Citizenship, Communities and Adult Learning
Paper presented at SCUTREA, 32nd Annual Conference, 2-4 July 2002, University of Stirling
Pam Coare and Rennie Johnston, University of Sussex, UK
‘We need both ‘good citizens’ and active citizens’ (Crick. 2000: 2).
‘Citizenship’ has become the framing discourse for many of the social and educational
policies of the current New Labour government. This rhetoric of citizenship is not, of course,
unique to Britain. Rather it is part of a wider European focus that reflects the way in which
national boundaries and identities have become more fluid, with the language of citizenship
evident in many key documents and policies of the European Commission.
Of course, ‘citizenship’ is a concept that carries significantly different meanings for disparate
individuals and groups and, as Lister points out, it does not always have positive connotations
for everyone (Lister, 1997). Different traditions such as Communitarianism, which stresses
the primacy of community and the socially situated individual and Liberalism, with its
emphasis on the autonomy of the individual with legally held rights, have defined two
different approaches to citizenship, that of status and that of practice (Oldfield, 1990). Both
traditions have emphasised the relative importance of different aspects of the civil, political
and social themes originally espoused by T. H. Marshall in his seminal work ‘Citizenship and
Social Class’ in 1950. Lister suggests that we could most usefully see these two traditions as
complementary: ’In this way citizenship emerges as a dynamic process in which the two
dimensions of status and practice interact with each other, linked through human agency’
(Lister, 1997: 8).
As adult educators working in community settings and using practices that grow out of the traditions of
community development and social purpose adult education, we are concerned with developing that
‘dynamic process’. However we are working within a pedagogy of lifelong learning and widening
participation that focuses primarily on skills for employability, linked as it is to the Government and
European models of the ‘economic citizen’ and the ‘good citizen’. In this context, we are looking to
explore and better understand the political imperatives that lie beneath the rhetoric of citizenship and at
the same time investigate the possibility that adult education might play a part in engaging more people
in the Freirian notion of education for liberation rather than domestication. If ‘good citizens have a
respect for law and order. Pay their taxes…, know their place in society…, keep their noses clean and
are ever so grateful to be governed so well’ (Crick, 2000: 98), then our role as adult educators in the
process of shaping such a citizen will require a significant shift from our ideological roots. However, if
‘the good citizen’ is someone who looks to (actively) exercises her/his civic rights in a democratic form
of government we feel we can play a part in this. If ‘good citizens will obey the law, but will seek to
change it by legal means if they think it bad, or even if they think it could be better’ (Crick 2000: 6),
then adult educators may have a role to play in developing the skills of critical thinking and learning
that will be needed to actively engage in a dynamic political process.
The New Discourse of Citizenship
Lister (1997) argues that citizenship dominates political thought today. The importance of the
discourse of citizenship has been recently supported by Edith Cresson, President of the EU, in her
foreword to ‘Learning for Active Citizenship’ where she highlights that within Europe the concept of
citizenship is ‘becoming more fluid and dynamic, in conformity with the nature of European societies
themselves’ (Cresson, 2001). While recognising that legal and social rights remain at the heart of the
relationship between the citizen and state, she sees the Europe of the future as being the site of ‘a
negotiated and culturally-based understanding of citizenship’ in which ‘active citizenship lies at the
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heart of our civilisation’s aspirations’ (ibid. 2001). Significantly in this context, similarity and
difference will be respected for ‘they underlie our recognition of the social reality of a globalised world
in which the significance of active citizenship extends far beyond local communities and national
frontiers.’
These changing notions of citizenship and identity may go some way to explaining why in Britain
conventional participation in the democratic process is declining: voting patterns, particularly amongst
the young and the poor indicate a deep disinclination for people to exercise their democratic rights
(Henderson and Salmon, 1998; Crick, 2001). This reflects a growing problem across the Western
world. Welton points to this as ‘mounting evidence of citizens unhappiness and distrust of its ruling
elites, what Habermas has called a legitimation crisis’ (Welton, 2001: 20).
In Britain, the resurgence of citizenship in the political rhetoric of both the Thatcher Conservation
Government in the 1980s and the current Labour administration has been driven by a number of factors
within Britain, Europe and America. Ignatieff suggests that Thatcher came to power in 1979 as a
result of ‘an attack on the citizenship of equal entitlement in post-war liberal democratic society’. She
was elected ‘not to reform the civic contract between state and citizens, but to rip it up and start again’
(Ignatieff, 1991). The market was to be the sole arbitrator, with the citizen defined as consumer. Held
(1991) agrees with this proposition, describing Thatcherism as ‘the natural enemy of citizenship’ with
its ‘drive towards unrestricted private accumulation, its attack on public expenditure and its critique of
the ‘dependency culture’. In Thatcher’s world view, citizenship was also imbued with moral virtue
which embraced individualism and voluntarism. This moralism underpinned a simplistic view of
community in which ‘voluntary effort can fill the gap left by the deliberate under-resourcing of social
services, especially those associated with local authorities as a plurality of centres of power, and those
where the ‘clients’ are the least able to organise themselves in effective pressure groups: the very old,
the very young, the mentally and physically handicapped and the long-term unemployed. The
opportunity to bridge the resource shortfall with volunteers and families, is what Crick calls the ‘halfuntruth in Thatcher’s rhetoric of citizenship’ (Crick, 2000: 101). Policies based on this privatised
approach to citizenship and community was to contribute, during the Thatcher years, to some of the
worst scenes of social unrest witnessed in Britain in decades, focused primarily on ‘failing’ housing
estates which were areas of high unemployment and poverty. The failure of Conservative policies that
sought to ‘turn around’ these estates left a difficult legacy for the new Labour administration.
The Labour Government that was elected in 1997 has been subject to domestic and global
pressures that have forced them to re-address the concept of citizenship, and this issue has
been central in the shaping of both their domestic and overseas policies. Their response has
been, following a clear communitarian agenda, to focus on the responsibilities of the citizen
as a counterbalance to the rights that accompany the status of citizenship. In this way they
have echoed the rhetoric of the USA and, to some extent, the previous Tory administration.
Addressing the issue of ‘social exclusion’ was thus high on the Governments agenda and remains so.
The breakdown of communities and the attendant threat of social unrest have forced them to address
the interrelated issues of poor housing and health, unemployment, low educational attainment and a
breakdown in law and order. The task of analysing the problems faced by such communities, and
offering solutions, was to be the remit of the Social Exclusion Unit which was set up in 1997. This was
to be an example of ‘joined-up Government’, where the inter-relationship between different social and
economic factors was recognised, and departments of Government would work together, not in
competition, to secure the resources to address social decline. However, in practice and in line with a
particular government instrumentalism, the SEU has tended to focus on specific problems, for example
teenage pregnancies, so apparently falling into the trap of ‘blaming the victims’ without addressing the
effect social inequality has on the ability of individuals to assert their rights as citizens or become
active citizens (Dean, 1999).
Dwyer (2000) has made the point that the new ‘welfare orthodoxy’ stressed ‘a reduced role for the state
in the provision of welfare and increasingly conditional social rights’. To assert your rights as a
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citizen and the have the opportunity to actively participate and ‘do one’s duty’, you need time,
resources and an identifiable ‘voice’. Yet these resources are what such areas of intractable long-term
unemployment and social decline lack. Thus they have been at the heart of the regeneration initiatives
from the 1990s and of interventions that focus on capacity building as active citizenship. Local
participation is seen as the key to the successful regeneration and reinvigoration of geographic
communities. The World Bank Learning Group on Participation defined participation as a ‘process
through which stakeholders influence and share control over development initiatives and the decisions
and resources which affect them’ (Gaventa and Valderrama, 1999). In this context, Gaventa and
Valderrama usefully remind us that ‘Citizen participation is about power and its exercise by different
social actors in the spaces created for the interaction between citizens and local authorities. However,
the control of the structure and processes for participation – defining spaces, actors, agendas,
procedures – is usually in the hands of governmental institutions and can become a barrier for effective
involvement of citizens’. It is unsurprising, therefore, if attempts at local empowerment are met with
little enthusiasm by communities who traditionally have had no voice in planning change. Many such
regeneration initiatives hark back to a golden age of good neighbourliness and have failed to engage
critically with relative power differentials within and across communities.
However we do not despair of community approaches and initiatives in developing more informed and
active citizens. We want to explore further Finger and Asun’s (2001) argument that the gradual erosion
of the state in a complex global world and the emerging ‘democratic deficit’ have opened up space for
a ‘re-invention of politics’ at a local level with new opportunities for community-based adult education.
The second half of this paper will look at the prospects of pursuing a community-based link between
learning and citizenship. Of course, here we must avoid falling into the trap of assuming the idea of a
reciprocating, mutually supportive community. On the contrary, we recognise the existence of a
diversity, often a conflict, of interests within communities, a diversity of communities of place,
association, interest and belief and the fact that no community stands alone but is inevitably influenced
by wider regional, national and global considerations. We do however see ‘community’ as offering a
place and space for learning that is somewhat removed from more formal educational and other
statutory provision (Johnston 2001) and therefore a learning context which is directly influenced or
shaped by institutional norms or requirements and which offers scope for a range of different learning
engagements including informal approaches.
An agenda for citizenship learning and action at a community level
In tracing the erosion of politics, Finger and Asun identify two processes of development: the
privatisation of and hence loss of democratic control over state or public functions and, following
Illich, the instrumentalisation of politics. In this paper, we would like to look for space at a community
level for alternative educational approaches which take account of both our earlier critique of the good
and compliant citizen and Finger and Asun’s argument identified above, as well as our own interests in
developing a dynamic link between citizenship as status and active citizenship. As part of this we
would like to suggest that ‘learning our way out’ (Finger and Asun, 2001) of a democratic deficit
involves first identifying then reversing the deficit models which pervade key government policies:
widening participation, community regeneration, social inclusion and basic skills development. For
reasons of space, we will concentrate on the latter two, although our approach is relevant to all four. In
taking a community-oriented focus on this, we would like to adopt as a ruling principle the idea of
community as politics, which is essentially community-led as opposed to community as policy, which
is essentially state led. Of course in taking this stance we recognise that in practice these two different
approaches are to some extent inter-connected in the same way that Martin (1998) identifies that ...the
boundaries between the state and civil society are both permeable and shifting, and the relationship is
often a symbiotic one.’
Much of the European and UK rhetoric about citizenship stresses the goal of social inclusion. Here it
is interesting to note Levitas’s analysis (1998) of the different discourses of inclusion: what she calls
RED, a critical social policy and redistributionist discourse, MUD, a gendered moral underclass
discourse and SID, the social integrationist discourse where inclusion is primarily in terms of labour
market attachment. Levitas traces New Labour’s discursive and policy move from RED to SID with a
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bit of MUD thrown in for good measure. And of course New Labour educational policy is a vital part
of a process where ‘Education is the best economic policy we have’ (DfEE, 1998), where ideas of
human capital development reign supreme and where arbitrary, top-down widening participation
targets can easily overwhelm longstanding processes of mutual trust building, reciprocity and
curriculum negotiation between educators and community groups.
Of course the key questions here are: ‘Inclusion - on whose terms and in whose interests?’ While there
is clearly a correlation between the level of formal education attainment, social inclusion and indeed
community participation (see Field, 1995), there is also a danger in reducing issues of social inclusion to
questions of individual access and participation within the education system. Certainly, a more equitable
social representation within post-compulsory education is likely to contribute to a more inclusive society,
particularly when there is a renewed emphasis on 'Access to What?', access not just to 'more of the same'
but involving a comprehensive and critical engagement with the issues of culture and power which
underpin curricular and institutional practice. However, this is a long-term programme where the outcomes
are still uncertain. It needs to be complemented by more informal and communal learning in the
community. Farrar, from a community development perspective, makes the point that:
Inclusionary policies are those which enhance the social, economic and political power of groups in
subordinate positions; in short, they promote the autonomy of the marginal groups (Farrar, 1996:
294)
In contrast to an individualised access to education, a community context offers space for such groups to
develop their autonomy, some way removed from the most obvious restrictions of governmentality and
social control, and the opportunity to develop different forms of learning and participation. Within a
contemporary Risk Society, Van der Veen identifies three explanations of social exclusion: economic
exclusion, cultural exclusion and personal vulnerability arising from the individualization of private life
(Van der Veen, 1996). In response to this, Van der Veen, takes a more collective approach, identifying the
important goal of learning to participate as part of a 'social learning' process that involves:
..learning how to build personal networks, learning to communicate about the dynamic and
complex social conditions of late modern life and learning to develop new interactive routines.
(Van der Veen, 1996: 6-7)
Certainly, from our own experience of working with long-term unemployed adults in Southampton and
Hastings, an initial focus on very practical involvement in collective community activities and learning
initiatives within a secure social environment can help to counter the worst aspects of individualization. It
can help excluded adults to move towards a new identity, that of a participant and/or learner, which can in
time lead on to more complex forms of participation and the gradual exercise of wider citizen rights. In
some notable cases in Southampton, a modest initial contribution to the running of a community adult
learning resource centre or participation in a short exploratory course led on to a more active and dynamic
involvement in a more complex and demanding wider participatory research process (Johnston 1987: 6263). Indeed, this point has been recently re-emphasised by unwaged adults from the Action Learning in the
Community and Getting Set for Citizenship projects taking part in an ESRC-funded workshop. Their key
message from the seminar was that ‘active citizenship is rooted in personal and community transformation
and regeneration’ (ESRC, 2001). These examples illustrate some of possibilities for developing citizenship
and learning at a community level. We believe that this approach can be further developed through less
prescribed educational initiatives like the Adult and Community Learning Fund, possibly even as part of
new (and more equal?) partnerships between HEIs and their local communities currently being promoted in
the UK. Certainly there is growing evidence from contemporary literature that community-based and
informal learning can lead to a progression and development that is neither individualised nor
institutionalised but is geared towards active and collective citizenship (McGivney, 1999; Cullen, et al,
1999).
At that same ESRC workshop, a heartfelt plea from unwaged participants was – ‘NOT BASIC SKILLS!’
They were tired of having their social and economic position translated by educators and policy-makers
into a supply-led ‘problem’ of ‘Basic Skills’. Indeed this feeling reflects our own community-based
experience and is supported by recent research with lone carers in Brighton. One of the two New Labour’s
ambitions for Lifelong Learning in its second term has been identified as ‘raising basic skills levels
amongst the 7 million people who cannot read properly and who are not comfortable with numbers’
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(Hodge, 2002). As Bob Fryer has emphasised on several occasions the very term ‘basic skills’ is an insult
to people who already have very sophisticated skills but who also have literacy or numeracy problems.
Certainly it embodies a deficit analysis, but, more damningly, it embodies a deficit pedagogy! In a recent
cross national report, the current ETGAGE (2001) citizenship research project states unequivocally that ‘in
motivation interventions for disadvantaged groups, it is crucial to avoid a deficiency perspective. For
instance, Spain stresses a pedagogy of the maximum which draws on the capacities and skills of individual
and not their deficits, a pedagogy that fosters people’s self esteem’.
Of course, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with functional literacy – everyone needs to have the tools to
operate in society even if not necessarily to be a ‘good citizen’. However it does not need to be the only
show in town - in the face of the embedded and institutionalised instrumentality of the deficit and
functionalist model of ‘Basic Skills’, it may be salutary to note Jeanne Brady’s advocacy of three interconnected forms of literacy: functional, cultural and critical, where functional literacy moves beyond the
predominantly instrumental and utilitarian; cultural literacy facilitates communication across borders and
lines of cultural difference; and critical literacy enables ‘a critical reading of how power, ideology and
culture work to disempower some groups of people while privileging others’ (Brady, 1994: 143). In a
commercial and political world replete with consumerism, manipulation and spin, the need for critical
literacy has never been so necessary. Furthermore, in the international context of a growing diaspora of
refugees, asylum seekers and other minority ethnic groups and the racism and nationalism that this can
engender, the case for inter-cultural literacy has never been stronger. Of course, intercultural literacy needs
to cut both ways. Recent research with refugee communities in Brighton has demonstrated that far from
being acquiescent and dependent citizens, some refugee communities are already very active in their
communities and only need the right linguistic and other support from educators to extend this further and
make a contribution to the wider community (Bellis, 2000). A key part of this is for educators to embrace
a ‘pedagogy of the maximum’ and begin to listen to and help to promote the voices of adult learners and
community activists from a diverse range of ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, especially asylum seekers
and refugees. This is one of the tasks we have set ourselves in developing an ESF-funded project and
book on ‘Adult Learning, Citizenship and Community Voices’
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