January 2019 saw a bomb explosion in the Northern Ireland city of Derry/Londonderry, attributed to a dissident republican group, the New IRA, seeking the unification of the island of Ireland into one political entity (BBC 2019).
Over 2500 miles away, the same month also saw continued violence along the Israel-Gaza border during mass protests against what is viewed by some as the occupation of the land of Palestine (Ahronheim 2019).
These are two countries that, in the 1990s, appeared to be following a similar āroadmap to peaceā, with international interventions shining a spotlight that resulted in much hope for a cessation of violence and redress for past wrongs and inequalities. Their ethno-national divisions offered an important site for comparison, as they shared some comparable issues of citizenship and identity that lie at the heart of educating for citizenship in a society affected by conflict. However, their journeys since that time have diverged and it is against this backdrop that their differing citizenship education programmes have emerged. It is also against this backdrop that I began the work for this book.
I did the bulk of the research for this book in 2011/12, interviewing students, teachers and policy-makers involved in citizenship in both jurisdictions, and analysing curriculum and policy documents. At the time, both countries were facing some challenges that made research into citizenship education timely: Northern Ireland was experiencing protests among supporters of Northern Irelandās place within the UK over the decision by Belfast City Council to restrict the number of days the UK flag would fly outside the City Hall (BBC 2012), while in Israel, the national supervisor for civic studies at the Ministry of Education had just been dismissed, with some attributing it to his left-of-centre approach that included the promotion of universal human rights within a right-of-centre and highly nationalistic Ministry (Nesher 2012).
In 2019, I returned to this issue and updated the literature and some of my thinking for this book. What I found was that not much more scholarly work had been published on citizenship education in English in the interim. Therefore, I believe that the views of students, teachers and policy-makers related in these pages, although set within the context of citizenship education in 2011ā2012, still have relevance for today.
When I started this research, I was aware that a lot of work had been done on citizenship education, which was particularly concerned with conceptions of citizenship within citizenship education (Parker 2008; Cohen 2010), including some large-scale, cross-national and longitudinal studies have also looked at similar aspects (Kerr 1999; Torney-Purta et al. 2001). I was also aware that the relationship between citizenship education and human rights had been explored, focusing on human rights education and the human rights-based approach to teaching (Osler and Starkey 2010; Niens et al. 2013). However, coming fresh to the world of human rights, I was motivated to explore the potential for the purportedly universal nature of human rights, and related international obligations in respect of education rights, to offer a fresh, unifying perspective and an alternative way of delivering the citizenship education curriculum to a diverse group in a divided society had received little attention.
Ultimately, the research unearthed a wide range of understandings of young peopleās rights in the citizenship classroom, with these understandings sometimes conflicting within a single jurisdiction or even within a single educational stream in a jurisdiction. What this left me with was an acute awareness of the inherent difficulty in applying an international framework to a national context. And although this book is based on in-depth research into these particular jurisdictions, I contend that what I have presented about views on education rights is applicable within any diverse society, not only one that has experienced conflict.
In short, the aim of this book is to explore how international education rights obligations are reflected and interpreted within citizenship education in Northern Ireland and Israel, by stakeholders and through policy and curriculum documents. The international obligations that education be āacceptableā and āadaptableā provide a ā2-A frameworkā which forms the conceptual framework for the research (based on general comment 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1999 and TomaÅ”evski 2001). The three key themes around which the findings are organised relate to some of the central building blocks of any education system: curriculum (and how that poses challenges in terms of representing ethno-national minority groups); pedagogy (and how that poses challenges when dealing with controversial difference in terms of national conflicts); and the aim of preparing young people for life (and the particular challenges faced within a divided society). To show the relevance of these themes, I will briefly explore them below. Further analysis can be found in Chapters 4ā6.
Educating for Citizenship in a Divided Society: Curriculum and Pedagogy
The curriculum and pedagogy of citizenship education, and how analysis of them illuminates how education rights are understood, are two key themes in this book (see Chapters 4 and 5). Both are aspects of education that are much debated, particularly in ethnically, religiously or sociopolitically divided societies where it is often suggested that education can play a constructive or a destructive role in addressing conflict (Bush and Saltarelli 2000; Gallagher 2004). Although education may contribute towards the transformation of a conflict-affected society, it also may be viewed as a tool in socialisation into the āimagined communityā of the nation (Anderson 1991) or the divided status quo (Podeh 2000). Therefore, it may also play a role in āreproducing the attitudes, values, and social relations underlying civil conflict and violenceā (Buckland 2005, p. 2). From such a value-laden perspective, the role of education in general and citizenship education in particular may be contested in societies divided along ethno-national lines, where conceptions of citizenship, identity and national belonging vary and the majority culture cannot offer the basis of shared identity. Thus, divisions are highly complex and long-standing. In Northern Ireland and Israel, the aims of the common and compulsory citizenship education curriculum include learning about diversity, equality, human rights and respect for identity, and their content and suggested pedagogies reflect these aims (Partnership Management Board 2007; Cohen 2013). Nevertheless, both societies still experience ethno-national division and inequality, not least within the education system, where most young people attend school alongside only those of the same religion or ethnicity (Hughes et al. 2015; Tatar 2004).
A large body of scholarship relating to the aims of education has developed, much of it from the perspective that education is neither neutral nor necessarily inherently good (McCowan 2010). In Bourdieuās view, education is a way of transmitting the culture of the dominant classes (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990) and Podeh (2000, p. 65) claims that education is āresponsible for implanting knowledge and values in the younger generationā. Harris (1999, p. 3) suggests that the aims of education across the world are disputed as education is āa changing, contested and often personalised, historically and politically constructe...