From Our Archive: Could Citizenship Education Combat Political Apathy?

The final report of the Advisory Group on Citizenship (the 'Crick Report') is a landmark document. Cogently argued and resolute in its recommendations, the report proposes a serious and sustained place for citizenship education in the curricula of schools and colleges. It arrives not before time: for as long as anyone can remember, teachers and schools have wrestled with uncertainty, ignorance and political trepidation in this critical area of education policy. Citizenship education represents a significant hole in the education system, a deficit which becomes all the more stark when viewed from an international perspective.

It was this void that the Advisory Group on Citizenship Education, chaired by Professor Bernard Crick, was set up to fill. Its patron was the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Rt Hon. Betty Boothroyd MP, who, like her predecessor, has expressed strong concern at the lack of citizenship education in schools and the potential impact this lacuna might have on the processes of parliamentary democracy. The political will behind the formation of the group came from the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, the Rt Hon. David Blunkett MP, who has a long-standing and well-attested interest in the promotion of active citizenship.

The group was necessarily cross-party and its membership was broad, if not extensive, containing a range of interested and expert parties. In this respect it contrasted sharply, and doubtless deliberately, with the 150-strong National Forum for Values in Education and the Community, whose statement on values in education met with such a storm of protest from the right-wing press in 1996. The Crick Report has managed thus far to avoid political controversy, partly perhaps because the advisory group learnt from the experience of others who have trodden this path before. To give but two recent examples, the National Curriculum Council produced guidance on citizenship education in 1990 at the same time as the Speaker's Commission on Citizenship published its report Encouraging Citizenship. Non-governmental organisations and academic institutions have also been highly active in this area; citizenship foundations, institutes and centres are almost as thick on the ground as citizenship projects in different communities.

However, none of this activity has produced enduring, system-wide change. It will be a testament to the experience and political skills of Bernard Crick if this time the trick can be pulled off and, as we approach the new century, a place is found at last for citizenship education in our schools and colleges. A great deal is at stake. The advisory group states in the report that 'we aim at no less than a change in the political culture of this country... for people to think of themselves as active citizens, willing, able and equipped to have an influence on public life.'

Few are as well qualified as Crick to secure the necessary breakthrough in education policy, for aside from his obvious credentials as a respected political theorist, commentator and biographer, Crick himself possesses a considerable pedigree in the field of citizenship education. He pioneered the Programme for Political Education in the 1970s, elucidating a concept of 'political literacy' which has clearly helped to inform the final report of the Advisory Group on Citizenship. He also happens to be a former tutor of the Secretary of State in whose hands the final decisions on this matter rest.

The main recommendations

The report unanimously recommends that citizenship education should be a statutory curriculum entitlement and that all schools should demonstrate that they are fulfilling the obligation to provide it. It also recommends that consideration should be given to the place of citizenship education in post-16 learning programmes for which no curriculum entitlement currently exists.

The statutory entitlement is to be established through specific learning outcomes applicable at the end of each key stage, rather than through prescribed subject content. The learning outcomes should be based on an allocation of no more than 5 per cent of curriculum time across the key stages and are to be sufficiently tightly defined for their standards and objectivity to be inspected by Ofsted. Broadly following T. H. Marshall, the Crick Report proposes a tripartite – or `three heads on one body' definition of citizenship education: namely, social and moral responsibility; community involvement; and political literacy. Citizenship education, the report argues, consists of their habitual interaction.

Political literacy is perhaps the most straightforward of these and rejects the standard view of citizenship education as 'civics': the development of the knowledge, skills and values necessary for participation in public life in its widest sense. Lack of knowledge about the decision-making processes of parliamentary democracy is the most obvious gap in the preparation of young people for political citizenship, and the report's arguments for strengthening the procedural knowledge base of democracy in the United Kingdom come at a time when devolution and the revival of local government promise to inject new urgency into the task.

However, the report stresses that knowledge is but a part of the equation and that the values and skills necessary for engagement in public affairs are of equal importance. This concern rejects the backdrop of growing unease at the uninterest and disdain shown by young people towards mainstream politics. Countering this political disaffection is a primary purpose of the Crick Report. It takes a measured but not dispassionate view of the problem and refuses simply to endorse the thesis that young people have become increasingly disconnected from political participation. Indeed, it registers the growth of youth participation in single-issue campaigns. None the less, it concludes that, whatever the historical trends, the state of political literacy among young people is `inexcusably and damagingly bad, and could and should be remedied'.

Debate about youth disaffection is rarely limited, however, to the question of how limited young people's interest in mainstream politics has become. The focus is usually broader: on alienation, cynicism and general `moral decline'. Given that much of this debate is generated by conservative moralists, and indeed, that the notion of a feckless and criminal youth underclass has its origins in the work of the controversial American theorist Charles Murray, Crick does well to treat it with caution, noting that the `spurts, fits and fashions of vivid media coverage' make it difficult to judge whether there has been an increase in youth alienation and disaffection.

However, the issues at stake here run far deeper than media sensationalism and go to the heart of what the Crick Report has sought to address. Concerns are widespread over the weakening of community bonds, the rise of an instrumental individualism, and the lack of strong civic virtues. Much of the purpose behind the Crick Report – particularly in the motives of the politicians who commissioned it – has been concern for the role of education in the development of socially and morally responsible citizens who are active in their communities. These are the first two parts of Crick's tripartite formula, and arguably the most interesting.

The report defines responsibility as an 'essential political as well as moral virtue, for it implies (a) care for others; (b) premeditation and calculation about what effect actions are likely to have on others; and (c) understanding and care for the consequences.' It argues that guidance on moral values and personal development are essential preconditions of citizenship.4 Consequently, socially and morally responsible behaviour ­­– both in and beyond the classroom, both towards those in authority and towards each other – must be learned from the very beginning of a child's education. But if moral sensibility is a precondition of active citizenship, moral capacity also derives from engagement in public life. The report quotes the Cambridge educational theorist David Hargreaves approvingly: 'Active citizens are as political as they are moral; moral sensibility derives in part from political understanding; political apathy spawns moral apathy.' Hence the central role in the report, not just of political literacy, but of learning about the life of a community and becoming active in it. This is an aspect of citizenship education which must necessarily take place beyond the school gates.

These passages reject the central concern of the report to foster through education a culture of active citizenship in which citizens are morally sensitised in a non-instrumental fashion to the needs of others, and in which a greater awareness, respect and self-ownership of the communal polity is developed. In this respect, the report's vision of citizenship education is a stronger one than would be required for the development of citizens in a minimal liberal state which simply protects the private individual from intrusion by others into his or her activities. It is reasonable to suggest that the report seeks the education of young people for civic virtue, as well as autonomy and personal self-fulfilment. Civic participation on this account is not merely a matter of delineating what the public sphere can legitimately demand of the private and what it cannot, such that the active citizen is largely a self-regarding individual who furthers his or her interests without harming others. Rather, it is about the promotion of the common good and the recognition that freedom and self-fulfilment consist, at least in part, in active self-government as a member of a civic polity.

That is not to say that the report promulgates a substantive moral code or concept of the good life. Rather, it seeks to place citizenship education within the context of a pluralist society which requires basic but robust civic and political foundations. A key passage in the report states: 'A main aim for the whole community should be to find or restore a sense of common citizenship, including a national identity that is secure enough to find a place for the plurality of nations, cultures, ethnic identities and religions long found in the United Kingdom. Citizenship education creates common ground between different ethnic and religious identities.'

Alongside the many references in the report to the pluralism of modern society, this paragraph serves to illustrate the conviction of the advisory group that there is unlikely to be agreement on substantive concepts of the good life in a multi-ethnic society of diverse cultures, religions, beliefs and practices. The role of citizenship education is to ensure that young people are equipped for engagement with the 'overlapping consensus' of a political liberalism ­– the basic foundations of a civil society and its political system.

It would be reasonable to suggest that both David Blunkett and Crick's advisory group believe this requires a stronger emphasis on duties and social solidarity than is currently the case. Neither is instinctively libertarian; in fact, quite the reverse. The pervading tone of the report is not one of metropolitan liberalism. Its account of citizenship education is about the cultivation of civic virtues for a society that refuses to succumb to postmodern despair or libertarian relativism.

Nor is this observation contradicted by the fact that the Crick Report advocates the necessity for human rights education within each component of the learning outcomes: in the key concepts to be understood, the values to be internalised, the skills to be acquired and the knowledge to be taught. Opponents of rights discourses often neglect the fact that the possession of rights entails strong duties towards others. The Crick Report acts as a useful correction both to the neglect of other-regarding civic virtues by some rights theorists and to the condemnation of the latter by communitarians and/or conservatives who often fail to appreciate the mutuality of rights and their enduring value and importance. In terms of the current political context, the recommendation for human rights education brings together the Home Secretary's desire that the Human Rights Act should lead to the development of a `culture of human rights', particularly among young people, with the civic activism that both David Blunkett and Bernard Crick wish to promote.

In this sense, citizenship education can help the contemporary centre-left meet a basic challenge it faces, namely to find coherent ways of uniting genuine personal freedom and autonomy with a strengthened capacity for community self-government and enriched civic virtue. This will not be achieved, as the Crick Report recognises, by denying the irreducible value pluralism of contemporary society or by loading an excessive burden of civic morality upon individual citizens, as the republican theoretical tradition has often done. Nevertheless, it does entail a rejection of the relativism and despair which are typical, if not the exclusive preserve, of postmodern analyses.

Crick and beyond

Over the coming months, the government will have to decide whether to accept the Crick Report's recommendations. They join a long list of others – brought together under the rubric of Preparation for Adult Life – feeding into the millennial review of the National Curriculum. Crick stands a better chance of implementation than most, not simply because of close personal connections to the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, but because of the importance of the subject matter his advisory group has addressed and the astute nature of its recommendations.

None the less, it is unlikely that the report will emerge unscathed from the processes of consultation and compromise. For those whose exclusive focus is on raising standards in the basics of literacy and numeracy, citizenship education is a luxury schools can ill afford. For others, Crick's recommendations constitute the vessel though which political correctness will once again infect our schools. These political and technical objections represent a formidable challenge to Crick's prospectus.

It was previously remarked that political reaction to the Crick Report had been muted. However, there is a section in the report on the teaching of controversial issues. It is a thoughtful section which looks very carefully at how classroom teachers should handle issues likely to provoke controversy and disagreement, particularly when bias is unavoidable. It is a very useful discussion which deserves a wide audience among teachers and other education professionals. But it leaves a feeling that Crick has sought to decant into a semi-neutralised arena some of the basic philosophical choices which must be explicitly addressed within the main text on citizenship education itself. For example, can we claim that young people have learned moral and social responsibility if they have not been taught that all their fellow citizens are of equal worth, including those of different sexual orientations who have become adoptive parents, as was the subject of a famous children's book in the 1980s?

To be fair, the report acknowledges that there are problems in teaching controversial subjects, but points out that citizenship education is not unique on this score, and that issues of political significance arise frequently in subjects such as history, geography and religious education. This serves to remind us that the curriculum is not a neutral thing, somehow extricated from its social context. It is unlikely, therefore, that the political atmosphere will remain undisturbed for too long once citizenship education takes place in the classroom.

The report also holds out a challenge to those who view children simply as subjects of instruction and whose concepts of discipline and school ethos cannot embrace forms of pupil participation and engagement. Children and young adults may not be full political citizens until they reach the voting age; but they are none the less citizens with rights, and for that matter, duties. Consequently, citizenship education cannot be considered entirely a matter of preparation for engagement in adult civil society, rather than something of value in itself. Citizenship education improves the lives and school experiences of young people, and not just through spin-off effects on attainment in other subject areas. It is valuable for children as children.

Additionally, the Crick Report is clear that schools must practise what they preach, if citizenship education is to be effective. The report strongly endorses the need for schools to consider the relationship between their ethos, organisation and daily practices, particularly pupil discussion and consultation forums, and the aims and purposes of citizenship education. Moreover, while the former reinforce and improve the effectiveness of the latter if properly construed, they are also important to schooling more broadly, as studies of discipline policy have shown.

Conclusion

It is often remarked ­– often disparagingly – that New Labour lacks a robust political philosophy. It could do worse than to look towards that recent political theory which has been concerned with generating new grounds of agreement between liberal and communitarian concerns, and which has stressed the necessity for uniting a commitment to individual freedom and the pursuit of genuine personal autonomy with renewed civic virtue, communal mutuality and a radicalisation of democracy. Citizenship education will be central to any such endeavour and consequently deserves serious consideration beyond the confines of educational debates. One of the many valuable things about the Crick Report is that it elucidates these connections in a manner which is neither politically partisan nor morally relativist. It holds out the promise of an enriched democracy with an active citizenry, for which it is itself a necessary, if not sufficient, condition.

Originally published as 'Education for Citizenship: The Crick Report' in The Political Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 2, April 1999

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