Educating the new national citizen: education, political subjectivity and divided societies

Abstract

(2010) 'Educating the new national citizen : education, political subjectivity, and divided societies.', Citizenship studies., 14 (6). pp. 667-680. Further information on publisher's website:http://dx.doi.org/10. 1080/13621025.2010.522353 Publisher's copyright statement:This is an electronic version of an article published in Staeheli, L.A. and Hammett, D. (2010) 'Educating the new national citizen : education, political subjectivity, and divided societies.', Citizenship studies., 14 (6). pp. 667-680.Citizenship studies is available online at:http://www.tandfonline.com/openurl?genre=articleissn=1362-1025volume=14issue=6spage=667Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. But what most shocked her was how close to her experience of the classroom it was." (Connolly, 2008, p. 27) This example illustrates what is at stake in citizenship education in the context of divided societies. What seems to be rather straightforward -teaching basics of civics, democracy, and the values and behaviours associated with citizenship -inevitably has to confront the histories that children, parents, and teachers have lived. Many traditions of 4 democracy implicitly assume that democracy and citizenship are built around core elements or core principles that are unchanging from place to place, from context to context. But how would students in Brixton, the original setting of the play, interpret and make sense of lessons about equality, confronting as they do racism and material inequality? How would students in Sarajevo make sense of lessons about respect and deliberation after living through a brutal war and the on-going difficulties of forging a sense of mutuality and community?Our focus in this paper is on divided societies and the ways in which citizenship education is used -and perhaps manipulated -in an effort to create particular kinds of citizens that suit the national stories and imaginations that governments and other agents hope to foster. In this way, citizenship education should be seen as a tool in nation-and polity-building; it is one component of a suite of practices associated with social reproduction and citizenship formation (Marston and Mitchell, 2004). The paper begins with a discussion of the purpose of citizenship education and its role in creating political subjectivities for citizens. We then address the relationships between citizens and states as they are often conceptualised in and mobilised by citizenship education theory and programmes. Policies and programmes often use citize...

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