ABSTRACT
However, it is not only in the United States that civic educators are remarkably active. In Australia, civic education is one of three major elements of a national educational reform program-aboriginal studies and Australian history are the other two. In that country, the most soul searching questions about citizenship are being asked. "What is it to be an Australian today, and what will it be to be an Australian tomorrow?" asks Eric Willmot, the 1986 Boyer lecturer. He also asks whether Australia could "establish that a modern polygeneric society, a society created from people of mixed origins, can successfully exist in the midst of older indigenous societies?" (Willmot, 1987). In Hong Kong, the introduction of a major program of civic education in the schools is part of the transition process-from being a colony to becoming a special autonomous region of the People's Republic of China in 1997 (Lee, 1987; Ting, 1987). In Canada, there have been several impressive projects in the related fields of civic education and human rights education, of which the Political Education Project of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg is one (Osborne, 1986, 1987). In West Germany, there is a tradition of interest in "Politische Bildung," and there has been a high level of formal support for civic education, including a national Center for Political Education and a national Research Center. Even in England, where there is a whole history of formal opposition to civic education in schools, the national Programme for Political Education, launched in 1974, managed to establish its key concept of political literacy securely enough for it to be central to the programs for multicultural education recommended by the national commission chaired by Lord Swann (Lister, 1987; Reid, 1984; Swann, 1985). Even the present government, a mixture of conservative restoration, and of cultural revolution, while opposing political education in schools, advocates the spread of economic literacy, and of citizenship. In the Soviet Union, the policy of perestroika will inevitably involve a reconstruction of citizenship. In opening itself to the world, the People's Republic of China is opening itself to other political cultures, and to developments in its own political culture.
