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Unit 2 The Nature of the Citizenship Curriculum
Unit 2a A Brief history of Citizenship Education as an aim of
mass education
Citizenship is not new to the English education system; it did not
come out of the blue. It is the latest in a long line of approaches towards
educating young people for participation in public life and for the
‘opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of adult life’ (Education
Act 1996 section 351).
In some ways, citizenship education has always been a strand in the
thinking of those who have pioneered mass public education. In the
nineteenth century, before the 1870 Education Act, education reformers
establishing local schools for the children of the working classes were
generally clear that part of their aim was to instill a moral sense of
responsibility as well as to teach basic skills. The Bible was often used as
a basic literacy reader for this reason.
For example, in 1848, William Ellis an educational pioneer, founded the
first of what he called Birkbeck schools (so-called because the first school
was held in the hall of the London Mechanics Institute, which later
became Birkbeck College). Ellis argued that the children of the poor
should have a useful education which would equip them for work and life
including ‘social economy’ but also, he believed, they needed a secular
moral training in contrast to the domination of religion, classical
languages and history in the education of the upper classes.
In fact, there were many individual initiatives to introduce civic
education into schools during the late nineteenth century and early
twentieth century. One book, Citizen Reader, sold a quarter of a million
copies from 1885 to 1916 (Heater, 2001). But culturally, in this country
there persisted a strong conviction that a) that government-run civic
education would be a dangerous threat to the freedom of the individual
(and here the Protestant tradition of dissenting was no doubt strongly
influential) and b) the view of the ‘ordinary’ citizen at this time, when
who should be entitled to vote was still a controversial issue, was of
someone who should learn, in the words of a 1949 Ministry of Education
pamphlet:
humility, service, restraint and respect for personality. If schools can
encourage qualities of this kind in their pupils, we may fulfil the
conditions of a healthy, democratic society. [quoted in Heater, 2001,
p107].
Such civic virtues, in effect, were intended for those attending state
schools, whilst, in this country, the children of society’s leaders were
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given an education suiting them for their future roles in public life in the
many private schools which have so influenced educational provision in
England.
In the 1930s, at a time of widespread ‘moral panic’ across Europe, there
was a major campaign for the introduction of citizenship education into
the curriculum and in 1934 the newly founded Association for Education
in Citizenship argued that if democracy was to be maintained in the face
of the threat from mainland Europe, it would be necessary for education
to promote the duties of democratic citizenship. Nonetheless, the
Association failed to secure its ambitions partly, perhaps, because the
firmly established presence of religious education in the system rendered
it unnecessary in the eyes of many. This was a time when Church and
State were still very closely identified with each other and good Christian
virtues would be seen as obeying the law, doing good and serving others.
What better training for citizenship could there be, given the lack of
emphasis on the need for political literacy up until this point? There were
no great ‘citizens’ rights’ movements at this time, so the need for
citizenship education to contain elements of political or legal literacy was
not widely recognised. The tradition is still strong in our culture (and
thus in our schools) that citizenship is more about community service, or
volunteering, than knowing one’s rights, which is how it is viewed in,
America, for example (Conover et al , 1991).
Gordon Batho (1990) quotes C.S..S. Higham, writing in a book called The
Good Citizen, published in the 1930s, that the English approach to
education for citizenship drew on two ancient traditions which can
arguably still be seen in the present curriculum formulation. These are
the:
Christian view that the good citizen must make some personal sacrifice
to help his [sic] fellow men, [combined with] … the Greek ideal that
he should play his part in affairs and feel himself a citizen of no mean
city.
During the ‘50s and ‘60s citizenship education was quite common but
very much more likely to be taught in secondary modern schools, whilst
the more able students in the grammar schools were learning extra
languages (were the more able students seen as less in need of such
socialization?). The introduction of comprehensive schools, under which
children of all abilities came to be educated together, arguably turned out
to be an opportunity missed as it was the grammar school curriculum
model which predominated and many less able children came to be forced
to follow a curriculum less suited to their abilities than they had
previously enjoyed. And citizenship was not a common feature of the
comprehensive curriculum, though times were changing with the
development of sociology at university level, which in turn impacted on
subjects being offered in schools.
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The 1980s and ‘90s saw social studies and humanities gaining rapid
ground across the country, and a proliferation of new ‘educations’,
including political education (pioneered by Bernard Crick amongst
others), environmental education, development education, peace
education and human rights education (Dufour, 2006; Starkey, 1992). At
the heart of many of these new educations was the central concept of
justice. They were developed with the intention of providing students
with useful and socially important knowledge (social studies had never
become an established curriculum subject in England unlike in most
European and North American countries), but again ambitions for this
form of civic education were thwarted when the Conservatives
introduced the National Curriculum in 1990. Social studies and the
humanities were largely squeezed out in favour of the more traditional
subjects, history and geography.
It is worth bearing in mind that at this time, when the Cold War was still
raging, social studies, and several of the other educations including
political education, peace education and even human rights education,
were seen by many to be capable of being utilized by left-wing teachers
to promulgate radical ideas amongst the young. This fear led Sir Keith
Joseph (a conservative education minister) to consider banning the
teaching of controversial issues in schools altogether but he was
persuaded of the impossibility of this. He decided, instead, to make it
unlawful for teachers to teach such issues in a biased or partisan way
(Education (no 2) Act 1986, sections 44 and 45). Furthermore, the
traditional opposition to state-led civic education remained. Heater (ibid.)
quotes Rhodes Boyson, a former headteacher and minister of education as
saying, in 1982, that:
Politics, like sex education, is something that should be left to the
family. Schools can just become the depository for all the problem
society doesn’t know what to do about.
One alternative solution (still being advocated) was that citizenship
education could be adequately delivered through other subjects, most
notably, history. This method directly avoids the awkward questions of
indoctrination and state manipulation of the citizenship curriculum
whilst delivering a safe, ‘depoliticised’ form of civics as the story of the
development of our democratic institutions and, sometimes even, an
implicit patriotic story of the nation’s great achievements.
Having said that, within the teaching profession, if not the public, during
the 1980s and 1990s support was building for a stronger social
curriculum and for more lifeskills education (often in the form of PSHE).
The raising of the school leaving age prompted the highly influential
Schools Council to advocate including some elements of political
education for 15-16 year-olds (Schools Council, 1965) and HMI came out
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very strongly in favour of citizenship education as an entitlement in its
review of the secondary curriculum in 1977:
Insofar as pupils may marry at 16, vote at 18 and become involved in
legal responsibilities, what has the curriculum – the school’s deliberate
educational policy – done to help them in these matters of fundamental
importance to adult life? More than this, even though it may sound
somewhat grandly put, pupils are members of a complicated civilization
and culture, and it is reasonable to argue that they have nothing less
than a right to be introduced to a selection of its essential elements.
[p.7]
The Victorian stress on educating the bulk of the population for servile
obedience to its leaders has gone and has been replaced by a thoroughly
modern discourse based on full legal and political equality for all.
‘Subjects’ have at last been replaced by ‘citizens’. During the 1980’s the
Schools Council and its successor body, the School Curriculum
Development Committee sponsored curriculum development in ‘lawrelated education’ (Rowe, 1992) which strongly influenced the content of
the subsequent citizenship curricula. At the same time, the Speakers
Commission on Citizenship (1990), a cross-party body investigating how
best to encourage engaged citizenship, also strongly advocated a rich
integrated model (knowledge, skills and attitudes) delivered both
through the curriculum and the life of the school.
At the time when the first National Curriculum was introduced by the
conservatives in 1990, the mood towards citizenship education had
undergone a huge shift such that the movement for civic education which
had failed in the 1930s could now succeed in the 1990s. The needs of
society and the rights of the citizen were widely seen as outweighing
fears of indoctrination or indeed, of social instability by the
empowerment of the working classes. Rather social fragmentation and
lack of cohesion became increasingly the dominant concerns.
The first National Curriculum framework was very full but citizenship
was accorded the status of a non-statutory ‘cross-curricular theme’ along
with health, environmental education, economic and industrial awareness
and careers education. Aspects of citizenship education could be seen to
be present in many PSHE courses of this time, but these elements tended
to be confined to equal opportunities and anti-racism plus police/schools
liaison work. Some elements of citizenship were being more
systematically promulgated including law-related education (by the
Citizenship Foundation, the successor of the Law in Education project)
but, for a number of reasons, cross-curricular citizenship was not widely
successful (Whitty et al, 1994). It was not until the arrival of the Labour
government with its more communitarian philosophy and, in particular,
the appointment of David Blunkett, who had a pre-existing passion for
citizenship education, that the former professor of politics Bernard Crick
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was asked to bring forward proposals to make citizenship a statutory
element of the revised National Curriculum of 2000.
By now, the cold war fears of mass radicalisation had subsided with the
virtual collapse of communism and had become replaced in the public’s
mind by fears of social disintegration, including rising crime and violence
in society, falling voting rates, and loss of respect amongst the young for
the law and the police. An increasing area of concern was the fracturing
of society along ethnic, cultural and religious lines as unprecedented
levels of immigration and the rise of violent extremism threatened to
erode a sense of shared identity and the social order. Citizenship
education was widely welcomed as one strategy to address these social
problems.
Even at this stage, however, it was not a done deal and in his committee’s
report (Advisory Group on Citizenship, 1998) Crick can be seen to be
arguing not only on the merits per se of citizenship education, but also
that it would meet the new government’s communitarian agenda.
Blunkett was committed and had made it something of a personal goal
but would his Prime Minister agree to it? Tony Blair himself was
reportedly cool towards the proposed new subject fearing that schools
might be distracted from the renewed emphasis on ‘standards’ but
Blunkett won the day and it would be not until much later, in 2006, (after
the London bombings) that Tony Blair would finally declare citizenship
to be a central part of the curriculum ‘given the current debate about
integration and social responsibility’ (Guardian Unlimited, 19th October,
2006).
A revision of the secondary curriculum announced in 2007, which was
designed to reduce the amount of prescription in subjects like history and
geography, spelt out in the most certain terms yet that a key purpose of
education is to create ‘responsible citizens who make a positive
contribution to society’ (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, 2007).
Citizenship continued to be non-statutory in primary schools, though
PSHE and aspects of emotional literacy were becoming increasingly
established and formalised. Then in 2009, two influential reports
recommended that citizenship should become statutory throughout the
four key stages. Firstly, an intellectually rigorous and independent
review of the primary curriculum based in Cambridge (Alexander, 2009)
recommended that ‘encouraging respect and reciprocity’ should be one of
the central aims of the primary curriculum and that citizenship and ethics
should be a key knowledge domain. The report claimed that this proposal
was supported by
widespread concern about the ousting of mutuality and civic
consciousness by selfishness and material greed. […]For these
reasons, it makes sense not only for private and public morality to
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be placed together within the communal domain of citizenship,
but for citizenship to be mandatory rather than, as at present,
optional. [page 46]
Secondly, the Independent Review of the Primary Curriculum (Rose,
2009), established by the Secretary of State, also recommended that
education for citizenship should be a statutory element of an area of
learning to be called ‘History, Geography and Social Understanding’.
The new curriculum will be introduced in September 2011. Rose
recommended that the recently introduced aims of the secondary
curriculum be adopted for the primary curriculum for the sake of
consistency. Further, despite, Rose’s original declared intention not to
introduce any new subjects into the primary curriculum, he had been
persuaded of the importance of citizenship education. His report declared
that the new area of learning was important because it should teach
children:
about right and wrong, fairness and unfairness and justice and
injustice; to understand the way in which laws are made and
society is governed; and to engage actively with democratic
processes. This area also promotes working collaboratively to
build an understanding of important matters such as nurturing
the quality of and sustaining the environment.
So has citizenship education achieved its promised land? Not necessarily.
The curriculum is a ‘battleground’ of competing ideas and interests and is
constantly in a state of flux. The fluctuating fortunes of history since the
National Curriculum was introduced bears testimony to this fact. The
status quo at any given time can never be regarded as permanent.
Citizenship education, in particular, is constantly subject to changing
social conditions and concerns, as society looks to schools to help remedy
a range of social ills.
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Study Tasks
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To what extent does the above brief history of citizenship education (and
Dufour’s account of the social curriculum in Developing Citizens, if you have
time to read it) support the proposal that citizenship education is an
instrument used by the state to create the kind of citizens required at any
given time? Is this a reason to resist its introduction into the curriculum, in
your view?
This section argues that culturally, citizenship in our society is strongly
associated with doing good and serving others rather than being politically
or legally literate. To what extent is this reflected in the citizenship
provision in your own school?
How does your own view of the value and purpose of citizenship education
chime with the concerns of those who have fought for its place in the
curriculum?
You are recommended to draw on this chapter when writing your own
Statement of Values for your Portfolio.
References
Advisory Group on Citizenship (1998) Education for Citizenship and the
teaching of democracy in schools. London, Qualifications and Curriculum
Authority.
Alexander, R. ed., (2009) The Cambridge Primary Review Final Report.
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Batho, G. (1990) ‘The History of the teaching of civics and citizenship in
English schools’. The Curriculum Journal, vol 1:1 Oxford Blackwell
Conover, P.J., Crewe I.M., Searing D.D. (1991) ‘The Nature of
Citizenship in the United States and Great Britain’. The Journal of
Politics, Vol 53:3.
Dufour, B., (2006) ‘The Fate and Fortunes of the Social Curriculum and
the Evolution of Citizenship: a historical overview’ in Breslin, T., and
Dufour, B. (eds) Developing Citizens. London, Hodder Murray.
Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI), (1977) Curriculum 11-16, London, Her
Majesty’s Stationery Office
Rose, J. (2009) Independent Review of the Primary Curriculum . London,
Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.
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Rowe, D. (1992) ‘Law-related education: an overview’ in Lynch, J.,
Modgil, C. and Modgil, S. (eds.) Human Rights, Education and Global
Responsibilities. London, Falmer.
Schools Council (1965) Working Paper no 2: Raising the School Leaving
Age. London, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office
Starkey, H. (1992) ‘Teaching for Human Rights and Social
Responsibility’ in Lynch, J., Modgil, C. and Modgil, S. (eds.) Human
Rights, Education and Global Responsibilities. London, Falmer.
Whitty, G., Rowe, G. and Aggleton, P. (1994) ‘ Subjects and Themes in
the Secondary School Curriculum’. Research Papers in Education Vol 9:2
Further Reading
Developing Citizens (Breslin and Dufour), Chapter 1.1 by Barry Dufour
‘The Fate and Fortunes of the Social Curriculum and the Evolution of
Citizenship: a Historical overview’. pp 2 – 11.
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