SAGE Handbook of Education for Citizenship and Democracy

James Arthur, Ian Davies, Carole Hahn, James Arthur, Ian Davies, Carole Hahn, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781412936200
• eBook ISBN: 9781473971578
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This handbook brings together new work by some of the leading authorities on citizenship education, and is divided into five sections. The first section deals with key ideas about citizenship education including democracy, rights, globalization and equity. Section two contains a wide range of national case studies of citizenship education including African, Asian, Australian, European and North and South American examples. The third section focuses on perspectives about citizenship education with discussions about key areas such as sustainable development, anti-racism, gender. Section four provides insights into different characterisations of citizenship education with illustrations of democratic schools, peace and conflict education, global education, human rights education etc. The final section provides a series of chapters on the pedagogy of citizenship education with discussions about curriculum, teaching, learning and assessment.

SECTION 1

Key Ideas Underlying Citizenship Education

1

Democracy

Bernard Crick

Democracy is both a sacred and a promiscuous word. We all love her but we see her differently. She is hard to pin down. Everyone claims her but no one can possess or even name her fully. To give any definition for a class to learn would not be particularly democratic. To have any open-ended discussion about possible meanings could be reasonably democratic. Like ‘Britishness’ it is more a matter of recognizable behaviour over time than of definitive definition for a precise curricular moment. Besides, definitions don’t settle arguments. ‘Democracy’ can suggest certain institutional arrangements or it can suggest authorities or individuals behaving in a democratic manner. To some it means that the will of the majority must prevail; but to many others it is simply a synonym for good or just government – which may some have to contradict and restrain majority opinion. Not every decision can be judged by whether it is reached democratically or not. BBC news programmes, in the UK, ask listeners to send in their opinion on road-pricing for motor vehicles or on the provision of a super-expensive new drug in the National Health Service, but this is an illusion of democracy, perhaps better called populism. Representative government is best conducted as dialogue and mediation between opinion and knowledge, popular majorities and elected minorities.

A moment’s thought or reading a short book could remind us why the concept, while so important, is yet so often so confusing, even sometimes dangerously misleading (Crick, 2002). Some world leaders recently assumed that if an oppressive and intolerant autocracy was destroyed, democracy would automatically follow. But the concept that we take so much for granted has had, at its best, an essential historical and logical precondition: the idea of politics itself, practised in what we would regard as pre-democratic societies; politics as a willingness both to offer and to accept compromises binding on both governments and majorities.

Historically ‘democracy’ has had four broad usages, each of which can be invoked as the real meaning even today. History is not a dead past but conditions how we understand the present and the future. There are no real meanings, only different usages of concepts; some more acceptable than others, some less self-contradictory or more compatible with others. The report that led to citizenship becoming a compulsory part of the national curriculum in England was titled Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools (Advisory Group, 1998); but noticeably offered no explicit definition or even extended discussion of ‘democracy’; rather it chose to concentrate on ‘citizenship’, especially active not just good citizenship, ‘participation’, ‘rights and responsibilities’.

The first historical usage is found in Plato’s attack on democracy and in Aristotle’s highly qualified defence: democracy is simply, in the Greek, demos (the many, or more often invidiously ‘the mob’) and cracy, meaning rule. Plato attacked democracy as being the rule of the poor and ignorant over the educated and the knowledgeable, ideally philosophers. His fundamental distinction was between knowledge and opinion: democracy is rule, or rather the anarchy, of mere opinion. Even in modern times this view has some resonance. Beatrice Webb, a democratic socialist, once said ‘democracy is not the multiplication of ignorant opinions’. Aristotle modified Plato’s view rather than rejecting it utterly: good government was a mixture of elements, the educated few ruling with the consent of the many. The few should have ‘ aristoi’ or the principle of excellence from which the highly idealized concept of aristocracy derives. But many more can qualify for citizenship by virtue of some education and some property (both of which he thought necessary conditions for citizenship), and so must be consulted and can, indeed, on occasion be promoted to office. He did not call his ‘best possible’ state democracy, rather politea or polity, a political or civic community of citizens deciding on common action by public debate. But democracy could be the next best thing in practice if it observed ‘ruling and being ruled in turn’. As a principle unchecked, by aristocratic experience and knowledge democracy was a fallacy: ‘that because men are equal in some things, they are equal in all’. The citizen class in Athens in the 5th century BC excluded women, the propertyless, foreigners and there were slaves. Citizens were a minority but they made decisions by public debate, chose officials by vote or by lot, and had forcibly resisted and overthrown rule by tyrants or narrow oligarchies (Farrar, 1988).

The second usage is found in the Roman Republic, in Machiavelli’s great republican Discourses, in 17th century English and Dutch republicans, and in the early American republic: that good government is mixed government, just as in Aristotle’s theory, but under constitutional law – laws that could only be made and changed by a special procedure not a simple majority vote. But a democratic popular element could actually give greater power to a state. The plebeians, the common people of Rome, elected tribunes to represent them in the aristocratic Senate. Good laws to protect all were not good enough unless subjects became active citizens making their own laws collectively. When Oliver Cromwell at the end of the English Civil War argued in the Putney Debates for a property franchise, one of his colonels, a Leveler, famously hurled back in his face: ‘The poorest he that is in England has life to live as the greatest he’ (but beneath the rhetoric even Colonel Rainborough believed that servants, debtors and tenants could not have the vote because they would lack ‘independency’, would be in the power of another). The republican argument was both moral and military. The moral argument is the more famous: both Roman paganism and later Protestantism had in common a view of man as an active individual, a maker and shaper of things, not just a law-abiding well-behaved subject of a traditional rule-bound monarchical or religious order. But also it was believed that free citizens would defend their state from aggressors more strongly and reliably than professional soldiers or mercenaries.

The third usage of democracy is found in the rhetoric and events of the French Revolution and in the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau – that everyone, regardless of education or property, has a right to make his or her will felt in matters of state; and indeed the ‘general will’ or common good is better understood by any well-meaning, simple, unselfish and natural ordinary person from their own experience and conscience than by the over-educated living amid the artificiality of high society. Now this view can have a lot to do with the liberation of a class or a nation, whether from oppression or ignorance and superstition, but it is not necessarily connected with individual liberty. (In the European 18th and 19th centuries most people who cared for liberty did not call themselves democrats at all – rather constitutionalists or civic republicans, or, in the Anglo-American discourse, ‘Whigs’). In the French Revolution the Jacobins turned Rousseau’s ideas into the slogan ‘the sovereignty of the people’ they spoke of ‘Our Sovereign Masters, the People’. The difficulty was that they exercised sovereignty on behalf of whom they took to be ‘the people’ with no clear representative institutions to check them. The general will could have more to do with popularity than with representative institutions, the rule of law, reasoned debate or individual rights. Napoleon was a genuine heir of the French Revolution when he said that ‘the politics of the future will be the art of stirring the masses’. His popularity was such, playing on both revolutionary and nationalist sentiments, that he was able for the very first time to introduce mass conscription – that is to trust the common people with arms. The autocratic Hapsburg’s and Romanovs had to be most careful to whom and where they applied selective conscription.

The fourth usage of democracy is found in the American constitution and in many of the new constitutions in Europe in the 19th century and in the new West German and Japanese constitutions following the Second World War, also in the writings of John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville: that all can be active citizens if they care, but must mutually respect the equal rights of fellow citizens within a regulatory legal order that defines, protects and limits those rights. So what is generally meant by ‘democracy’ today, especially in the US, Europe and countries influenced by their political ideas, is the fusion of the idea of the power of the people and the idea of legally guaranteed individual rights. Sometimes this fusion can be confusion. The two should, indeed, be combined, but they are distinct ideas, and can in practice contradict each other. There can be intolerant democracies and reasonably tolerant autocracies. It may not always be helpful to call the system of government under which we live ‘democratic’ without qualification or pause for thought. To do so begs the question. It can close the door on discussion of how the actual system could be made more democratic, just as others once feared – and some still do so – that the democratic element can become too powerful. For many years the Reverend Ian Paisley, in Northern Ireland, proclaimed it undemocratic to stop the majority in an elected parliament from ruling over the Catholic minority. It took him a long time to accept such an artificial and imposed political device as power-sharing; and any system of proportional representation is a deliberate check on majoritarian democracy.

Sociologically and socially England is still in many ways a profoundly undemocratic society (Scotland and Wales are perhaps somewhat more democratic), certainly when compared to the US – but even in the US there is now very little active citizenship or positive participation in politics in the republican style of the early American Republic. There are some interesting but very localized experiments in direct democracy, local referenda and ‘citizenship panels’ etc, and of course people vote (albeit in disappointing numbers); but between elections any talking about and active participation in politics rates far lower as the most favoured national activity, apart from work, than shopping. (Lipset, 1996). But institutionally we know what we mean by calling Britain and the US democracies: institutional procedures protected by law and custom allow public debate, freedom of the press and free and fair elections so that presidents, governments and representatives can be changed peaceably. But that is a different matter to behaving democratically: treating everyone one as worthy of equal respect even when unequal in talent or status. All opinions are to be respected (to a varying degree) but not all can be judged of equal worth.

Aristotle said that as part of the good life, to fulfill our humanity, we must enter into the polis as citizens, into political relationships with other citizens. ‘To be political, to live in a polis meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through violence. In Greek self-understanding to force people by violence, to command rather than persuade, were prepolitical ways … characteristic of life outside the polis’. (Arendt, 1958: 26–27). What we mean by politics and citizenship has been shaped by the Aristotelian tradition of thought. Politics is an activity among free citizens living in a state or polis, how they govern themselves by public debate. To him the special sense of polis or civic state was that of a conditional teleological ideal: both a standard and a goal to which all states would naturally move if not impeded, as well they might be impeded, by folly, unrestrained greed, power-hunger by leaders lacking civic sense or by conquest. Aristotle brings out the intense specificity of the political relationship when, in the second book of The Politics, he examines and criticizes schemes for ideal states. He says that his teacher Plato made the mistake in The Republic of trying to reduce everything in the polis to an ideal unity; rather, it is the case that:

… there is a point at which a polis, by advancing in unity, will cease to be a polis: there is another point, short of that at which it may still remain a polis, but will none the less come near to losing its essence, and will thus be a worse polis. It is as if you were to turn harmony into mere unison, or to reduce a theme to a single beat. The truth is that the polis is an aggregate of many members (Barker, 1958: 51).

So politics arises in organized societies that recognize themselves to be an aggregate of many members, not a single tribe, religion, interest or even tradition. It can be defined as the activity by which the differing interests and values that exist in any complex society are conciliated (Crick, 2005: 3–5). Democratic politics are a device for such conciliation needed in modern industrial and post-industrial society. Politics only arises when there is a perception of diversities as natural and a tolerant democratic politics when that perception is widely shared. But historically and logically politics preceded what in the modern world is usually called democracy. Ruling elites in 5th century Greece and in republican Rome did act politically among themselves (democratically, if you like), even while the majority of inhabitants were shut out of political activity – just like in 18th and 19th century Britain.

Not all regimes that style themselves democratic are democratic in any sense other than that a majority of the people accept the regime and may, indeed, be proud of it – as when the ‘peoples’ democracies of the former Communist world had survived war and were in working order, or in many African, South-East Asian and South American regimes today inspired (if sometimes deceived by) intense nationalism. It is bad mistake to assume that all dictatorships were and are unpopular, even if in our eyes their leaders subvert political compromises and individual liberties by appealing to the masses against traditional institutions and restraints.

Consider by way of contrast to even the best democratic practices of today a passage from an ancient author that in the 19th and early 20th centuries ‘every school boy knew’, or so it was said; certainly all those who thought seriously about politics – the Periclean oration.

Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, every one is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty. …

Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the state as well: even those who are mostly occupied with their own business are extremely well-informed on general politics – this is a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all. We Athenians, in our own persons, take our decisions on policy or submit them to proper discussions: for we do not think that there is an incompatibility between words and deeds; the worst thing is to rush into action before the consequences have been properly debated … (Rieu: 1954, 117–119).

But historians now tell us that Pericles was a populist demagogue, a kind of democratic dictator. And today to say ‘a man who minds his own business … has no business here at all’ would be seen as a dangerous denial of individual rights. But, that point apart, the ideal is eternally impressive that Pericles had to invoke to persuade and deceive his fellow citizens.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Section 1: Key Ideas Underlying Citizenship Education
• Section 2: Geographically Based Overviews - Comparative Research
• Section 3: Key Perspectives
• Section 4: Characterizations and Forms
• Section 5: Pedagogy
• Index