As we have seen, for young people with what one teacher called “the golden tickets”, citizenship was recognised as a label to be attached to values they already have, rather than providing new opportunities. Pupils in this more privileged
demographic tended to envision the world that awaited them beyond school as welcoming of the rounded citizens that their combination of academic and social schooling had made manifest, and believed that they would benefit from acceding to cultural norms. One year ten pupil, from a successful school with a high proportion of students from prosperous Asian minority families, defined citizenship on his own terms and extrapolated from this a positive reasoning for its place in schools in that young people could then make “their own decision” to adhere to or deviate from cultural norms. Although this student regarded the school’s role as a vanguard of values as somewhat secondary to his parents’, he recognised a value in shoring up messages of what society and communities expect so that, were an individual to default on their responsibilities, ignorance could not be used as a defence. In this context, citizenship lessons are an opportunity to demonstrate one’s knowledge of this common sense, which enables them to choose to either conform to expected norms or depart from them with full awareness of the consequences. This test of common sense was seen by others at the school as a defining characteristic of citizenship lessons.
Citizenship lessons were not, therefore, a forum for the airing of controversial views or mounting a real challenge to dominant norms, as one student’s reflection on the
‘open’ nature of classroom discussion revealed when he described an exchange with his teacher in which he played his part by suggesting “drugs should be banned”. The teacher duly validated this but, in keeping with a commitment to
‘balance’, did so “in a neutral way”. This dialogue betrays a conscientious championing of neutrality that construes “unbiased” discussion as naturally preferable to unruly debate as a mode of demonstrating one’s ability to engage civilly with others. This student’s account was an admission that this way of dealing with issues on the citizenship syllabus sat so comfortably in the domain of received opinion, established law and accepted thought that ‘debate’ constitutes more of a tick-box exercise – going through the motions of a process to justify arriving at an outcome – than the challenging, active learning environment envisioned by Crick.
This displacement of engaging with ‘controversial subjects’ with accepted norms clearly co-operates with the displacing of active debate with constructed questions and answers through the disempowering practices that discourage challenges to social norms, which this study found to be prevalent. Freire (1970) referred to this process of narrating to pupils, instead of fostering the vitality of genuine debate, as perpetuating the ‘narration sickness’ (Freire 1970:45) he argued was endemic in formal education. This study found no cause for optimism that the teaching of citizenship in schools offers a challenge to this sickness.
No doubt Crick would have approved of a nurturing teaching style that truly
‘welcomes’ and ‘helps’ students ‘express’ views but, in such an example as encouraging a child who agrees with the current law and shows evidence of drawing on school subjects that seek to be cautionary of deviant behaviours, the teacher seems to be instilling a form of manufactured choice that promotes what is to be regarded as common sense.
6.4.4.1 “You’re not wrong, it’s just your opinion” – manufacturing choice
Pupils’ responses when questioned about their experiences of differences of opinion among their peers were revealing. Without being prompted, pupils consistently gave accounts of their teachers’ role in discussion as the most active – the source of validation – able to neutralise tension with the reassurance that “you’re not wrong, it’s just your opinion”. Gently undermining resistance to dominant views by the practice of tolerating instances of off-syllabus contribution and isolating them under the ownership of the pupil allows pupils to learn to sanction their own actions and use their ‘free choice’ to make decisions that are appropriate to their culture.
Sequestering a statement as just an opinion recognises individuality whilst devaluing it, as a process of segmentation by which Foucault proposed the power of analysis is shown to be beyond the subject, acting upon it; it ‘individualize[s] the excluded, but use[s] procedures of individualization to mark exclusion’ (Foucault 1977:196).
This is an example of how ‘public’ agendas can be linked to ‘private’ codes of behaviour, and demonstrates how overt actions by which a government seeks to impose its values by linking public and private practices (by constituting certain practices as ‘anti-social behaviour’ and inventing new punishments and treatments for perpetrators, for example) are complemented by ‘internal’ actions that seek to constitute citizens as ‘free’ individuals (who have been warned about behaviours that are anti-social, are attributed with the ability to regulate their own behaviour and therefore have no-one to blame but themselves) (Foucault 1982; Rose 1998).
Rose (1998) cited the relationship between national government and self-government as explicitly established since the advent of policing. A citizen was to be taught ‘to control his own life by mastering his emotions and to subordinate himself politically without resistance’ (Rose 1998:77). This demanded education in practices of ‘self-scrutiny, self-evaluation, and self-regulation’ (Rose 1998:77), which included governance over one’s body, speech and movement in school. In common with
subjects of other institutions like factories and asylums, pupils were to internalise judgment of themselves against the values of their institution. These practises, therefore, do not aim to repress individuals but to produce individuals who subject themselves to moral judgments (Rose 1998). These practices are what Foucault called technologies of the self, ‘which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality’ (Foucault 1988:18).
As one pupil explained that he did not feel he could bring up an issue he felt was relevant to citizenship, as this would be discouraged because his teacher “usually has something set to learn”, his validated role of “getting involved in what she’s already set out” constituted a more active role than he experienced in his other lessons. Pupils are therefore taught the theory of the merits of constructing and expressing one’s own opinion, without benefiting from the practice of it. The manufactured choices they are conditioned to follow represent the level of participation that is reinforced by their learning in other National Curriculum subjects, affirming citizenship’s place in the wider discourse of their school.
6.4.4.2 “Drugs should be banned” – the construction of a common sense consensus
As discussed above, pupils’ perceptions of the source of the views they were exposed to were obfuscated by teaching methods, like extreme case formulation and devil’s advocate, which sought to guide them to a pre-decided conclusion. In this way, pupils’ manufactured choices may create a common sense consensus that is not recognised as the product of their teacher’s methods. When pupils were asked if a teacher would put forward a particular argument as part of class discussion, it was seen as an arbitrary decision for the teacher, of little consequence. One pupil exemplified a lack of critique of her teacher’s position in class debates by describing her position as “just in the middle!”
After teaching students to be vigilant for signs of bias in ideological positions, some teachers precluded debate by adopting a somewhat disingenuous approach that neglected to acknowledge their role in bringing issues to the classroom. The provenance of the view was not examined and the significance of being ‘in the middle’ of a scale of their own construction is not afforded genuine consideration.
The real ‘balance’ here seems to be between what Bentham (1798) described as
too much or too little observation. In Bentham’s terms, schoolchildren need not feel constantly subjected to inspection as long as they are aware that they may unwittingly be so at any time. In this way, instances of the exercise of power through inspection are unverifiable. When presented with a ‘middle-view’, or one whose expression is presented as dependent on the whim of the teacher, pupils are unable to verify whether or not power is acting upon them. Foucault believed this unverifiability to be central to panoptic discipline in institutions such as schools (Foucault 1995).
Rather like the teacher who ‘neutrally agrees’ that drugs should be banned, failure to seize opportunities to apply the values of transparency and informed, reasoned analysis that are taught about in the treatment of issues for class discussion is consistent with a rhetorical strategy that seeks to avoid any naturally-occurring confrontation in favour of a manufactured middle ground. Billig’s (1987) work on the construction of ‘common-sense’ identifies limits that such a strategy places upon argumentation, either devaluing issues by establishing a norm of selecting issues to offer a view on based on “if they want to or not”; or, by not opening an issue up for genuine debate, denying the legitimacy of fundamental questions on the subject (Billig 1987). In this way, silence is never a neutral response. Pupils are used to looking for the right answer and are adept at reading between these lines to “work out” the common sense consensus they must arrive at to be admitted to the echelons of academic attainment.
Although all the teachers who participated in the study were conscious of the potential for political and personal bias in citizenship education, most expressed a view of education more generally as playing a valid role in shaping the kind of citizen a child would grow up to be. There was a consensus that personal views could be drawn upon in teaching, so long as they reflect widely held mainstream principles such as the inherent unacceptability of racism that had passed into common sense. This understanding of common sense – of the constructed limits of what is accepted and acceptable in the discourse – is one of the local processes of constituting and re-constituting social relations through which hegemony is achieved (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Working at the macro level of policy formation as well as this micro level, such processes integrate subordinate subjects rather than dominating and suppressing them and exercise power through the generation of consent rather than coercion (Fairclough 1995:123) The idea that culture may be legitimately reproduced as long as there is consensus had some credence with
pupils, who saw teachers’ positions on debates as arrived at “with lots of other