Something is Rotten in the state of Citizenship Teaching

Has the introduction of Citizenship classes in schools in the UK made a difference? Should they be renamed subjectship? Promoted or scrapped? We found a textbook that's crying out to be bought and used across the country. It caused a stir thanks to Thom Yorke from Radiohead's comments on the music industry in the pages of the toolkit. That was enough to get us interested in The Rax Active Citizenship Toolkit. Read on...

The development of the Citizenship Studies curriculum had been an exciting change to UK education as it heralded an opportunity for young people to becoming informed citizens, equipped for the task of seeing through the various ways an issue can be distorted so that they find a reliable and unbiased viewpoint for themselves ("Critical thinking and enquiry"). In the curriculum, that first step of engagement led on to being facilitated with the skills to speak up for what you believe in ("Advocacy and representation") and finally, to the third main skill, taking authentic action for something that you believe in ("Taking informed and responsible action"). To any individual who believes that the voice of youth is vital and must be heard, the skills and processes part of the curriculum – 'active citizenship' – seemed astonishingly progressive.

In reality, the whole subject has been declawed and dumbed down and in fact, the way it is generally being taught and the way that it is being advocated for by the major charities responsible for raising awareness about Citizenship Studies, means that the subject is succeeding in turning young people off political engagement in droves. Highly funded bodies like The Citizenship Foundation and The Association For Citizenship Teaching are encouraging schools to focus more on the Content side of the curriculum which is an enormous body of information that covers Democracy and justice, Rights and responsibilities and Identity and diversity. The sheer weight of information buries any interest or passion that a student may develop and without the 'active citizenship' side being pushed, then all information seems dry, meaningless and utterly disconnected from a student's everyday life.

This destruction of all that could be good in the teaching of Citizenship Studies is at variance with the wishes of Ofsted, who have stated clearly that schools are failing in not practicing enough authentic active citizenship in their schools and that schools need to be addressing controversial and current issues. It is a rarely known fact in schools that whether a school takes the GCSE or not, what remains statutory is that students engage in active citizenship, they do not have to be learning all the Content at all. This dire state is also doing a disservice to the students who take the GCSE as all examination boards award 60% of their final mark to the active citizenship project but students currently wading through the mire of piles of facts and information (From the Content side of the curriculum) barely have the opportunity to engage in any authentic and meaningful active citizenship project. This makes even less sense when you realise that it is when students are engaged in a campaign that has meaning and real currency in their lives, that they absorb the content side of the curriculum simply as a matter of course as it has context within their strivings to bring about a change they are interested in. That is to say, the make up of parliament, the process of law, will remain completely dry and alien to young people until they are busy lobbying MPs and testing the word of a specific law in order to save their local youth club or create a campaign to deter consumers from buying at a local store that engages in unethical business practice in Bangladesh. That is real active citizenship, that is the true empowerment of the youth voice but that kind of engagement is rarely present in UK schools even though it is stated in black and white in the curriculum and demanded by Ofsted.

LiNKS:

http://shop.newint.org/uk/the-rax-active-citizenship-toolkit.html

Buy it from the New Internationalist bookshop (you may find it cheaper elsewhere)

http://www.newint.org/publications/citizenship-toolkit/

See the video intro to the book by the author...