Educating the Gendered Citizen

sociological engagements with national and global agendas

Madeleine Arnot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415408066
• eBook ISBN: 9781134132898
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Globalisation and global human rights are the two major forces in the twenty-first century which are likely to shape the sort of learner citizen created by the educational system. Schools will be expected to prepare young men and women for national as well as global citizenship. Male and female citizens will need to adapt to new social conditions, only some of which will encourage gender equality.

This book offers a unique introduction to the contribution that sociological research on the education of the citizen can make to these national and global debates. It brings together for the first time a selection of influential new and previously published papers by Madeleine Arnot on the theme of gender, education and citizenship. It describes feminist challenges to liberal democracy, the gendered construction of the 'good citizen' and citizenship education; it explores the implications of social change for the learner citizen and offers alternative gender-sensitive models of global citizenship education.

Reaching right to the heart of current debates, the chapters focus on:

• feminist democratic values in education
• teachers' constructions of the gendered citizen
• European languages of citizenship
• the inclusion of women's rights into English citizenship textbooks
• gender struggles for equality in school pedagogy and curriculum
• the implications of personalised learning for the individualised learner citizen
• globalisation and the construction of a global ethic for citizenship education

.

It will be an invaluable text for all those interested in citizenship education, gender studies, sociology of education, educational policy studies, critical pedagogy and curriculum studies and international or comparative education.

Part I
Introducing gender education politics into citizenship debates

1 Sociological perspectives on the education of the gendered citizen

An introduction

The aim of this book is to engage with contemporary debates about citizenship education, democratisation and globalisation. The purpose is to encourage debate about how citizens are educated in ways that contribute to an international sociological field of citizenship education studies. The book cannot claim to cover the wealth of literature now available on citizenship and citizenship education, nor to explore in depth the philosophical basis of these concepts. However, by bringing together this collection of new and previously published papers (some of which I have updated and amended), I hope to show that there is an important line of sociological research on citizenship and citizenship education that complements and engages with the study of contemporary educational reforms. The education of citizens is now a global debate and brings us directly back to Durkheim’s (1956) concerns about the relationship between education and society

The critical perspective I develop in this book is that of gender—what Yuval Davies and Stoetzler (2002) call the ‘gender gaze’. A gender perspective never claims to be comprehensive, nor exclusive, but it does aim to be productive in assessing the social significance of education. Gender relations in Western European philosophy are central to the definition of the social contract between individuals and government and are deeply implicated in the distribution of power and control within society. Gender relations are also embedded within other sets of social relations including religious, ethnic, community relations and social class cultures that affect men’s and women’s differential access to citizenship rights and entitlements.

The educational system is the institution historically that shapes relations between citizens and, as these chapters show, which constructs the relationship of male and female citizens to the state. The extent to which the study of gender education is marginalised in current discussions of citizenship education is therefore really quite shameful. The aim of this collection of papers is therefore to establish clearly the importance of researching the schooling of the gendered citizen and of recognising the political significance of current gender struggles over education. Politically it is also important to define the terrain within which schools can contribute to a form of democracy that offers women and men equal status, whatever their social class, ethnic, or religious background.

The chapters of this book represent academic research I have been engaged with since the early 1990s. In 1992, I began a programme of research on the gendering of citizenship and citizenship education, which has led me along a variety of different empirical and theoretical paths. This book collects some of the work I have published over the last fifteen years, much of which has been developed with others either in funded projects or through the supervision of post-doctoral and doctoral research. I have had the advantage and the pleasure of working closely with a number of colleagues—together we conceptualised, worked on and wrote various articles on our research and presented these at international conferences. For example, I learnt a good deal from my colleagues Helena Araújo in Portugal, Amparo Tomé in Spain, Kiki Deliyanni and Roula Zougou in Greece and Gabrielle Ivinson (then Rowe) in the UK about different discourses and social representations of citizenship and the impact of gender on citizenship in very different cultures and countries with strong political histories. Such comparative research on citizenship education is invaluable in my experience, not least because it highlights the exceptional nature of Anglo-Saxon traditions. Jo-Anne Dillabough and I also combined forces to engage with the political dimensions of feminist education theory. We have written many articles together in which we developed a critique of liberal democracy. I have included in this collection of papers our first major publication here, in which we revisited feminist educational theory in order to see what sort of democratic schooling was called for in the name of gender equality. After writing this article, we co-edited Challenging Democracy: international perspectives on gender, education and citizenship (Arnot and Dillabough, 2000) in which we published a range of new international research. I also worked with Patrick Brindle and Harriet Marshall, both of whom were doctoral students at the time. I am very grateful to them for allowing me to publish our work here, and for the lessons I have learnt from them about the history of English citizenship education and about global education respectively. I am greatly indebted to all these colleagues for allowing me to reprint our co-authored chapters in this collection.

The analysis of citizenship in this collection is informed largely by the British, American and Australian literature. The advantage of locating research on the education of the English citizen within this tradition is that I have been able to consider, with the help of my colleagues, an understanding of Anglophone versions of liberal democracy with their particular concepts of ‘freedom’. The history of English citizenship education, it must be said, has to some degree been the history of English exceptionalism. England has had a long-term and deep-seated antipathy towards teaching about political issues and citizenship in schools (Heater, 1990). This absence was not for want of effort on the part of educational reformers throughout the twentieth century who campaigned for civics, citizenship, politics and social studies to be central aspects of a modern education. The two decades following the end of the war in 1945 was a period in which the language of equality of opportunity, both in education and in society, was at its height. After much debate, in 1990, Education for Citizenship was introduced as a cross-curricular theme, but it was only in 2002 that the subject was made a statutory part of the National Curriculum for schools in England and Wales. In the last two decades, however, it has become important to relate to the

European agendas that frame citizenship and more recent work on globalisation and global citizenship education. The global context has impinged on national citizenship education and has challenged its assumptions. These international interfaces are reshaping the education of the English citizen. The organisation and sequencing of the chapters reflect these various approaches to the education of the citizen, concluding as it were with a chapter on the most important gender debates that are likely to affect discussions about global citizenship education in the twenty-first century.

The organisation of the book

The book is divided into four sections—the first section focuses on the ways in which feminist theory addressed issues of democratic values and democratic schooling. The second section focuses particularly on the languages/discourses of citizenship that helped male and female student teachers in various European countries make sense of the notion of citizenship, their construction of male and female citizenships and their personal engagement with changes in male-female relations in society.

The third section takes the sociology of gender and citizenship studies into an analysis of the English citizenship pedagogy and curriculum historically and in the present. The three chapters in this section are very different but they indicate the possibilities of historical analyses of textbooks, the theoretical analysis of shifting politics within gender education reform movements and a critical analysis of the assumptions underlying the English citizenship and global education curricula.

The final section of the book moves out from the national context to consider how the neo-liberal notions of ‘freedom’ have started to shape the processes with which the school constructs the learner citizen. The tensions between, on the one hand, individualisation and, on the other, global citizenship education represent challenges to the education of the citizen that are likely to frame educational debates in the twenty-first century.

Below I describe how current concerns about the nature of social change in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been addressed by sociologists and where the study of gender, education and citizenship might be placed within that agenda.

Sociological engagements with education for citizenship

Sociological studies describe the twin processes of democratisation and globalisation as the leitmotif of the twenty-first century. These two epoch forces which simultaneously shape contemporary society and national educational systems are also mostly in conflict. Paradoxically, both speak the language of freedom and promise greater participation for all. Often those who wish to promote laissez-faire market economies and a rolling back of the nation state argue that their strategy is for egalitarian or even democratic purposes. In this context, support for neo-liberal discourses can be used to mask the increasing polarisation of wealthy and poor nations, and national inequalities with a veneer of respectability. At the same time, the revitalisation of human rights represents the strongest contemporary critique of such polarisations, the massive differences in wealth and opportunity of privileged and underprivileged communities within and across national boundaries. Human rights activists and theorists draw attention to the global migration of millions of people who are ‘non-citizens’ and thus denied the normal rights of citizenship. The realities of global poverty, war and terrorism have also created an image of the twenty-first century as one filled with conflict and dissonance rather than security. The concept of citizenship, therefore, has taken hold of the political imagination as one of the means by which such global complexity can be addressed. It has become the focus not just of social and political theorists, but also of educationalists keen to show that educational systems can engage with such extraordinary levels of ideological conflict and social change.

At the centre of the tension between globalisation and human rights are liberal democratic notions of the social contract that defines the relationship between individuals within a polity and the relationship of individuals to government. Brysk (2002) points out that human rights are seen as ‘the highest stage of liberalism’ where the ideal is that freely chosen governments protect the individual’s rights. However, the more the nation state is threatened by global forces, the harder it is to see how such human rights can be protected. Today there is a ‘citizenship gap’ – ‘a lack of political mechanisms to ensure individual membership, power holders’ accountability, and respect for human rights in a globalising world’ (Brysk, 2002: 246). Globalisation has led to increased opportunities for ‘transnational investment, commodity networks and export dependency’ but it has also increased the chance of greater threats to social rights, security rights and the abuse of labour rights.

A second key debate within contemporary social and political thought focuses on the tension between citizenship as a construct and human rights discourse. Citizenship is essentially about the individual’s relationship to the nation-state, whilst the notion of human rights draws on universal concepts of a common humanity, without reference to any state. The focus of much contemporary political debate is on contemporary forms of national citizenship. From an historical point of view, there is interest in how definitions of citizenship have been shaped by, for example, civic republican, liberal, social democratic, neo-liberal or nationalistic, post-communist, communitarian or cosmopolitan ideals. These political ideals have different consequences for a range of social groups such as working classes and professional middle classes, the low paid and the unemployed, religious and minority ethnic communities, children, the aged and the disabled. Such ideals, whilst often appearing to be gender neutral, also construct male and female citizens in particular ways within and across such groups.

Much of the social scientific writing on citizenship, globalisation, human rights and democracy in the UK has been framed by the models of citizenship rights described by T.H. Marshall (1950) in Citizenship and Social Class in the post-war period. In this ground-breaking work, Marshall established the political, economic and social rights that would form the welfare state. Social regeneration after the Second World War was through the new concept of social citizenship which complemented the civil element and the political element of citizenship that had developed over the previous century. Citizens were to have:

[The] whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilised being according to the standards prevailing in the society. (Marshall, 1950: 10 quoted in House of Commons, 1990: 5)

The concept of social citizenship drew attention to the inequalities of citizenship created by a hierarchical and stratified society and questioned which of these inequalities could be redressed by the nation state—a theme that, as Bulmer and Rees (1996) point out, became the task of sociologists to investigate.

By the 1960s, this definition of social citizenship had been transformed by new social movements such as the women’s and black civil rights movements. What was demanded was a ‘floor of entitlements’ – the rights of all individuals to have their basic needs met by the state (e.g. housing, nutrition and education). Today, there is strong sociological interest in how different types of citizens are positioned within the polity and what they receive from government in terms of support, provision and protection. However, contemporary social scientific interest now also wants to know what it feels like to be a citizen and what the emotional aspects of belonging and not-belonging within the civic community are. The state in advanced industrial societies extended the rights, responsibilities and duties of the citizen into the personal domain, family life and sexual spheres. The politics of inclusion therefore has created new yardsticks with which to assess contemporary models of citizenship.

Sociologists of education have contributed to this analysis of social citizenship by investigating the contribution of educational institutions. The last four decades have seen many empirical studies o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Illustrations
• Sources
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Introducing gender education politics into citizenship debates
• PART II Teachers’ constructions of the gendered citizen
• PART III Gendered pedagogies and citizenship curricula
• PART IV Individualised learning and global citizenship education