Citizenship and Politicization
Liam Taylor
(The substantive part of the essay is written early on during the PGCE course, the
second part is a reflection on the earlier essay written towards the end of the course.)
Abstract: Citizenship education is concerned with the politicization of young people.
To be political, it is argued, is to be active and to be engaged with power. The Crick
Report defines politics narrowly, as the institutionalised resolution of disputes, and
consequently sees the process of becoming political as the gradual acquisition of the
knowledge, skills and values required to ‘play an effective role in public life’. This
contrasts with the transformative perspective offered by Paulo Freire, who sees
politicization as a shift in consciousness rather than the acquisition of knowledge. A
Freirean approach to citizenship education emphasizes the role of active citizenship
in helping young people arrive at a new way of seeing the world.
Citizenship and Politicization
‘Citizenship’ is a multivalent concept, incorporating notions of community,
identity, democracy, and participation, among others (Kerr, 2003). Underpinning the
diverse and shifting meanings of citizenship education, however, has always been
some understanding of ‘politics’ and ‘the political’. The roots of citizenship education
in the UK can be found in Bernard Crick’s calls for a programme of ‘political
education’ in which learning starts not with ‘good citizenship’ but with ‘politics itself’
(Crick, 2000: 14). Echoing this explicitly political focus, the Advisory Group on
Citizenship – which Crick chaired – identified its central aim as ‘no less than a change
in the political culture of the country’ (Crick, 1998: 7). In this context, one of the core
aims of citizenship education can be seen as the politicization of young people; or, in
the words of the Programme of Study, to help pupils ‘to become informed, critical,
active citizens who have the confidence and conviction to work collaboratively, take
action and try to make a difference in their communities and the wider world’ (QCA,
2008).
1
It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that relatively little research has been done
into the nature of politicisation or the development of political thinking in young
people. Assessment levels in citizenship have been developed without detailed
consideration of how progress can be measured or even what it would look like
(Rowe, 2005). Part of the problem, I will argue, is a general reluctance to interrogate
the meanings of ‘politics’ and ‘the political’. As a result, the process of ‘becoming
political’ has been conceived as the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and loosely
defined ‘values’, rather than as qualitatively different ways of seeing the world. With
particular emphasis the work of Paulo Freire, I hope to show how a more critical
approach to the meaning of politics draws our attention towards politicization as a
transformation in consciousness through praxis. This leads to a reconsideration of the
importance of active citizenship, which I argue is the primary arena of political
learning. The aim of teaching is only partly to transfer knowledge; perhaps more
importantly, it is about creating compelling political experiences which lead pupils
towards new ways of seeing.
Taking seriously Crick’s injunction to ‘start with politics itself’, let us begin
with an exploration of the meanings of ‘politics’ and ‘the political’. I am concerned
here with politics in its broadest sense, as it may be applied not just to events and
institutions, but also to actions, texts, processes and discourse. Something is political,
I believe, in so far as it fulfils two criteria. Firstly, it must in some way be involved in
a process of making the world. It need not be consciously political in intent, nor must
it be clearly political in form; indeed, politics is at its most powerful when it is most
hidden from view (cf. Lukes, 2005). But it must intervene actively in the world, even
if only to reproduce the status quo1. Politics is thus socially active. Secondly, the
political can be distinguished from other forms of social activity in that it engages
with, through and against power. Power, of course, is ubiquitous, and permeates all
forms of social activity to some extent; but we may reasonably say that a social act
becomes more political the more deeply it is imbricated with power. We find the
political wherever, and so far as, we find human struggles to make, navigate and
transform uneven landscapes of power.
1
Note that active disengagement, for example voting abstention, can also be considered political in this
sense
2
Politics, according to this definition, is far broader than conventional usages of
the term suggest. When we see politics as inherent in any activity which is both active
and power-laden, we start to find the political in places far beyond parliament and the
polling booth. Politics takes place in the boardroom and the office, the park and the
supermarket, the church and the mosque, the living room and the kitchen – and, let us
not forget, the school. To become political is, in the first instance, to become attuned
to the politics of everyday life, and to locate mundane struggles over such things as
pay, housework and public space within these broader landscapes of power. It is also,
crucially, to recognise contingency; that is, to see existing arrangements as the
outcome of struggle and agency, in the constant process of being made and remade. It
is thus to develop an awareness of one’s own capacity for agency, to be able to
intervene as an active subject in the historical process.
When we understand politics in this way, our attention is drawn to the ways
in which politicisation is about developing new ways of seeing. By analogy, we might
draw a contrast between a two-dimensional and a three-dimension apprehension of
reality. The ‘apolitical’ individual is not isolated from politics; he is inescapably
impacted by politics and by power, which affect his work, his home, his community,
his family, his hopes, his wants, his fears, even his very sense of self (Foucault, 1980).
But he does not perceive these things as political, as open to contestation; they appear
to him rather as a two-dimensional collage, which he may observe, perhaps rearrange,
but which he is largely powerless to alter or transform. The ‘politicised’ individual, by
contrast, perceives the social world in three dimensions; he can travel through and
around it, see objects from different perspectives, move them between foreground and
background, mould and sculpt them, and through his location within the world he is
able to make it anew. He will, no doubt, need knowledge of the world in order to
interpret it; he will require, too, the necessary skills to shape it in ways that he desires.
But the fundamental transformation that has taken place in the politicised individual is
not the acquisition of knowledge and skills; rather, it is a transformation in seeing, in
perception, in consciousness.
The Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire articulates a similar view in his
attempt to develop a ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ (1970, 1973). His work can be read
as an extended meditation on the learning process through which, in his formulation,
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the ‘dehumanised’ individual comes to see herself as a historical Subject – capable of
achieving liberation and thus regaining her humanity.
For Freire, the political
encompasses any situation in which a person or group of persons exercise power over
others (McCowan, 2006). Education proceeds through a process of ‘decodification’
by which deeper meanings and power relations begin to be perceived; it cannot be
anything except political. Moreover, Freire adopts a self-consciously utopian stance in
which politics is seen as the struggle to move beyond division and achieve human
emancipation. In this context, education is used to overcome injustice and oppression;
it has an explicitly liberationist and transformative purpose.
For Freire, politicization is conceived of as a process of conscientização
(‘conscientization’), as the individual passes through stages of magical and naïve
consciousness before ultimately achieiving ‘critical consciousness’. He therefore
supports the view advanced here that politicization is about a perspectival shift. The
process of political development, according to Freire, is not about gaining knowledge
of some objectively observed reality; instead, it is about arriving at a new subjective
understanding of reality and its contradictions. Freire is less concerned with
knowledge or skills than with perception: ‘in problem-posing education, people
develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which
and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality,
but as a reality in process, in transformation’ (Freire, 1970: 64). Indeed, the learner in
only able to intervene critically in reality once she has first understood herself ‘as a
subject in a fundamental ontological sense’ (McCowan, 2006: 68) through
conscientização. Becoming political is primarily about a transformation in
consciousness.
So far I have argued for a definition of politics that is broad, active, and
cognizant of power; and an understanding of politicization that is transformative,
critical and directed at consciousness rather than knowledge. I will go on, in the
remainder of this essay, to explore connections between this approach and some
findings of educational research, particularly in the field of developmental
pyschology; and also to suggest some ways in which we might educate for critical
consciousness. But before that, I wish to take a brief diversion to examine the ways in
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which citizenship eduaction in the UK, particuarly as it is envisioned in the Crick
Repoort, diverges from the Freirean perspectives advanced here.
As McCowan (2006) argues, and Watts (2006) implies, these differences have
their root in fundamentally different conceptions of politics. I have here defined
politics broadly, as more or less coextensive with the field of power relations. Bernard
Crick, the intellectual forefather of citizenship education, leans at times towards this
definition; but at other times he defines politics more narrowly. In his In Defence of
Politics, Crick writes that politics is ‘a way of ruling divided societies by a process of
discussion and without undue violence’ (Crick, 1993: 141). Note immediately that
Crick identifies politics with ‘a way of ruling’, in other words with governance. A
similar assumption underlies the definition given in the Report of the Advisory Group
on Citizenship Education, also known as the Crick Report: ‘politics is the general
process by which differences of values and interests are compromised or mediated
through institutions in the general interest’ (Crick, 1998: 20). The emphasis here is on
the institutionalised aspects of political activity. Indeed, much of the Crick Report is
devoted to young people’s attitudes to party politics and voting, with relatively little
discussion of youth involvement in non-conventional politics and single-issue
campaigns. Young people and youth cultures are portrayed as politically passive despite evidence of young people’s widespread involvement in politics through less
formalized structures, such as campaigning (Roker et al., 1999; Annette, 2000).
Instead of embracing popular forms of youth engagement with politics, the reports
focuses of voter turnout and party membership and thus leaves itself open to
criticisms that, ‘for all the rhetoric of empowerment… [citizenship education] is
ultimately nothing more than an attempt to legitimize government’ (Watts, 2006).
Crucially, the Crick Report locates the cause of disengagement with the
political system in young people’s attitudes, rather than in the political system itself.
Thus, existing institutions are viewed as mechanisms for the mediation of conflict, not
as potential sites of conflict in themselves. There is little recognition of the role of
power relations in informal processes of inclusion and exclusion. If Freire relies too
much on the utopian visions of liberation theology and revolutionary Marxism, the
Crick Report is constrained by a liberal bourgeois mentality which presents an
idealized vision of the public sphere, derived from myths of the Greek polis and
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Roman republic (Crick, 1998: 9). The public sphere, in this tradition, is the place
where citizens meet on free and equal terms to deliberate about affairs of state. The
aim of citizenship education is to socialize young people into the rules and habits of
public dialogue so that they may participate as full citizens in the public sphere; in the
words of the Programme of Study, to ‘equip young people with the knowledge, skills
and understanding to play an effective role in public life’ (QCA, 2008).
According to the Crick Report, therefore, politics is about the institutionalized
resolution of conflicts through participation in an idealized public sphere; political
education is about gaining ‘the skills, knowledge and values necessary to understand
political problems and resolve conflicts through negotiation’ (McCowan, 2006: 66).
The importance of power is underplayed, and there is little recognition of way that the
public sphere is itself highly stratified, with access to political power differentiated by
levels of social, cultural and economic capital. More significantly for our purposes
here, the Crick Report and subsequent Programme of Study do not examine the way
in which politicization involves a fundamental transformation of consciousness.
Contrast Freire’s concept of conscientização – the process by which the individual
comes to a critical consciousness of himself as an ontological Subject capable of
intervening in reality – and the Crick Report’s concept of political literacy, defined as
‘pupils learning about and how to make themselves effective in public life through
knowledge, skills and values’ (Crick, 1998: 41). The emphasis in Freire is on how you
see the world; the emphasis in Crick is on what you need to know about it.
At this stage, it is perhaps useful to ask how far these contrasting perspectives
are supported by the findings of educational research into the political development of
young people. Does political thinking develop through the gradual acquisition of
knowledge (as Crick implies), or does it proceed through sudden cognitive leaps, akin
to a Freirean transformation in consciousness? Unfortunately, as was noted earlier,
there has been very little empirical research into stages of political development.
Furthermore, much of the work done in developmental psychology on political and
moral development has focused on thought experiments (along the lines of
Kohlberg’s famous ‘Heinz dilemma’ (Kohlberg, 1987)) in which experimental
subjects are asked to think about questions in the abstract. If, as has been argued,
politics is about actively making the world, then thought experiments can only be an
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imperfect guide to actual levels of politicization. Nonetheless, research in this field
may offer some clue as to the way that the kind of cognitive development that we
would expect young people to experience as they engage and interact with politics.
Developmental psychology in the Piagetian tradition suggests that learning
progresses through discrete cognitive stages, seeming to support the Freirean
approach. Learning, according to Piaget, cannot be reduced to a simple quantitative
exercise, the filling of pupils’ brains with ever greater quantities of stuff, without
adequate consideration of the way that concepts are ordered and interpreted. Piaget
and his followers argue that each stage of a child’s development is characterized by a
particular cognitive structure, qualitatively different to that which has gone before.
When a child is confronted with a new piece of information, she will usually be able
to assimilate the idea within her existing mental framework; but sometimes new
information causes individuals to radically restructure their thinking in order to
accommodate it (Hahn, 1998). Of particular interest here is the work of Lawrence
Kohlberg (1987), who argues that there are six discrete stages of moral development;
as the child develops and is confronted with ever more complex moral scenarios, her
way of thinking about moral problems progresses from a egoistic, ‘pre-conventional’
stage, through a conformist, ‘conventional’ stage, to a more abstract, principled ‘postconventional’ stage. A post-conventional thinker does not necessarily ‘know’ more
than a conventional thinker; but she perceives moral problems differently – or, we
might say, with a different way of seeing.
There is good reason to expect that a process of political development would
pass through similar stages, not least because many of Kohlberg’s experiments could
themselves be construed as political investigations; his famous Heinz dilemma, for
example, presents an individual with a classically political conflict between the right
to property and the right to life. Furthermore, the small amount of research that has
been done into young people’s political development indicates that it mirrors moral
development in many ways. In a recent study, Key Stage 3 students were asked to
respond to a problem in which a local council has to decide whether or not to grant
permission for an extension to the quarry on a hillside overlooking the town (Rowe,
2005). The study found that, at the age of 12-14 years old, most students lack a
societal or collective perspective on political problems: ‘broadly speaking, our
7
students’ political thinking is dominated by the actions and reactions of individuals,
with only a limited awareness of the societal backdrop against which these actions
play out’ (ibid: 106). There is a developmental shift towards more socio-centric
thinking only in mid-adolescence (ibid: 99; Hess and Torney, 1967). Rather than a
gradual accumulation of knowledge and skills, as envisaged by the national
curriculum attainment targets, research suggests there are a small number of clear
disjunctures (perhaps parallel to the leaps between pre-conventional, conventional and
post-conventional thinking?) in which young people come to see the world in
radically different ways.
These findings from the discipline of developmental psychology would seem
to offer scientific support to Freire’s philosophical claims. Individuals do not become
political through acquiring knowledge or skills; they become political through stages
of cognitive reordering or, we might say, transformations of consciousness.
Obviously, much more detailed empirical research is required; but, if we provisionally
accept this thesis, the next logical question is how we might educate for critical
consciousness. This is the question which I want to tentatively explore in the final part
of this essay.
One answer is to emphasize the importance of dialogue. Kohlberg argues that
individuals progress to a higher stage of moral development when they are confronted
with a problem that cannot be solved using their current conceptual apparatus. The
role of the teacher should be to stimulate ‘cognitive conflict’ in the pupil through a
dynamic process of discussion and reflection. Freire suggests something similar when
he writes that the methods of dialogical education should pose problems which,
through a process of decodification, expose social contradictions. Vygotsky goes even
further, arguing that it is through speech that conceptual thought itself is developed
(1986). The role of dialogue is not only to articulate ideas, but also to stimulate the
very formation of ideas.
However, it is doubtful that desired levels of political consciousness can be
achieved through classroom discussion alone. Despite their differences, Crick and
Freire both argue that the litmus test for political education is the extent to which it
stimulates ‘action’ (though they might have different ideas of what action would
8
involve). Crick writes that education for citizenship should ‘inevitably and rightly
encourage action’ (Crick, 2000: 62); he is echoed in the Programme of Study, which
urges pupils to ‘take action and try to make a difference in their communities and the
wider world’ (QCA, 2008). For Freire, an understanding of conscientização is
inextricably intertwined with the concept of praxis: ‘reflection and action upon the
world in order to transform it’ (Freire, 1970, p.33; Roberts, 1996). The individual has
not developed a complete understanding of reality without the experience of action;
the word without action ‘is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated
and alienating “blah”’ (Freire, 1970: 68, emphasis in original). If, as I have argued
here, politics is to involve oneself in a process of making the world, then to be
political is, by definition, to be active. Freire even goes so far as to suggest that the
unity of action and reflection are not just what make us political, they are also what
make us human; the differences between animals and humans is that ‘only the latter
are beings of praxis’ (ibid: 81). Only humans can integrate themselves within the
world by changing it:
Integration within one’s context, as distinguished from adaptation, is a
distinctively human activity. Integration results from the capacity to adapt
oneself to reality plus the critical capacity to make choices and to transform that
reality (Freire, 1973: 4, emphasis in original)
Although writing from a different perspective, Freire’s views are recalled
almost precisely by the educational theorist David Kolb, advocating the importance of
experiential learning:
We are… the learning species, and our survival depends on our abililty to adapt
not only in the reactive sense of fitting into the physical and social worlds, but in
the proactive sense of creating and shaping those worlds (Kolb, 1984: 1)
Kolb, following Dewey (Dewey, 1997), argues that it is precisely at the nexus
between reflection and experience that learning takes place. This theory is supported
in the present context by research into youth participation which found that a more
sophisticated vision of the socio-political world follows, rather than precedes, action:
‘A key outcome of participation in volunteering and campaigning amongst the sample
[of school pupils] was how the experience stimulated reflection and thought about
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societal structures and processes’ (Roker et al., 1999). Furthermore, action provides
learning opportunties for pupils with kinaesthetic learning styles and stimulates the
development of different intelligences (Gardner, 1999); it may has the potential to
motivate pupils who are disengaged from conventional subjects (Jerome, 2006).
Active citizenship, therefore, is important both on a philosophical level (in that to be
political is to be active) and on an educational level (in that learning is enhanced by
active experience).
Regrettably there is no space here to explore the realities of active citizenship
as it is currently practised in British schools. But it is worth noting in passing that
there is a contradiction between the critical perspectives of political education and the
ideological, socializing functions of the school (Davies, 2001). As Cheryl Lousley
argues in her study of school environment clubs, the energies of school pupils may be
channelled in directions which avoid problematic political conflict (Lousley, 1999).
These contradictions are brought out very clearly by the reaction to school pupils
protesting against the Iraq war; for their efforts in behaving as ‘informed, critical,
active citizens’, the organisers were rewarded with six-week suspensions
(Cunningham and Lavalette, 2004). It is important to remember that the school
frustrates political learning as much as inspiring it; and that much political learning
takes place outside the school, through families, volunteering, and community
organizations (Torres, 2007).
Although the role of the school is debatable, it is clear that political education
must be an active experience. This conclusion follows from the definition of politics
which has been advanced in this essay. To be political, I have argued, is to be actively
involved with and against power; to perceive the world as a dynamic process, open to
contestation and change; to understand oneself, in a Freirean sense, as an ontological
subject capable of intervening in reality and transforming it. The Crick Report, by
contrast, presents a more limited view of politics which focuses on the mediation of
conflict in the public sphere; it views the role of citizenship education as equipping
young people with the knowledge and skills to participate in the public sphere, while
neglecting the transformation of consciousness that politicization necessarily entails.
However, the Crick Report does emphasise the importance of taking action, which I
have argued is central to political development. Thus, while viewing active citzenship
10
as means to acquire skills of participation, the Crick Report may also have created the
space in which a deeper process of politicization might take place.
Reflection on Citizenship Essay
I am teaching a lesson on the policing of the G20 protests to a year 9 class. It
is part of a series of lessons on the police, framed by the question ‘do we have a
police force or a police service?’ Earlier this week we looked at stop-and-search.
Today, the focus is on the role of the police in facilitating/inhibiting protest. Pupils are
going to be conducting a ‘public enquiry’, examining evidence from video clips and
written witness statements to arrive at a conclusion about the actions of police at the
G20.
The lesson is going well. The class are settled, I have explained the learning
objectives, and I have set the context by briefly talking about the G20 and the reasons
for the protests. Many of the pupils already have some knowledge of the protests; one
boy at the back sticks his hand up to say that his brother went along on the day. I am
ready to move on to the main activity when one of the brighter boys in the class asks a
question:
‘What did the protestors hope to get out of it?’
‘Well,’ I reply, ‘they wanted to tell the government to change its policies
about things like climate change and the rules for banks’.
‘Yeah, I know that, but what’s that got to do with protesting in the streets?’
‘They hoped to raise public awareness. They also hoped that if lots and lots of
people came out to protest about something then the government would be put under
pressure to change its policies.’
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One of the girls raised her hand. ‘But surely the government knows all about
climate change, and if it is really a serious problem then they’d be doing something
about it.’
This exchange, I think, was instructive. Reflecting on it after the lesson, I
learnt several things. Firstly, that learning can go in unpredictable directions. I had
intended the lesson to be about policing; but the short discussion which followed
these questions was, for some pupils, the most intense learning of the lesson.
Secondly, it reinforced my belief that learning is strongest when driven by the
curiosity of pupils; the discussion would not have taken place without the boy’s initial
question. Finally, it made me aware of the ways that education is not just about
acquiring knowledge, but also about developing different ways of seeing. The girl
knew what a government is; she knew about climate change. The boy, similarly, was
familiar with the concept of protest. But they struggled to interpret the protests
because of the way that they perceived government, as an efficient machine for the
processing of issues into policy. Their understanding of politics was, to use the term I
employed in my original essay, ‘two-dimensional’; they recognised the process of
decision-making, but saw it in the same way that they might see a pattern on a screen,
which the observer (or, in this case, protestors) are powerless to alter or transform.
The focus of my essay was on citizenship education as a process of
politicization, which I argued must be understood as a transformation in
consciousness. Drawing on Kohlbergian theories of moral development (Kohlberg,
1987) and the Freirean concept of conscientização (Freire, 1970), I suggested that the
process of politicization may occur through a series of cognitive leaps, in which the
individual comes to a new understanding of her relation to the social world. Looking
back on my essay now, it is clear that the empirical basis for my assertions is sketchy;
indeed, as Rowe notes (Rowe, 2005), very little research has been done into the
political development of the individual (as opposed to the broader sociological
questions about the characteristics of politically active groups or societies). My
observations in this reflection are purely anecdotal, but provoke some interesting
thoughts to support, critique and develop my earlier view.
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In my classroom experience from two teaching placements, I have repeatedly
found that pupils struggle to understand society, and particularly government, as
complex, contested, and fragmented. At key stage 3 in particular they lack an
understanding of power and the way that political outcomes are the result of relations
between individuals in circumstances of power. This is despite their intuitive grasp of
power relations in familiar contexts, such as the school. The classroom exchange
which I described above is far from atypical. Many pupils seem to view government
as a monolith, floating above normal society, in ways that may be benign or malign.
In discussions about politics, pupils express opinions which oscillate between a
generalized sense that ‘politicians don’t care’ and a naïve trust in government to
ultimately ‘do the right thing’. Both these positions, when divorced from the concept
of power, are politically disabling; they lead alternately to cynicism or subservience,
without a sense of criticism or change.
These observations would seem to support the findings of academic studies
which I referred to in my earlier essay (Rowe, 2005; Hess and Torney, 1967; Hahn,
1998). These studies have found that very young children tend to view government as
an extension of parents or, later, the school – an external authority, over and above
them, which may act for good or ill but which the child cannot participate in. Later,
children develop a greater awareness of the differences between individuals in
society, but it is only in mid-adolescence that there is a developmental shift towards a
more socio-centric view which recognises the societal underpinnings of government
and individual conflict. Perhaps we may find parallels, too, with Kohlberg’s six-stage
model of moral development. Pupils who view government as an unquestioned
authority acting above society would conceivably be the same ones who view
conformity to the law as the basis for moral judgement (stage 4 in Kohlberg’s model).
This, of course, is mere speculation; but it would be an interesting avenue for further
research.
One of the biggest challenges, therefore, has been to break down pupils’ sense
of alienation from the political forces which control their lives and to develop what
Freire would call ‘critical consciousness’ (Freire, 1970). One technique I have used
has been to encourage pupils to imagine themselves in positions of power, to see
themselves not as passive recipients of laws from on high, but as the shapers and
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makers of those very laws. In one lesson, pupils worked in groups of four as a
government faced with some difficult budget decisions. This lesson certainly engaged
the pupils – several asked if they could do it again next lesson – but it did not develop
a deeper understanding of politics because the simulation did not include external
pressures on government (e.g. the demands of the citizenry). In another lesson, pupils
learnt about renewable energy by sitting around a ‘cabinet table’ to decide on
Britain’s future energy policy. This time, I asked pupils to consider competing
pressures from oil companies, environmentalists, anti-wind farm campaigners,
taxpayers, and the electorate. This activity was stronger, because pupils began to think
about the relationship between government and society in a more sophisticated way.
I argued in my essay for a strong focus on active citizenship as one catalyst for
politicization. Although I retain my enthusiasm for active citizenship, I am perhaps
more aware than previously of the constraints that exist within schools. Most of my
citizenship experience in my second placement has been with a GCSE class where
there has been a lot of pressure to cover course content rather than develop broader
skills of democratic participation (unfortunately they did their coursework before I
arrived). As a PGCE student on placement for only a short period of time, I have not
been able to develop ambitious active citizenship projects; nor have either of my
placement schools pursued active citizenship beyond charity fundraising or
established formats such as mock trials and debating competitions. Those pupils who
most closely resemble Crick’s ideal of an ‘active citizen’ pursue their interests outside
school (Crick, 2000). One year 9 pupil, who works with the police on community
engagement and aspires to be a politician when he is older, told me that ‘I’m
interested in this sort of stuff but I prefer to do it away from school’. For the vast
majority of pupils, school is still a place of coercion and hierarchy. Attempts by
teachers to encourage participation and democracy can seem disorientating or just
downright contradictory. To realise the full potential of active citizenship, it may be
necessary to rewrite the ‘hidden curriculum’ of schools.
These meandering reflections do not amount to a coherent response to my
original essay. However, I hope that they offer some indication of my evolving
thoughts on citizenship education at the point where theoretical arguments meet
practical experience. Anecdotal evidence affirms my original assertion that political
14
development is a transformation in consciousness. In particular, I have become more
aware of the way that pupils interpret the relationship between government and
society. I have also started to develop techniques to break down and problematize the
government-society dichotomy. I retain my enthusiasm for active citizenship, but now
see that the obstacles to be overcome are not just logistical – equally important is the
challenge of pupils who have been socialised into a certain vision of institutional
schooling, which they find difficult to square with teachers’ earnest exhortations to
active participation.
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