As a concern of a range of interest groups, arguments for and against different incarnations of citizenship education have emanated from those within the education system as well as political actors with broader social concerns. Pressure came from within education in the 1970s and 1980s for the personal and social development of young people and momentum was gathered following tensions brought into view by inner-city clashes such as the Brixton riots of 1981. The teaching of ‘political literacy’ was advocated, as well as a more inclusive curriculum that facilitated discussions of contemporary, multicultural society more than the existing focus on British history and traditions. These calls resulted in an expansion of ‘new’ subjects that were seen as more relevant to young people’s needs, many of which revolved around a core tenet of social justice, as advocated by Dewey, and could be described as forms of political education (Kerr 1999). In 1985, the Swann Report furthered this agenda with its statement that ‘all schools and all teachers have a professional responsibility to prepare their pupils for life in a pluralist society’ under the title Education for All (DES 1985: 560).
These reforms were associated with the political left and concerns were duly raised by those on the right who saw them as opening a door for bias and indoctrination in schools, as well as dismantling the essentially conservative nature of the curriculum. The consequences of adopting a multicultural narrative for the preservation of majority British culture were especially troubling to the assimilationist agenda of the right (Hillgate Group 1986; Marenbon 1987). Fears of indoctrination were sufficiently strong for two new clauses (44 and 45) to be added
to the 1986 Education Act. Teachers have since had a statutory duty to avoid overt bias in the classroom.
Debate in the late 1980s and early 1990s centred on the content of the new National Curriculum. The Conservative government sought to re-assert traditional values by excluding those ‘new’ subjects that had proliferated in preceding decades from the Curriculum. The National Curriculum was established by the Education Reform Act 1988, which made no mention of multiculturalism and emphasised history, English and religious education. In the same year, Section 28 of the Local Government Act banned local authorities from ‘promoting’ homosexuality as a normal part of British life. This was seen as part of the Conservative drive to maintain focus on marriage and families (based on heterosexual relationships) in education and beyond, an agenda that was furthered by the spread of AIDS in Britain. At the same time, the concept of ‘active citizenship’ was used for what has been called the Conservative Party’s ‘hegemonic project’ to combat ‘weak’
citizenship that erodes moral consensus (Davies 2012). According to Faulks, in Thatcher’s Britain, the ‘active’ citizen was:
... a law abiding, materially successful individual who was willing and able to exploit the opportunities created by the promotion of market rights, while demonstrating occasional compassion for those less fortunate than themselves – charity rather than democratic citizenship was to be the main instrument of “active citizenship”. Faulks (2006:125)
Although the Conservatives did not take this project forward into a comprehensive approach to educating ‘active’ citizens, it effected consideration of the role of education, including recommendations by the House of Commons’ Commission on Citizenship. The Commission’s recommendations for teaching to encourage, develop and recognise active citizenship were absorbed into the National Curriculum, although no provision was made for the teaching of a discrete subject.
Attempts to define education for citizenship were now being made. Following the Commission on Citizenship’s recommended focus on education, public services and the voluntary sector in Encouraging Citizenship (1990), Curriculum Guidance 8:
Education for Citizenship (1990) offered schools advice on developing active citizenship as an over-arching theme.
The 1990s saw debates turn to more specialised aspects of social and moral education to address the effects of rapid economic and social change on the so-called moral fabric of British society – that is, those institutions and values that are thought of as underwriting British society, promoting cohesion and continuity through deference to marriage, traditional family structures and the law – resulting in both the ‘democratic deficit’ of political apathy and a more general lack of interest in public affairs that can be observed in the diminutive role of civic culture and associated discourse in everyday life. Young people were particularly targeted by discussions of deficit, with anti-social and criminal behaviour both in and out of school highlighted by alarm at soaring exclusion rates and high profile crimes like the murders of London head teacher Philip Lawrence and Liverpool toddler James Bulger (the capture of whose final movements by CCTV has also been credited as the precursor to the expansion of surveillance technologies in the UK).
Indeed, the term ‘anti-social’ came to denote ‘the thin end of the wedge’ of criminal behaviour as it was applied to acts that should be subject to state sanctions, rather than rudeness or thoughtlessness that it had conventionally implied. The idea of the
‘pedagogical state’ (Hunter 1996) therefore became important in British debates about educating for citizenship. New Labour’s governing style of that time has also been described as the ‘therapeutic state’ (Furedi 2003) for its concern with
‘emotional literacy’ and a value-driven approach to intervention in discourses of health, welfare, criminal justice and education.
This language of ‘healing’ helped a government of outspoken advocates of citizenship to put citizenship education on the political agenda. Their model drew heavily on civic republican ideals of virtue for the rejuvenation of Britain’s foundations of liberal democracy. The ‘civil renewal’ agenda used ideas of re-cultivating social capital to re-install habits and norms of participation and collective action – associated with the dying out of the generation that ‘re-built’ Britain after the Second World War – amongst future generations (NCVO 2005). In David Blunkett’s (2003) pamphlet, Civil Renewal: a New Agenda, he stated that he had always advocated civil renewal as the ‘centrepiece’ of the government’s reform agenda, and that this would necessitate the redefining of the relationship between the citizen and the state (Blunkett 2003). Blunkett draws on the idea of the Ancient Greek polis as spawning the ideal manifestation of formative citizenship, where a sense of responsibility is borne out of a feeling that ‘the community is worthy of loyalty and patriotic commitment’. Active citizenship therefore ‘brings with it the
cultivation of civic virtues, and the free acceptance of duties and obligations to the rest of the community’ (Blunkett 2003).
Blunkett goes on to list five themes of the civic republican model he identifies with:
that individual freedom is only fully achieved through public participation; that the community must actively maintain democratic institutions; that participation is engendered by education for citizenship; that citizens must embrace civic virtues, committing to the common good, freely accepting obligations and demonstrating patriotic devotion to shared values; and prizing the public realm as the platform for community achievements (Blunkett 2003). Blunkett makes explicit his sympathy for this form of republican thought whilst problematising the broader concept of liberty, the philosophy of which, he believes, neglects the crucial component of social order. In keeping with his left-wing credentials, Blunkett shows concern for the theory of Marx and yet makes a notable departure as he rejects the romantic Marxist concept of freedom for its failure to appreciate the role of social ties. Instead of such purely ‘negative’ forms of liberty, Blunkett perceives a need to prescribe what exactly individual freedom should be used for: it should have a direction – as freedom to rather than freedom from – a form of positive liberty that recognises the co-dependent relationship of citizen and democratic state. In this view, the values of the state and the active citizen are inseparable. He sees education’s role as imparting political knowledge and skills but also engineering ‘dispositions’ to this effect. Blunkett arrives at this position on the basis that some free choices are more worthwhile than others, situated as they must be within a context of value judgments, and he sees a moral consensus emanating from a set of policies which
‘promote, structure and reward’ active engagement (Blunkett 2003:12). Blunkett concedes that, in the interests of legitimacy, liberal ‘negative’ freedoms must be protected, but it is positive freedom that he sees as the transformative force capable of changing behaviours, and he ambitiously seeks to achieve a form of social order that repudiates hierarchy and inequality in that it is nurtured from community level upwards.