ABSTRACT
This chapter has two main aims. The fi rst is to explore, in a preliminary way, the nature of the ideological and pedagogic content of citizenship education in the past, as it was expressed in the school texts of citizenship. The second is to investigate how past texts of citizenship education dealt with issues of gender. We shall argue that citizenship education functioned by constructing and defi ning the nature of political discourse using specifi c models of the polity; and that past confi gurations of the legitimate polity are based upon the dualistic and normative distinction between the public (political) and private (apolitical) sphere. In this way, citizenship education was predicated upon the ideal citizen as the active, publicly and professionally defi ned, male. In effect, the texts of citizenship education echoed Lord Nelson’s famous call for ‘every man to do his duty’ in terms of political and civic activity. Women’s duty (as well as their rights or responsibilities), as we shall argue, either went undiscussed or, commonly, defi ned that duty as inhering only within the private sphere.
