Citizenship, Communities and Adult Learning

Citizenship, Communities and Adult Learning

Paper presented at SCUTREA, 32nd Annual Conference, 2-4 July 2002, University of Stirling

Pam Coare and Rennie Johnston, University of Sussex, UK

‘We need both ‘good citizens’ and active citizens’ (Crick. 2000: 2).

‘Citizenship’ has become the framing discourse for many of the social and educational policies of the current New Labour government. This rhetoric of citizenship is not, of course, unique to Britain. Rather it is part of a wider European focus that reflects the way in which national boundaries and identities have become more fluid, with the language of citizenship evident in many key documents and policies of the European Commission.

Of course, ‘citizenship’ is a concept that carries significantly different meanings for disparate individuals and groups and, as Lister points out, it does not always have positive connotations for everyone (Lister, 1997). Different traditions such as Communitarianism, which stresses the primacy of community and the socially situated individual and Liberalism, with its emphasis on the autonomy of the individual with legally held rights, have defined two different approaches to citizenship, that of status and that of practice (Oldfield, 1990). Both traditions have emphasised the relative importance of different aspects of the civil, political and social themes originally espoused by T. H. Marshall in his seminal work ‘Citizenship and Social Class’ in 1950. Lister suggests that we could most usefully see these two traditions as complementary: ’In this way citizenship emerges as a dynamic process in which the two dimensions of status and practice interact with each other, linked through human agency’ (Lister, 1997: 8).

As adult educators working in community settings and using practices that grow out of the traditions of community development and social purpose adult education, we are concerned with developing that ‘dynamic process’. However we are working within a pedagogy of lifelong learning and widening participation that focuses primarily on skills for employability, linked as it is to the Government and European models of the ‘economic citizen’ and the ‘good citizen’. In this context, we are looking to explore and better understand the political imperatives that lie beneath the rhetoric of citizenship and at the same time investigate the possibility that adult education might play a part in engaging more people in the Freirian notion of education for liberation rather than domestication. If ‘good citizens have a respect for law and order. Pay their taxes…, know their place in society…, keep their noses clean and are ever so grateful to be governed so well’ (Crick, 2000: 98), then our role as adult educators in the process of shaping such a citizen will require a significant shift from our ideological roots. However, if ‘the good citizen’ is someone who looks to (actively) exercises her/his civic rights in a democratic form of government we feel we can play a part in this. If ‘good citizens will obey the law, but will seek to change it by legal means if they think it bad, or even if they think it could be better’(Crick 2000: 6), then adult educators may have a role to play in developing the skills of critical thinking and learning that will be needed to actively engage in a dynamic political process.

The New Discourse of Citizenship

Lister (1997) argues that citizenship dominates political thought today. The importance of the discourse of citizenship has been recently supported by Edith Cresson, President of the EU, in her foreword to ‘Learning for Active Citizenship’ where she highlights that within Europe the concept of citizenship is ‘becoming more fluid and dynamic, in conformity with the nature of European societies themselves’ (Cresson, 2001). While recognising that legal and social rights remain at the heart of the relationship between the citizen and state, she sees the Europe of the future as being the site of ‘a negotiated and culturally-based understanding of citizenship’ in which ‘active citizenship lies at the heart of our civilisation’s aspirations’ (ibid. 2001). Significantly in this context, similarity and difference will be respected for ‘they underlie our recognition of the social reality of a globalised world in which the significance of active citizenship extends far beyond local communities and national frontiers.’

These changing notions of citizenship and identity may go some way to explaining why in Britain conventional participation in the democratic process is declining: voting patterns, particularly amongst the young and the poor indicate a deep disinclination for people to exercise their democratic rights (Henderson and Salmon, 1998; Crick, 2001). This reflects a growing problem across the Western world. Welton points to this as ‘mounting evidence of citizens unhappiness and distrust of its ruling elites, what Habermas has called a legitimation crisis’ (Welton, 2001: 20).

In Britain, the resurgence of citizenship in the political rhetoric of both the Thatcher Conservation Government in the 1980s and the current Labour administration has been driven by a number of factors within Britain, Europe and America. Ignatieff suggests that Thatcher came to power in 1979 as a result of ‘an attack on the citizenship of equal entitlement in post-war liberal democratic society’. She was elected ‘not to reform the civic contract between state and citizens, but to rip it up and start again’ (Ignatieff, 1991). The market was to be the sole arbitrator, with the citizen defined as consumer. Held (1991) agrees with this proposition, describing Thatcherism as ‘the natural enemy of citizenship’ with its ‘drive towards unrestricted private accumulation, its attack on public expenditure and its critique of the ‘dependency culture’. In Thatcher’s world view, citizenship was also imbued with moral virtue which embraced individualism and voluntarism. This moralism underpinned a simplistic view of community in which ‘voluntary effort can fill the gap left by the deliberate under-resourcing of social services, especially those associated with local authorities as a plurality of centres of power, and those where the ‘clients’ are the least able to organise themselves in effective pressure groups: the very old, the very young, the mentally and physically handicapped and the long-term unemployed. The opportunity to bridge the resource shortfall with volunteers and families, is what Crick calls the ‘half-untruth in Thatcher’s rhetoric of citizenship’ (Crick, 2000: 101). Policies based on this privatised approach to citizenship and community was to contribute, during the Thatcher years, to some of the worst scenes of social unrest witnessed in Britain in decades, focused primarily on ‘failing’ housing estates which were areas of high unemployment and poverty. The failure of Conservative policies that sought to ‘turn around’ these estates left a difficult legacy for the new Labour administration.

The Labour Government that was elected in 1997 has been subject to domestic and global pressures that have forced them to re-address the concept of citizenship, and this issue has been central in the shaping of both their domestic and overseas policies. Their response has been, following a clear communitarian agenda, to focus on the responsibilities of the citizen as a counterbalance to the rights that accompany the status of citizenship. In this way they have echoed the rhetoric of the USA and, to some extent, the previous Tory administration.

Addressing the issue of ‘social exclusion’ was thus high on the Governments agenda and remains so. The breakdown of communities and the attendant threat of social unrest have forced them to address the interrelated issues of poor housing and health, unemployment, low educational attainment and a breakdown in law and order. The task of analysing the problems faced by such communities, and offering solutions, was to be the remit of the Social Exclusion Unit which was set up in 1997. This was to be an example of ‘joined-up Government’, where the inter-relationship between different social and economic factors was recognised, and departments of Government would work together, not in competition, to secure the resources to address social decline. However, in practice and in line with a particular government instrumentalism, the SEU has tended to focus on specific problems, for example teenage pregnancies, so apparently falling into the trap of ‘blaming the victims’ without addressing the effect social inequality has on the ability of individuals to assert their rights as citizens or become active citizens (Dean, 1999).

Dwyer (2000) has made the point that the new ‘welfare orthodoxy’ stressed ‘a reduced role for the state in the provision of welfare and increasingly conditional social rights’. To assert your rights as a citizen and the have the opportunity to actively participate and ‘do one’s duty’, you need time, resources and an identifiable ‘voice’. Yet these resources are what such areas of intractable long-term unemployment and social decline lack. Thus they have been at the heart of the regeneration initiatives from the 1990s and of interventions that focus on capacity building as active citizenship. Local participation is seen as the key to the successful regeneration and reinvigoration of geographic communities. The World Bank Learning Group on Participation defined participation as a ‘process through which stakeholders influence and share control over development initiatives and the decisions and resources which affect them’ (Gaventa and Valderrama, 1999). In this context, Gaventa and Valderrama usefully remind us that ‘Citizen participation is about power and its exercise by different social actors in the spaces created for the interaction between citizens and local authorities. However, the control of the structure and processes for participation – defining spaces, actors, agendas, procedures – is usually in the hands of governmental institutions and can become a barrier for effective involvement of citizens’. It is unsurprising, therefore, if attempts at local empowerment are met with little enthusiasm by communities who traditionally have had no voice in planning change. Many such regeneration initiatives hark back to a golden age of good neighbourliness and have failed to engage critically with relative power differentials within and across communities.

However we do not despair of community approaches and initiatives in developing more informed and active citizens. We want to explore further Finger and Asun’s (2001) argument that the gradual erosion of the state in a complex global world and the emerging ‘democratic deficit’ have opened up space for a ‘re-invention of politics’ at a local level with new opportunities for community-based adult education. The second half of this paper will look at the prospects of pursuing a community-based link between learning and citizenship. Of course, here we must avoid falling into the trap of assuming the idea of a reciprocating, mutually supportive community. On the contrary, we recognise the existence of a diversity, often a conflict, of interests within communities, a diversity of communities of place, association, interest and belief and the fact that no community stands alone but is inevitably influenced by wider regional, national and global considerations. We do however see ‘community’ as offering a place and space for learning that is somewhat removed from more formal educational and other statutory provision (Johnston 2001) and therefore a learning context which is directly influenced or shaped by institutional norms or requirements and which offers scope for a range of different learning engagements including informal approaches.

An agenda for citizenship learning and action at a community level

In tracing the erosion of politics, Finger and Asun identify two processes of development: the privatisation of and hence loss of democratic control over state or public functions and, following Illich, the instrumentalisation of politics. In this paper, we would like to look for space at a community level for alternative educational approaches which take account of both our earlier critique of the good and compliant citizen and Finger and Asun’s argument identified above, as well as our own interests in developing a dynamic link between citizenship as status and active citizenship. As part of this we would like to suggest that ‘learning our way out’ (Finger and Asun, 2001) of a democratic deficit involves first identifying then reversing the deficit models which pervade key government policies: widening participation, community regeneration, social inclusion and basic skills development. For reasons of space, we will concentrate on the latter two, although our approach is relevant to all four. In taking a community-oriented focus on this, we would like to adopt as a ruling principle the idea of community as politics, which is essentially community-led as opposed to community as policy, which is essentially state led. Of course in taking this stance we recognise that in practice these two different approaches are to some extent inter-connected in the same way that Martin (1998) identifies that ...the boundaries between the state and civil society are both permeable and shifting, and the relationship is often a symbiotic one.’

Much of the European and UK rhetoric about citizenship stresses the goal of social inclusion. Here it is interesting to note Levitas’s analysis (1998) of the different discourses of inclusion: what she calls RED, a critical social policy and redistributionist discourse, MUD, a gendered moral underclass discourse and SID, the social integrationist discourse where inclusion is primarily in terms of labour market attachment. Levitas traces New Labour’s discursive and policy move from RED to SID with a bit of MUD thrown in for good measure. And of course New Labour educational policy is a vital part of a process where ‘Education is the best economic policy we have’ (DfEE, 1998), where ideas of human capital development reign supreme and where arbitrary, top-down widening participation targets can easily overwhelm longstanding processes of mutual trust building, reciprocity and curriculum negotiation between educators and community groups.

Of course the key questions here are: ‘Inclusion - on whose terms and in whose interests?’ While there is clearly a correlation between the level of formal education attainment, social inclusion and indeed community participation (see Field, 1995), there is also a danger in reducing issues of social inclusion to questions of individual access and participation within the education system. Certainly, a more equitable social representation within post-compulsory education is likely to contribute to a more inclusive society, particularly when there is a renewed emphasis on 'Access to What?', access not just to 'more of the same' but involving a comprehensive and critical engagement with the issues of culture and power which underpin curricular and institutional practice. However, this is a long-term programme where the outcomes are still uncertain. It needs to be complemented by more informal and communal learning in the community. Farrar, from a community development perspective, makes the point that:

Inclusionary policies are those which enhance the social, economic and political power of groups in subordinate positions; in short, they promote the autonomy of the marginal groups (Farrar, 1996: 294)

In contrast to an individualised access to education, a community context offers space for such groups to develop their autonomy, some way removed from the most obvious restrictions of governmentality and social control, and the opportunity to develop different forms of learning and participation. Within a contemporary Risk Society, Van der Veen identifies three explanations of social exclusion: economic exclusion, cultural exclusion and personal vulnerability arising from the individualization of private life (Van der Veen, 1996). In response to this, Van der Veen, takes a more collective approach, identifying the important goal of learning to participate as part of a 'social learning' process that involves:

..learning how to build personal networks, learning to communicate about the dynamic and complex social conditions of late modern life and learning to develop new interactive routines. (Van der Veen, 1996: 6-7)

Certainly, from our own experience of working with long-term unemployed adults in Southampton and Hastings, an initial focus on very practical involvement in collective community activities and learning initiatives within a secure social environment can help to counter the worst aspects of individualization. It can help excluded adults to move towards a new identity, that of a participant and/or learner, which can in time lead on to more complex forms of participation and the gradual exercise of wider citizen rights. In some notable cases in Southampton, a modest initial contribution to the running of a community adult learning resource centre or participation in a short exploratory course led on to a more active and dynamic involvement in a more complex and demanding wider participatory research process (Johnston 1987: 62-63). Indeed, this point has been recently re-emphasised by unwaged adults from the Action Learning in the Community and Getting Set for Citizenship projects taking part in an ESRC-funded workshop. Their key message from the seminar was that ‘active citizenship is rooted in personal and community transformation and regeneration’ (ESRC, 2001). These examples illustrate some of possibilities for developing citizenship and learning at a community level. We believe that this approach can be further developed through less prescribed educational initiatives like the Adult and Community Learning Fund, possibly even as part of new (and more equal?) partnerships between HEIs and their local communities currently being promoted in the UK. Certainly there is growing evidence from contemporary literature that community-based and informal learning can lead to a progression and development that is neither individualised nor institutionalised but is geared towards active and collective citizenship (McGivney, 1999; Cullen, et al, 1999).