Teachers spoke about citizenship education’s relationship to the social world as central to their personal interest in it and their decision to become citizenship teachers. Many teachers spoke with passionate conviction about citizenship education’s potential for positive impact on wider society as a result of its capacity to instil certain values in the next generation that might help to overcome social problems. Schools’ role in shaping young people’s understandings of citizenship was seen as having a different type of impact on society than their substantive role of producing educated citizens with a grounding in certain disciplines that enable them to navigate the social world on common terms with other adults. Teachers
were aware that, in bringing in citizenship education, the government had looked to them to tackle issues at the root of social problems:
I think citizenship in some ways has either grown out of that or the community cohesion strand has grown out of the idea behind citizenship ... there was a general sense of apathy after the eighties, that it was more about the individual or about greed – “greed is good” – to quote Wall Street. And maybe there was a reaction against that, particularly during the Labour years, to try and readdress that balance, to try and bring communities together. Quite often communities that had fractured during that period [of] the decline of industry, and the role of men in the family and in the communities fragmenting, new immigrants coming into the country; there was a genuine need, I think, for an attempt to sort of say well what is Britishness, you know, decide who you’ll be as a citizen. Teacher, North West School
This kind of detailed analysis of the origins of citizenship education was common amongst teachers. When asked directly what they thought the New Labour government that introduced citizenship education was trying to achieve, most talked about an agenda of tackling social problems. A general idea that there was a “bit more selfishness creeping in, bit more ... personal aims over taking aims for the collective” (Teacher, Northern Academy) was widespread. Some teachers thought the introduction of citizenship education was an overt attempt to address a lack of certain values, with the design of the new school subject a secondary consideration to the aim of instilling values:
... I think it was Tony Blair – who suddenly brought citizenship in because of the increase in intolerance, terrorism, erm unrest? ... but I think since then they’ve begun to see that, is it civic and civil citizenship where obviously they can learn how to act in their own neighbourhood, their own community and what to do what’s right, what to do, what’s wrong, but also then you can look at the politics side of it and government side of it. And since then it’s branched off into its own subject. I don’t think it was introduced as a subject like geography would be, I think it was a possible solution to problems that we were facing. Teacher, East Coast College
This teacher shows her conviction that the New Labour government was focused on bringing about social change beyond education in her description of the
“sudden” implementation of citizenship education as responsive to perceptions of social need. She sees its identity as a school subject as forming somewhat organically once installed in schools. It is particularly interesting to note her
conception of the substantive content of the curriculum as concerned with learning certain behaviours and the remaining content that covers how these norms relate to political processes as supplementary. She notes how it only became recognisable as a subject once messages about “how to act” were augmented by this content.
Some teachers felt this focus was damaging for children, as this respondent argued:
... my personal viewpoint is that they were trying to do a very middle-class education and they were trying to sort of cram that into an education that covers a whole range of classes and ... I felt like they were forcing an agenda that wasn’t child-centred and that wasn’t going to help the children, they weren’t thinking ‘what do the children need?’, they were thinking ‘what would suit our agenda as a government?’ Teacher, East Coast College
Despite sympathising with the idea of educating young people in citizenship values, this teacher disagreed with citizenship’s guise as another National Curriculum subject, rather than a less prescriptive form of learning that would be more responsive to young people’s needs. Many teachers were reticent about the problems of the nation directing the way they engage with their pupils, although one respondent needed to be prompted to consider the aims of the policy after commenting that it was concerned with “how to be good citizens”, which involved informing young people “about certain laws that exist and why they exist and how to behave and how to look after yourself” (Teacher, North West School). After some contemplation, she suggested this was linked to Britain’s need to tackle alcohol and drug abuse and teen pregnancy. Although this teacher did not immediately relate the teaching of citizenship education to national priorities, she did consider tackling social ills valid justification for teaching young people how to behave.
There was a consensus that, if the policy was driven by a desire to benefit not just society at large but the lives of individual young people, then it was a valid effort, and whether or not teachers saw it as falling within schools’ remit, they supported the teaching of citizenship because its aims were congruent with their own reasons for becoming teachers: to influence the lives of young people for the better. One teacher suggested:
... maybe teaching them about law perhaps keeps some of them out of trouble and they’ll understand how the courtroom works and so on but hopefully won’t use that knowledge cos they’ll keep out of trouble. Teacher, East Coast College
Her colleague found these sorts of outcomes to be the only way of monitoring impact:
I mean we can only kind of go by the fact that we get a lot of compliments from our local neighbourhood and we have the police in a lot and they always comment that it makes their life easier. Teacher, East Coast College
There is therefore less emphasis on what pupils might derive form their citizenship education when taught from this ‘social problems’ perspective, as its beneficiaries are seen as located beyond the classroom.