Besides educational policies, school organisational structure (wide official curriculum) can help or hinder the citizenship learning process. The school organisation has impact upon the teaching-learning process of all subjects. For example, depending on how students are evaluated, they are more or less stimulated to memorise, build reasoning, practice what they learned, etc. The impact of school organisation over civic knowledge, skills and values, however, is even higher than over other subjects. Schools are constituted by rules and, in certain degrees, are linked with the communities around them. The ways that these two elements are managed by the schools‟ administration body impacts significantly upon students‟ development of citizenship. They learn about processes of decision-making and develop social relations with the known and unknown fellows.
The first way to develop civic knowledge, skills and values through school practices is making students participate in the school‟s creation and implementation of their rules. As mentioned above, schools play a fundamental role in the transition from family to public life.
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For several reasons, families (mainly when children are young) are non-democratic places. Whilst parents decide things, they can be susceptible to, amongst other things, accepting emotional blackmail of their children. Likewise, children follow their parents – though, many times, equally amongst other things, only after being threatened. Western public life is largely democratic. Regarding this difference, school is (or should be) a place in between family and public life. Not all students‟ wishes should be followed, since they are not mature enough for taking all the decisions about how their learning process should be. However, for two reasons, they should be truly listened to.
First, school is the best place for youth to start developing democratic knowledge, skills and values, something presented above as a central concern in the French educational model. As suggested in chapter 8, democracy actually demands that citizens possess certain manners. They have to defend their ideas appealing to reason, but, at the same time, understanding, as discussed in 2.6, that Western societies are plural and different people can have good reasons for disagreeing with them. People can identify through reasoning that their opponents are wrong but, in many cases, the former have to accept that this is part of the latter‟s burdens of judgment (Rawls, 1993). Having accepted this reasonable pluralism (Rawls, 1993), they also accept dissensus and defeats in democratic disputes. Thus, practices of democracy in schools which make students real decision-makers on certain subjects help the development of deliberative procedures – the capacity of being clear and making an effort to listen and understand others‟ ideas – and respect for majorities‟ decisions, that is, respecting fair rules. Moreover, through practicing democratic processes, students likely develop the wish to be a part of democratic regimes. Associated with this, they learn that, in democratic processes, they have to fight for their rights.
Regarding this discussion on cultivating youth willingness to respect fair rules and fight for rights, it is important to briefly reflect on how to deal with their feeling of anger. In 8.7, it is defended that political anger undermines social stability, something fundamental for justice being promoted. Interestingly, even White (2012), who considers political anger a virtue (against Nussbaum‟s (2016) and this thesis‟ understanding), says:
[C]hildren in school will not need to be encouraged to feel anger. When things they have been encouraged to care about – fair treatment, the rule of law, human rights – are threatened, they will feel it. (2012, p.9)
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On the other hand, she says that “[c]ivic education should also contribute to understanding anger in the democratic process” (2012, p.10). This claim is important, since a central point that sustains this thesis‟ argument is that, in a debate or in a social dispute, the other side has to be understood.
Going in a different direction, it is important to say that listening to students has another side effect: their opinions are useful for improving school practices. Regarding specifically citizenship education, it is valuable since the participation of students in decisions develops their sense of belonging to a cooperative venture, the school. This is connected with Dewey‟s (1915) and Piaget‟s (1930) ideas of learning by doing. Some strategies are very important for this. First, producing very clear rules and publicising their reasons. In this sense, a reduced number of rules is much more efficient. For example, legislating about hats, and, even worse, forbidding them without a reasonable explanation can produce these negative effects of imposed rules (Vinha, 2017). Second, as far as possible, students‟ opinions should be heard. For example, participatory counsels, classes‟ and schools‟ regular assemblies are good mechanisms. Related to this, Puig (2003) defends stimulus to assemblies instead of authoritarianism or coercion in order to, through repetition, crystallise democratic values.
Moreover, certain room for discussions about subject content should be institutionalised. For example, some mathematics classes should be used to reflect on the importance (or not) of learning certain contents: logarithms, geometry, etc. In this process, teachers‟ opinions should be considered more important, since they are specialists, however students should also have voice. The opposite is “a teacher who justifies a course of study to her students in terms of a state mandate or her own expertise and takes this justification to be final and sufficient. Secure in her justification, she can fail to take seriously her students‟ criticisms of her decisions” (Laden, 2013, p.67). Avoiding this imposition, not only students but equally teachers would train their capacity for deliberation, and, at the same time, the importance of specialists/experts opinions would be reinforced (disregard to experts‟ opinions is a current problem discussed in chapters 4 and 8).
Through this, it is possible to imagine that, at the end of the debate on the importance of teaching logarithms, the only reason for such classes is preparation for national exams. This conclusion would eventually put teachers and students in the same side on questioning the
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purposes of these exams. Of course, these discussions can also generate conflicts. However, democratic environments are naturally conflictive – differently from dictatorships in which conflicts are repressed – and conflicts are “natural in any relation and necessary for the development of the child and the young” (Vinha, 2017, 17-8).
This defence of introducing democratic practices in schools has to be at least balanced by Peters‟ (1974) view. He presents an apparent paradox of moral education: in order to guarantee that individuals think freely in the future, their liberty has to be limited in school. This attitude is even related to the safety and health of children. For lack of knowledge and/or imprudence, children often put themselves at risk, and it is the school‟s and parents‟ duty to watch over them.
The two models of teaching/cultivating citizenship presented in 9.1 are, somehow, oriented to these two ideas on how to deal with democracy in schools. If the French model presents a clear focus on developing democratic practices within the school, the English model emphasises another important structural element of the school in order to develop citizenship knowledge, skills and values: openness for the surrounding community. As discussed above, these two countries have opposite school practices towards promoting engagement and celebration of difference. France tries to cultivate national values in all students, while England is more concerned with creating strong ties between students and their communities. This thesis, agreeing with a middle ground in between republican (France) and multicultural (England) ideas, considers that the school has to be completely open to its surrounding community and that students have to be stimulated to engage with it as long as such an engagement is useful for a wider engagement in the future (Arthur & Wright, 2001, 86-7). On the other hand, schools have to be aware of communities‟ oppression over members that not follow certain patterns of behaviour. For example, schools should encourage sexual diversity (celebrate difference) instead of simply accepting the impositions of certain communities‟ practices.
After presenting the importance of students‟ participation on the process of creating and implementing school rules and of schools‟ insertion in the community to citizenship education, it is interesting to present an idea of how to develop in students a sense of cooperation and healthy competition. As a good example of cultivating cooperative values, Benjamin describes the routine of Japanese schools in which better students help the slower
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ones, almost all activities are in groups, including competitions that are won or lost by everyone (Benjamin, 1997. Apud. Levinson, 1999, p.90). Analysing US and UK schools, Levinson identifies the opposite, and says that, in these countries, teachers “do use cooperative learning techniques, [but] they usually do so to help students develop group-work skills, not to teach collective responsibility” (1999, p.90).
This comparison of two different systems shows one type of school‟s system focused only on individual achievement which stimulates excessive competition and individualism, and another focused on balancing cooperation and competition which prepares students for capitalist societies, but, at the same time, develops communal values. No doubt, the extremely capitalistic world outside the school teaches enough (even excessive) skills and values linked with competition. Thus, it is reasonable to think that the school has to counterbalance this in order to make social stability possible.