International Perspectives on Citizenship, Education and Religious Diversity

Robert Jackson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415274401
• eBook ISBN: 9781134496334
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Citizenship is high on the agenda of education systems in many of the world's democracies. As yet, however, discussions of citizenship education have neglected issues of religious diversity and how the study of religions can contribute to our understanding of citizenship. International Perspectives on Citizenship, Education and Religious Diversity brings together an international range of contributions from religious studies scholars and educators specialising in the study of religions. Together, these illustrate and explore the key questions for educational theory and pedagogy raised by drawing issues of religious diversity into citizenship education.
The chapters address and extend debates over the nature of citizenship in late modernity, highlighting local and global dimensions of citizenship in relation to issues of national, religious, ethnic and cultural identity. As well as emphasising the role religious education has to play in citizenship education, this book also covers wider issues such as state-supported faith schools and cultural diversity in relation to common citizenship. The authors argue that critical, yet reflective, approaches to religious education have a distinctive and valuable contribution to make to citizenship education. Issues addressed within the study of religions are related to new forms of global and cultural citizenship, as well as citizenship within the nation state. Ultimately, this stimulating and original collection highlights the challenges and possibilities for teaching and learning about religion, religions and religious diversity within an inclusive educational practice.

Chapter 1

Citizenship, religious and cultural diversity and education

Robert Jackson

Synopsis The introductory chapter sets the scene for discussions of citizenship education in plural, democratic societies, providing a context for the contributions that follow and highlighting some themes developed in later chapters. The history of the term ‘citizenship’ is outlined and then related to accounts of plurality and the position of nation-states in the late modern/postmodern world. Using examples from qualitative research, I argue for an understanding of diversity within debates about ethnicity, nationality, religion and culture. Outlining a range of positions within each debate, I argue that internal diversity within groups should be recognized fully, dialogue valued and a model of ‘differentiated’ citizenship adopted. A section on Islam in Britain and the West picks up an earlier point about the importance of minority involvement in formal structures and demonstrates the role of ethnographic field studies in questioning popular assumptions about Islam and nationality. A brief account of the debates about faith-based schools in Europe precedes a discussion of the roles the study of religion may have in citizenship education in common schools in England and Wales. Interpretive and dialogical pedagogies are seen as especially appropriate for studying religions in ways that offer young people access to the debates about citizenship. These approaches encourage the recognition of social plurality, differentiated citizenship and the experience of individuals.

Citizenship

The topic of citizenship is very much on the agenda of education systems in many democracies. Whether influenced primarily by fears of the young’s disengagement with political processes, as in England and Wales, or by concerns about social cohesion in multicultural societies, as in South Africa’s commitment to nation building, citizenship education has emerged, either as a curriculum subject in its own right or as a dimension of the wider school curriculum (Paludan and Prinds 1999). In those societies where the term ‘citizenship’ (or its equivalent) is not used, other elements are emphasized such as democratic values, virtues and political literacy (Skeie in Chapter 3 of this volume).

An important element of the citizenship debate concerns issues raised by social plurality, including issues of religious and cultural diversity. So far, discussions of citizenship education have made little reference to issues of religious diversity or to the contribution that the study of religions might make to our understanding of citizenship. This book sets out to explore some of the issues from the point of view of a group of scholars working in the field of religion, and from educationists with a specialism in the study of religions. Perspectives from Britain, Norway, Germany and South Africa illustrate some of the key generic issues for educational theory and pedagogy. Contributors emphasize religious/religion education’s contribution to citizenship education, but also deal with wider issues, such as statefunded religious schools and cultural diversity in relation to common citizenship. This introductory chapter provides a context for the discussions that follow.

In its primary meaning, ‘citizenship’ implies membership of a political society, involving the possession of legal rights, usually including the rights to vote and stand for political office. For many centuries citizenship was a privileged status given only to those fulfilling certain conditions such as owning property. However, in modern states, citizens’ rights are usually considered an aspect of nationality, usually granted automatically to all those born in a particular country as well as to others in certain circumstances, such as permanent settlers. Citizenship is a distinctively democratic ideal. Citizens, in contrast to subjects, have legal protection against arbitrary decisions by their governments. At the same time they have the opportunity to play an active role in influencing government policy. Whereas Aristotle considered citizenship (politeia) primarily in terms of duties, citizenship, in modern liberal thinking, has tended to be viewed more in terms of rights—citizens have the right to participate in public life, but also the right to put their private commitments before political involvement. Many commentators, including those writing from a communitarian perspective (e.g. Etzioni 1993), argue that citizenship should involve a balance between rights and duties, usually with the latter resulting from a feeling of responsibility and belonging, rather than compulsion.

In T.H. Marshall’s often cited discussion, citizenship is a status related specifically to the nation-state, which confers civil rights, political rights and social rights. Civil rights include rights under law to personal liberty, freedom of speech, association, religious toleration and freedom from censorship. Political rights include the right to participate in political processes, while social rights include the right of access to social benefits and resources such as education, economic security and welfare state services (Marshall 1950).

Current discussions about citizenship take place in the context of forms of plurality and diversity that were less evident in Marshall’s day. Although the nation-state is the main provider of social rights (including the benefits of the welfare state), its boundaries are challenged in a whole variety of ways, from migration, multinational companies, the press and media, wider federations such as the European Union, international feminist, environmental and human rights movements, international peace courts and websites to bodies such as the United Nations, NATO and the International Monetary Fund. It is not surprising that debates about citizenship and identity are taking place in many Western countries.

As Geir Skeie points out, descriptively, plurality is of at least two types (Skeie 1995; this volume, Chapter 3). The first is what he calls ‘traditional’ plurality. In this regard, Britain is overtly a religiously plural society partly because migrants, principally in the post-colonial period, came from South Asia, East Africa and the Caribbean, including significant numbers with, for example, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh religious backgrounds and others identifying with other groupings such as Pentecostal Christians and Rastafarians. In countries like South Africa, Norway, Canada or Australia, that religious plurality also includes the ways of life of indigenous peoples. These may have been suppressed or ignored for a variety of reasons, but have come back on the agenda (e.g. Leganger-Krogstad 2001). In all the societies mentioned above, one might add the emergence of new religious movements and various new age phenomena as further elements of religious plurality (Beckford 1985, 1986; Heelas 1996).

Skeie’s second sense of plurality relates to the plural intellectual climate of late modernity. In particular, he points to the plurality of modern societies in the sense of being fragmented, with various groups having competing and often contradictory rationalities, and the growth of individualism and the privatization of religion. Critiques of assumptions, ideas and values that characterized the European Enlightenment have led to a plurality in contemporary thought that is often pictured as a move from modernity to late modernity or ‘high modernity’ (Giddens 1990) or from modernity to post-modernity (e.g. Lyotard 1984). Modern plurality is the context in which traditional plurality now operates; the two are inextricably intertwined in current debates about citizenship.

As theorists argue whether the world is in a condition of late or post-modernity, tangible changes in social, political and economic life make it evident that the traditional idea of the nation-state is being eroded. The globalizing tendencies related to massive advances in information and communications technology have enhanced world trade, yet have also reinforced inequalities, especially between countries of the North and South. Multinational companies can be more wealthy than some individual nation-states and are capable of wielding huge power, sometimes against the interests of the poor or causing long-term damage to the environment. Those committed to universal human rights, to the reduction of inequality or to the conservation of the environment (and some of them are religious voices) can find themselves at odds with government policies perceived as promoting a narrow national interest at the expense of the poor or with policies of multinational companies seeming to show scant regard for the long-term future of the planet. In ways such as these, global concerns can have a reciprocal relationship with concerns of particular local groups within countries, affecting individuals’ relationships with and views of the nation-state. For example, there are those who would both act as citizens of particular countries and also argue for global governmental structures beyond the nation-state to eradicate poverty, and to exercise constraint over multinational companies. Moreover, there is the issue of nationstates belonging to wider political and economic groupings (the British and German contributors to this book are automatically citizens of the European Union, for example) and of the potential fragmentation of nation-states through devolution.

Education in citizenship, then, needs to take account of these different but interrelated forms of plurality. There needs to be an informed exploration of the debates about identity and belonging in relation to the nation-state, and also in relation to global and more local issues. These issues are related in a variety of ways, but especially so in ‘multicultural’ societies where some citizens have transnational links with other family members or co-religionists (see in this volume Chidester, Chapter 2, on social, cultural and global citizenship and Østberg, Chapter 5, on transcultural citizenship).

Religion figures in a number of key interrelated debates that are relevant to discussions about citizenship in relation to plurality, especially in ‘multicultural’ societies. These include debates about the nation-state (and related concepts such as nationality), ethnicity, culture and about religion itself. The debates show a range of positions from, at one extreme, ‘closed’ views that reify the concepts to postmodern views, at the other, offering complete deconstructions. The key educational task is to engage learners in a critical analysis of how such terminology is used, both in relation to their own experience (and several contributors to this book would make this the starting point) and with regard to examples from a variety of other sources. By participating in such discussions, students should also be helped to examine their own and their peers’ assumptions and reflect upon their own identities. Different positions within the debates (rather than their technical detail) can be used to clarify, challenge or illuminate positions advanced by students. It would be helpful to attempt a brief overview of the main debates about the nation-state, ethnicity, religion and culture.

The nation-state and nationality

The modern nation-state has a relatively short history of around 500 years, with most states being formed within the last century or so. A ‘state’ is usually regarded as a governed society, supported by a civil service, ruling over a specific area, and whose authority is supported by law and the ability to use force. Thus a ‘nation-state’ isa variety of modern state in which ‘the mass of the population are citizens who know themselves to be part of that nation’ (Giddens 1993:743). Perhaps Giddens’s definition should be broadened, for a state can include groups who regard themselves as nations (comprised of one or more ethnic groups) and may aspire to their own statehood, as with Scottish and Welsh nationalism in Britain. Nationality is recognized or denied by each nation-state on its own rules, and usually gives entitlement to citizenship. Disputes about nationality and citizenship are common, in relation to welfare benefits, for example. However, we have already noted the impact of globalizing forces on the nation-state.

Nationalism, the ideology of one or more privileged ethnic categories, regards an essentialized and romanticized culture as the ‘heritage’ of the national group. Inflexible and narrow views of national, ethnic and religious identity tend to emerge when fixed and bounded views of the nature of cultures are combined with reified views of nationality, ethnicity and religion. Nationalism leads both to ‘biological racism’ and to what Tariq Modood calls cultural racism. Cultural racism builds on biological racism in order to vilify cultural difference (Modood 1997; see also Steyn’s material in Chapter 6 below on the relationship between religious education and citizenship in South Africa during the apartheid period).

However, some nation-states attempt to find ways of incorporating more than one ethnic group through abstracting a romantic idea of ‘superethnicity’, withideas such as ‘the American people’ or the idea of assimilation through a melting pot of cultures. However, this notion is in tension with any idea of retaining the distinctive but shifting cultural traditions of minorities. The tension can be there in the rhetoric of a single politician, as in US President George W. Bush’s televised references to ‘the American people’ inone breath while appealing to ‘Arab-Americans’ in another. Skeie’s account (Chapter 3 in this volume) of the production of a new national religious education syllabus finds an attempt to incorporate difference within a sense of a common Norwegian national identity. The resultant tensions manifest themselves through dissatisfaction with the syllabus among religious and non-religious minorities who see it as privileging a view of ‘Christian heritage’. Insufficient account is taken, for example, of the subtleties of identity described and analysed by Østberg in her research on Pakistani Muslim young people in Oslo (this volume, Chapter 5).

Another way of accommodating ethnic or religious difference is through finding ways to incorporate different groups through the modification of civil religion or national custom. In Britain, for example, there is a gradual incorporation of the main faiths represented in the country into national and local civic religious life—whether a royal wedding or funeral, a mayoral investiture or hospital or prison chaplaincy (Beckford and Gilliat 1998). The current heir to the throne’s declaration that he sees himself not as the future ‘Defender of the Faith’ butas a ‘defender of faith’ is another example. In South Africa ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Citizenship, religious and cultural diversity and education
• PART I Issues in citizenship, education and diversity
• 2 Global citizenship, cultural citizenship and world religions in religion education
• 3 Nationalism, religiosity and citizenship in Norwegian majority and minority discourses
• 4 Citizenship as a replacement for religious education or RE as complementary to citizenship education?
• 5 Cultural diversity and common citizenship Reflections on ethnicity, religion, nationhood and citizenship among Pakistani young people in Europe
• 6 The good South African citizen Then and now
• 7 Learning the difference Religion education, citizenship and gendered subjectivity
• PART II Dialogue and communication
• 8 Dialogue, citizenship and religious education
• 9 Dialogue among young citizens in a pluralistic religious education classroom
• 10 Difference without discrimination Religious education as a field of learning for social understanding?
• 11 Religious education and citizenship Some reflections
• Index