A major research programme: Nations and Regions, Constitutional Change and Identity

Two Views of Education for Citizenship

Lindsay Paterson 1 and Ross Bond 2

This short note concentrates on the question: what is the most appropriate intellectual preparation for citizenship? It describes two views that have prevailed in Scotland over the last century about what a curriculum for citizenship might be; the material here draws on two current pieces of research 3. The contrast between the two views raises difficult questions for what we might currently mean by citizenship education.

1. Skills

We start with the view that is now dominant: the belief that education for citizenship requires that students acquire certain skills and capacities, and that at best they should learn how to engage critically with people in authority.

A particularly influential instance of this view is the response by Learning and Teaching Scotland - the body which is responsible for advising on the school curriculum - to the report of the working party that its predecessor set up to investigate education for citizenship in Scotland; that report was the most thorough and careful recent consideration of this question in Scotland. LTS agreed with its working party that citizenship should pervade the curriculum, and should not be tied to any specific body of knowledge:

Education for citizenship should aim to develop the capability for thoughtful and responsible participation in political, economic, social and cultural life. This capability is rooted in knowledge and understanding , in a range of generic skills and competencies , including 'core skills', and in a variety of personal qualities and dispositions . It finds expression through creative and enterprising approaches to issues and problems. 4

This clearly places the greatest emphasis on skills. Even by ' knowledge and understanding ' it turns out that LTS mean skills too: 'appreciating the need to base opinions, views and decisions on relevant knowledge and on a critical evaluation and balanced interpretation of evidence'. 5

Such a view is widespread, and indeed is merely one instance of a more general belief that the curriculum for whatever topic should mainly be concerned with developing skills rather than imparting knowledge. Another current example relates to the expansion of higher education. More than one half of people in Scotland now enter higher education by age 21, and so some experience of it is becoming as important a route into adulthood as experience of a full course of secondary education was half a century ago. Our investigation of academics' own views of the role of critical citizenship has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, as part of a wider project on national identity. Full details are in the paper cited in footnote 1; the conclusions, however, may be illustrated by a couple of quotations. In Scotland, we found that academics were inclined to encourage critical thinking. For example, one lecturer in languages said:

[in my particular field] questioning authorities, knowing the past, being prepared to think across the time periods, respect for different cultures, ... . In university generally, I think if universities aren't helping students to learn to question authority, then I don't know what we're doing.

Such views were by no means confined to people working in the humanities or social sciences; for example, the following was said by an engineer:

If you have people who are going through the university system, if they have a good experience of that system opening their eyes, getting them to think critically about things, then that's the kind of population who can debate things like GM crops or cloning or whatever and can debate it in a rational way, rather than the kind of tabloid way in which these things are dealt with now.

On the whole, academics in Scotland were somewhat more inclined to foster critical citizenship in these ways than academics were in England,

In conclusion to this first section, then, we can say that the dominant view of education for citizenship is now that it is about developing a social version of the skills of critical thinking.

2. Engaging with a tradition

Thus there is little support nowadays for the view that education should pass on the best that has been thought and said (Matthew Arnold's definition of culture). But that belief used to be dominant in Scottish education, as in many other places. It was held that engaging with a cultural tradition was the best preparation for citizenship.

A good example of that in Scotland is the role which the study of literature had in Scottish secondary education in the first four decades of the twentieth century, a period when secondary schooling was emerging as a distinct stage for the first time. It was believed - by teachers, inspectors, policy makers in government, and university professors - that the subject which was called English should be at the heart of a truly secondary education, and that, through English, pupils could learn how to live in society.

The view was that developing this social capacity required engaging with a tradition. For example, one of the early and influential thinkers in this regard was S. S. Laurie, the first professor of education at Edinburgh University (from 1876 until 1903). He believed that a nation's character could be discovered in 'the literary expression of its way of looking at the world', and that through literature people may enter 'on the inheritance which the past has bequeathed'. The aim of literary studies should be 'the making of a good citizen'.

Likewise, the standard specification for the Leaving Certificate from 1895 until after 1939 required that candidates for Higher Grade English should have 'some acquaintance with the authorship and period of the leading masterpieces of our literature', and should be based on close, critical reading: 'knowledge of literary history should in all cases be based upon a first-hand acquaintance with literature itself, acquired by the careful study of a few well-chosen masterpieces supplemented by more cursory reading in a wider but no less carefully selected range of English classics'.

As the Scottish Council for Research in Education said in a report on English in 1931, 'to teach English to pupils of any age is to help them to satisfy ... the need to understand others and to be understood by them.' This echoed Adam Smith's view that we become social beings by learning to judge our own actions through an imaginary 'impartial spectator' expressing society's norms and values, and his belief also that one effective way of stimulating that imagination was through learning about literary characterisation with its capacity to enable us to stand outside ourselves.

In that sense, literature took on a role in the emerging secondary system rather akin to that which common sense philosophy played in the Scottish universities in the nineteenth century. Unlike in England, literature in Scottish schools was not what has been described as a 'poor man's Latin': it came to replace Latin even in schools serving mainly middle-class areas. In contrast to Germany and France (and in common with England), it was not an enfeebled substitute for philosophy: the mind and the moral faculty could be trained, it was believed, by rigorous attention to linguistic analysis of texts, and by the discussion of the philosophical issues that were raised by novels, poems, plays and essays.

Although at this time only about one in three pupils entered a secondary course, and only one in eight did gain the Leaving Certificate, this role for English carried over into the much more widely accessible secondary system after the Second World War, and survived to shape the character of secondary courses in comprehensive schools at least until the 1980s. In any case, even when only a minority of pupils took a full secondary course, they went on to become the Scottish professional classes of the second half of the twentieth century. In that capacity, they exercised their intensely moral sense of citizenship - acquired through such courses - to shape the society that Scotland became.

3. Questions

Nevertheless, despite the legacy, we have moved away from this view now. One reason is exemplified in the inadequacy of the term 'masterpieces' in the regulations for Higher English quoted above. How do we define cultural literacy when what we have inherited from the past excluded the contributions of many social groups: most women, most people from outside Europe, most of the working class everywhere?

And yet the very idea of democracy depends upon a common social ethic, far beyond the minutiae of politics and constitutions, a set of common understandings about what society is, what it is aiming for, and how it relates to the autonomous life of individuals. Developing these understandings does require skills, but it also requires knowledge and ultimately wisdom. The old Arnoldian view of culture may have been imperfect, but, in rejecting it, we are close to rejecting any idea of a common culture altogether.

The key dilemma for us is then this. We are apparently agreed on the need for critical reflection. But, as we move rapidly away from the idea that a common education requires a common understanding of a standard body of knowledge - away from the importance of fostering cultural literacy - have we given up on the notion that critical capacities may be developed in a truly democratic way only if they are honed in the process of engaging with a cultural tradition?

Footnotes

1. School of Education, Edinburgh University.

2. School of Social and Political Studies, Edinburgh University.

3. For the material on academics' views of critical citizenship, see Paterson, L. and Bond, R. (2004), 'Higher education and critical citizenship: a survey of academics' views in Scotland and England', paper submitted for publication. For the material on the teaching of English in Scottish secondary schools in the first part of the twentieth century, see Paterson, L. (2004), 'The role of English in Scottish secondary education, 1900-1939', paper submitted for publication. The sources of all quotations in this note may be found in these papers, unless otherwise specified.

4. p. 7 in Learning and Teaching Scotland (2002), Education for Citizenship in Scotland , Dundee; emphasis in the original.

5. p. 7 in Learning and Teaching Scotland (2002), Education for Citizenship in Scotland , Dundee.

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