Why Would Young People Want to be Active Citizens?

Indeed, pupils concentrating on getting by and those focused on moving on may sit side by side in class, but pupils who took the initiative to take part in school councils and other pupil voice fora expressed themselves in terms that revealed a level of informed awareness that was not typical of the young participants in this study. The year eight school council member whose motivation to become a councillor was

that he “thought it would look quite good on the CV” spoke of a conception of citizenship as ‘taking care of yourself’ quite different from his peers’ interpretation of

‘staying out of trouble’. His attitude suggested a Kantian cleverness: the skill which enables the individual to use society for their purposes (Kant 1795). More commonly represented in this research was Mill’s (1910a) notion of developmentalism: education for an understanding of democracy that seeks to encourage an awareness of the existing system and acceptance of the learner’s role in it, rather than cast her as an active agent of systemic change. In one teacher’s view: “pupils are politically aware, they might not be able to tell you ... who the cabinet minister is for this ministry but they’re very, very astute and they know how to organise and how to plan things” but policy makers have “chosen not to acknowledge” this as “they’ve decided that they don’t want [to change] the system”

(teacher, North West School).

Whether young people’s opportunities to experience deliberation are sidelined by the aim of moving on or getting by, a central aim of civic republicanism has been displaced. Although pupils may feel compelled to demonstrate civic empathy, a short circuit has been created that bypasses their own experiences of civic speaking and civic listening, so that that the only views presented for their empathic understanding are those manufactured in the classroom. Barber’s (1984:117) vision of strong democracy with citizens united by ‘civic education’ over ‘homogeneous interests’ is then made impossible. Revisiting earlier liberal thought on citizenship and the transformative powers of education is perhaps insightful at a time when the coalition government is scaling back the state and using the language of the social contract to describe expectations of citizens in the Big Society (Helm 2010), while the Labour opposition is pushing for an educational contract between the individual and the state to guarantee a ‘relevant’ curriculum ‘more geared to the world of work’

that will ensure children leave school packaged to appeal to employers (Helm 2011) and ready to become economic citizens. Such an approach would presumably endorse the attitude of the bright student who has yet to use her citizenship education but sees it as cultural capital in “general knowledge” that would allow her to be involved if “a conversation comes up”; which critics would argue is evidence that young people’s citizenship learning lies dormant, waiting to be expressed in reaction to some external event.

Some teachers had strong views on how the education system fundamentally served to keep the application of citizenship values from being prioritised in schools, with the culture of inspections providing no incentive for pupils to be

“rounded”, rather than “android[s]”, “good little consumers and workers”, “a commodity rather than a person” (teacher, North West School). In this analysis, pupils have become nothing more than the result of their banking, or the cultural capital they take on, moving from subjects to objects to products of the discourse (Kakos 2012). Citizenship as part of the National Curriculum then is not proactive, or even active. The clearest illustration of this is in pupils’ references to debate. The concept of debate is understood, it is known to be the basis of adult decision making processes, but pupils never described their participation in lessons as truly representing such an empowered process. By year ten, a Midlands Community pupil had experienced “almost like mini debates”, refereed by her teacher who attempted to broach topics “without trying to annoy anybody else” dependent on

“the topic”. As amenable as this approach may seem, Foucault’s analysis of pedagogical power relationships found that it was just such intimacies of practice that served to neutralise counter-argument. Similarly, In contrasting the characteristics of the archetypal lecture and seminar, Foucault contended that the overtly skewed nature of the power relationship in the lecture is in fact a more honest and open device than that of the seminar with its claims to reciprocity, that may dupe students into forgetting the true dynamics at work and assume its openness has left nothing further to question (Foucault 1971).

The controversial issues Crick had hoped would stir your people’s interest are absent in pupils’ testimony, perhaps a result of being undermined by techniques like the light-hearted use of devil’s advocate. Empowerment through active participation has been displaced by a simulation of debate that is not to be taken seriously, as one girl explained, outside the classroom pupils may reveal conflicting views but in a citizenship lesson “people tend to just go along with it, no-one tends to strongly disagree with no-one, they tend to just listen to it” (year eight pupil, East Coast College).

Like abstract premises for mathematical problems, citizenship’s relevance does not extend to life beyond the lesson for young people. They may not appreciate, however, that they have been conditioned to give a neutral response to conflicting arguments by guided freedom that encourages them to revere ‘balance’ and to regard themselves as tolerant and respectful of all points of view. This non-judgemental approach treats all positions as of equal value, as long as they do not oppose those frequently occurring ‘right answers’ that reinforce what is culturally acceptable. This second concern of cultural acceptability is by no means secondary; after all, state education is not merely an end in itself. Rather,

citizenship education operates not only within the National Curriculum; but the National Curriculum itself is a construction of a broader ideological discourse that produces culture at a societal level. An understanding of the macro level values, like the ‘politics without adversary’ (Mouffe 1993) around issues of diversity, that permeate from this source is therefore fundamental to an analysis of the micro level statements that filter into the discourse of citizenship.

As discussed in Chapter Three, the historical use of schools as an instrument for instilling morals and controlling behaviours is widely acknowledged, but is there any evidence that English schools have, after generations of changes to educational policy, made significant progress from a system of containment and control, towards pupils’ democratic participation?

Mead’s (2009) research into conceptions of participation in secondary schools is instructive. Mead cites his case study of a student-led protest against the war in Iraq, involving a group of ‘mature and respected Year 11 Muslim pupils’ at a school with an active school council, with whom the head teacher consulted in order to reach agreement on the school’s choice of response. As a result of this genuine pupil involvement, part of the school day was given over to discussion of the war and ‘a short vigil’. It was agreed that petitions for and against the war would be produced and sent to the Prime Minister and a local Member of Parliament. Staff responses were mixed, with some supportive of what they saw as an authentic channel for young people’s expression, and others wary of weakening the school’s authority over pupils; what Mead describes as a ‘communitarian perspective’ that favours ‘leav[ing] such issues at the school gate, because they might fuel tension between different sections of the school community’ (Mead 2009: 54).

The pupils’ sense of empowerment in the wake of this event is what is really striking about Mead’s study. Interviewed ten months after the protest, the young people expressed how their presence in the school had been transformed:

... after the protest ... we didn’t just feel like children, we felt like responsible people who have their views heard and are not just silenced. (Mead 2009:55)

Mead described how this feeling of agency extended to pupils’ consideration of wider-reaching activism and their indictment of the political system that ultimately failed to respond to national protests. They were aware that their school had taken an unorthodox approach to reacting to their actions and that they were a peculiar

minority in proportion to other pupils around the country (10,000 in London alone), whose activism was met with authoritarian discipline. One sixth-form student from a less progressive school commented:

... suddenly the politicisation of youth looks unattractive to those who have called us apathetic for too long. (Mead 2009:55).

Mead drew on his research to question the desirability of pedagogical models of participation. He highlights the transformative power of ‘true’ pupil participation as an essential element of his case study school’s continuing improvement after being consigned to the category of ‘failing’ (by Ofsted). Mead is convincing in his analysis of the importance of engaging all members of the school as stakeholders in its core processes. Participation on these terms is fundamentally different from Chandler’s (2000) ‘technical’ participation or, in Mead’s (2009:55) words, ‘instrumental participation that uncouples the political challenge from moral decision-making, and is ‘done’ by staff to pupils’. While there may be much to be gained from structured participation in the classroom, if this is not complemented by critical thinking and agency, it will depoliticise the political education Crick advocated.