiple forms of citizenship have presented a challenge to the traditional, nation-focused, approaches to citizenship education, and prompted much debate in the 1990s and 2000s about the need for, and nature of, ‘post-national’ curricula in a globalising world. Global citizenship education discourses found their way into Japanese and Chinese educational circles in the 1990s and 2000s as both countries undertook major reforms of their education systems, and policy documents and debates about curriculum content and the need for new pedagogical approaches echoed the language circulating in the international arena. New curriculum guidelines implemented in the first decade of the twenty-first century in both China and Japan emphasised the need to develop in students a global outlook, an awareness of, and respect for, other cultures and races, and an understanding of global issues. The coverage of such elements appeared to reflect increasing emphasis on extra-national perspectives, global interdependence, notions of transnational citizenship, regional and global political structures and universal human rights – as opposed to a ‘traditional’ focus on patriotism and the rights and obligations of national citizens (Davies et al. 2005: 75). However, the extent to which Chinese and Japanese curricular changes imply any fundamental adoption of post-national values is questionable.
