Like their colleagues further up the league tables, teachers in schools serving areas with higher levels of deprivation also used citizenship education as a utility for dealing with perceived barriers to success. The nature of this agenda, however, was recognised as more controversial, as the dual beneficiaries of the individual pupil and society at large came to the fore. One teacher felt that learning about the law might keep students “out of trouble”, while another attested to making “life easier” for the local police.
Indeed, some pupils spoke of their citizenship education as teaching them to look after themselves by staying out of trouble. The importance of staying within the existing laws and moral codes of the country was emphasised with a clear message that stepping outside these boundaries was an act of criminality and wrongness, not the work of an agent of social change. Young people were therefore informed of their rights, not so that they could proactively hold democratic society to account but so that, when they committed (with varying degrees of inevitability) infractions against the social order, they would know their rights. The social world was portrayed as a hazardous place, where the potential for one to betray their responsibilities lurked at every decision point. Students were urged to take responsibility for their actions in order to keep the threat of the state having to do it for them at bay, as one teacher’s interpretation illustrated, the policy’s key aims were the production of “good citizens”, aware of the law and “how to behave and how to look after yourself”. It was this reading of the curriculum that found greatest resonance amongst students, some of whom were almost fatalistic in their perception of the world waiting for them. As one respondent put it, citizenship education “gives us a warning”.
Staying on the right side of the law was the number one priority of this agenda, it was not only the most frequently referred to antecedent for citizenship education but pupils from schools where the law was focused on in this way were much more homogeneous in their agreement that there was such a key aim than those in other schools. Social and moral responsibility was then understood as insurance against getting into trouble. These pupils were keenly aware that they had been identified as an at risk group, likely to fall into criminal activity if not actively diverted from it.
Surrounded by the ASBO discourse that depicts a ‘drift’ (Nolas 2011) into anti-social behaviour, denying even the agency of disaffected youth, these young
people were able to easily construct a narrative around the behaviour that was expected of them. This view of citizenship as corrective, designed to undo the work of conflicting discourses by denouncing choices that deviated from the “right path”
as ‘wrong’, or ‘criminal’ was particularly prevalent at North West School. Unlike the Midlands Community pupils for whom needing citizenship was an abstract concept or, in one case, related to a form of lack that had been eradicated, North West pupils could draw on close-to-hand examples of candidates in need of correction “to insure your life”.
Citizenship was therefore about making the right choices to not harm the community and avoid sanctions: the other was then someone who failed to sanction themselves and ended up on the wrong side of the law. The positive benefits of discussing one’s social and moral responsibilities towards others were not espoused and some struggled to see the merits of engaging with different points of view. Although understanding of their fundamental responsibilities, and their rights when they failed in their responsibilities, was recognised as being of value, some North West students could not look beyond this function to a broader definition of citizenship as an end in itself. It is taught as Skills for Life and afforded more time on the timetable than at Midlands Community but ‘life’ is depicted more as a sequence of traps than a series of opportunities.
Of course, it is not the individual students at North West School who are singled out as predisposed to anti-social and inadvisable behaviour; rather, a projection is being made that their life choices are likely to echo those of previous generations of school leavers from similar backgrounds. The ‘failings’ of their forebears are recognised by the state and a connection is made to the reproductive function of schools, so that some tinkering with the mechanisms of education is seen as providing a solution in the form of ‘remedial’ citizenship education. The idea of the
‘model citizen’ who goes down the ‘right path’ was a part of the discourse that recurred frequently in conjunction with the interpretation that staying out of trouble was the most pertinent way of ‘looking after yourself’ and this could be achieved by taking note of each of the traps the teacher has informed you the world has laid for you. The language of the media and adults in general was frequently adopted to describe the perils of not aligning oneself with the established order by voting age.
Pupils’ supposed freedom to make choices in their own best interests, therefore, was what Skeggs (2013) described as a trick that really dispossesses young people from the ownership of their own goals: values are only to be prized in terms of the value the adult world gives them. The reproduction of values in the form of a “model
citizen” as a panacea for social problems is discussed in greater depth in the next chapter but in this context it is symptomatic of what one teacher described as the major flaw in citizenship education; the imposition of an adult agenda on the youth population.
It is argued here that both these models teach citizenship as instrumental, eliding values with value to produce the internalisation of essentially individualistic dispositions in pupils, despite curriculum content that decries insular or selfish attitudes. That teachers’ commitment to tackling individualism has nevertheless produced this result might seem less surprising when understood in Skeggs’ terms.
Skeggs (2004) argued that the logic of capital is so pervasive that critiques of greed commonly make their case by arguing for the pursuit of some alternative goal, essentially commodifying this goal and encouraging its acquisition. Taking this view, we might start to see the absurdity of hoping to change a culture by teaching about that culture. There is, however, a clear sign of hope that springs from this analysis:
that if young people are not taught about the present state of citizenship in their country but rather enabled to learn citizenship through discussion of their own views – before particular values are permanently inculcated in them – perhaps a more authentic democracy, which champions the representation of a pluralism of perspectives rather than the reproduction of permanent (or ‘British’) values, might be achieved.
6.5 Conclusion
In this chapter, teachers’ perceptions of citizenship as a tool to tackle social problems and as enabling the empowerment of young people were described.
These ideas provided the foundation for teachers to rationalise two themes they expressed as key to their pedagogy: balanced discussion and pupil voice. Pupils’
understandings, on the other hand, were framed by a perception that teachers south to convey the right answers of citizenship. This preoccupation was found to impede an association of citizenship with empowerment. The themes of balanced discussion and pupil voice were therefore experienced as having more in common with pedagogy of other subjects than teachers’ accounts suggest. Pupils’
understandings of discussion and pupil voice in terms of right answers is then argued to limit young people’s understandings of themselves as active citizens ready to critically engage with public life as they are taught about citizenship concepts rather than offered opportunities to practice them.
The assumption that, if a school were to deliver a programme of citizenship education that truly represented active democracy and was shored up by empowering practices across the institution that saw pupils contributing to debates in reconstructive ways, young people could only be disillusioned by life outside school – where they experience inequitable opportunities to contribute to public life and witness unfairness and corruption in by the most conspicuous public servants – could perhaps explain why the lofty aims of the curriculum appear so watered down when interpreted by those teaching in the classroom. Teachers’ decisions to funnel debate into what they consider most ‘relevant’ to their pupils, however, highlight a process of critical consciousness that their pupils are denied.
Rather than engaging with the values of democratic citizenship through critical debate, the young participants in this research were encouraged to adopt citizenship values by the negative reasoning that either: being a ‘model citizen’
would ensure a future that did not follow the path of the other, who failed to heed citizenship’s warnings (necessitating taking responsibility “to insure your life”); or that citizenship knowledge would give the product of their education a final polish that would signal they had the full package of attributes to ‘move on’. These negative understandings of citizenship are both reductive and reproductive. In such manifestations, citizenship education is disingenuous because it offers the appearance of transforming young people’s participation but denies them real opportunities to define their own citizenship. Once the shallowness of their participation is revealed, young people might be expected to feel despondency which turns to political apathy by the time they are given real opportunities to participate but, as they did not expect to learn anything at school that had applications beyond passing exams, the effect is more worrying: they come through their schooling unaffected by notions of active citizenship, struggling to define it or, until probed, unaware that they have been taught it.
Even in areas where pupils seem to express greatest understanding, recognising bias for example, they have merely been adopted into the system and positioned to the orientation of adults. Young people are therefore unable to engage meaningfully because they lack what Fairclough (1995:220) refers to as ‘an essential prerequisite for effective democratic citizenship; the capacity for critique of language’. Crick advocated the development of this critical capacity, and saw it as key to tackling cultural degradation by raising expectations of, and encouraging wider participation in, public life. In the same sense that a teacher complains they leave their ability to solve equations “in the maths room”, however, pupils only apply their
understandings of citizenship in abstract exercises, which encourage the use of adult labels and the identification of the other that deviates from the right path of manufactured choice.
This chapter has engaged with teachers’ and pupils’ understandings and experiences of citizenship and citizenship education. It has suggested that pedagogical norms associated with established National Curriculum subjects define methods of teaching and learning in citizenship education. Core concepts of citizenship, including pupil voice, are acknowledged and learned about but pupils remain disempowered by neutered explorations of issues such as bias, in which they are not enabled to recognise or challenge their subjection to their teachers’
power to define citizenship knowledge, which is constructed as common sense.
Citizenship’s precarious position in the National Curriculum results in active concepts such as free choice being reduced to ‘a thing to be taught’ and the learning of manufactured right answers therefore takes precedence over opportunities to exercise free choice. Once these right answers were learnt, young people felt they were expected to apply these to their future roles as responsible citizens, which they were invited to envision according to a particular moral code. In the next chapter, it will be shown how reducing citizenship to a subject to be learnt about results in schools’ fulfilment of a reproductive role that is antithetical to the production of active citizens.