New Bottles for Old Wine? Affective Education and the ‘Citizenship Revolution’ in English Schools.

Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, University of Lisbon, 11-14 September 2002

(in the Symposium: The Affective Dimension: European Perspectives on the Role of Affect in the Curriculum)

Ron Best

Professor of Education

University of Surrey Roehampton

Froebel College

Roehampton Lane

London SW15 5PJ

Tel: 0208 392 3374

Fax: 0208 392 3664

E-mail:

Introduction

Affective learning may be defined as ‘learning which is concerned with the emotions, feelings or passions that motivate, constrain or shape human action …. whether this concern is to develop, comprehend, constrain or come to terms with such dispositions’ (Best, 1998, p. 72). Following R S Peters and other conceptual analysts of the 1960s and 1970s, affective education may be defined as ‘the intentional and structured bringing about of affective learning, undertaken in ways which recognize the intellectual and moral autonomy of the learner’ (ibid).

This paper is concerned with particular recent developments which have significant implications for the place and priority given to different aspects or forms of affective education in the school curriculum in England and Wales. These are: the establishment, from September 2002, of Citizenship Education as a statutory component of the secondary school curriculum (known in UK as ‘key stages 3 and 4’); its linking to a non-statutory, but expected, curriculum in Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) at both primary and secondary levels; and the inclusion of Citizenship in the non-statutory (but powerful) framework for PSHE in primary schools (‘key stages 1 and 2’).

In what follows, I explore a number of questions which these developments raise and their implications for aspects of personal-social education. These questions are:

  • To what extent do recent developments in citizenship education constitute a significant break with tradition? Are we presented with ‘old wine in new bottles’, or is this a new vintage?
  • How might the ‘re-discovery’ of citizenship education as a curriculum priority at the level of national government be explained and in what ways is it problematic?
  • What are the implications of the ‘citizenship revolution’ for affective education?

In addressing these questions, a limited scrutiny of some of the more recent official documentation will be undertaken and some doubts raised about the scope and direction of the new curriculum.

  1. To what extent do recent developments in Citizenship Education constitute a significant break with tradition? Are we presented with ‘old wine in new bottles’ or is this a new vintage?

There is ample evidence that what might be called ‘citizenship education’ is by no means novel in UK education. Johnson and Holness (2001, p.2) have observed that although citizenship education is ‘undoubtedly … an issue of the moment’ it is not a new idea. A concern to promote responsible social and political behaviour on the one hand, and, on the other, a desire to extend a reasonable quality of civilized life to all, were factors in the mile-stone Education Acts of 1870, 1902 and 1944 (Aldrich, 1996). There was an Association for Citizenship Education as early as 1934, there were courses in “civics” between the World Wars, and intermediate or ‘ordinary’ (‘O’) and advanced (‘A’) level examination courses in ‘British Constitution’ in the post-WWII years (Johnson and Holness, 2001, pp. 2-3). From the 1960s onwards, progressive curricular initiatives such as the Schools Council’s Humanities Curriculum Project (HCP) contributed to the promotion of citizenship by engaging pupils in debate about such issues as poverty, race, education and war (Stenhouse, 1983).

Citizenship education might also be seen within the ‘hidden curriculum’ of schools. A good deal of what is elsewhere described as ‘pastoral care’ has been concerned with meeting the needs, developing the knowledge and promoting the skills and propensities of the ‘good citizen’ (Best, 2002). A concern for the development of the ‘whole child’ (the education of the ‘whole person’) has been a feature of the UK concept of the role of teacher in loco parentis at least since the 19th Century. The promotion of Christian values and ‘gentlemanly conduct’ befitting the British citizen enjoyed a certain priority (in England and in its colonies) in the great ‘public’ schools of the day and continues to do so (Best, 1998, p. 73). The translation of some of the structures and sentiments of these schools into state schools - and especially into the comprehensive secondary schools created from the 1960s onwards - brought such ideas as school and house loyalty, civic duty and the spirit or fair play into the educational environment of most (if not all) children.

What is new is the status which citizenship education is given in the National Curriculum, and what is perhaps most significant here is the fact that there was no National Curriculum prior to1989 to afford it such status. The political significance of Citizenship Education may be inextricable from the political significance of the Government’s decision in 1988 to impose a statutory curriculum on all state schools. The justification for such an intervention included the argument that not all children were receiving their ‘entitlement’ because of variations in the content of locally-determined curricula; indeed, the notion of a ‘national entitlement’ for all children was in itself an important development. The idea of a national curriculum in citizenship must therefore be seen in terms both of a national entitlement and of the concept of a ‘national citizen’.

Ironically, the prominence of Citizenship Education today is in part a product of its neglect in the preoccupation with the conventional academic and technical subjects (and their testing apparatus) which comprised the 1989 National Curriculum. Cross-curricular elements were recommended and exemplified in a spate of ‘Curriculum Guidance’ documents in the early 1990s, one of which concerned itself with education for citizenship. But these were ‘afterthoughts’, their status was never clear (Watkins, 1995, p. 123) and they lost such force as they had when the National Curriculum was rationalized (the ‘Dearing Review’) in 1993 (Inman and Burke, 2002, p.21).

Also new is the status of the curriculum frameworks and schemes of work currently entering schools. Throughout the 1990s, bodies such as the Citizenship Foundation, Community Service Volunteers and the Gulbenkian Foundation promoted and/or produced curriculum frameworks and resources relevant to citizenship (Best, 2000, pp. 2-10; Jenks and Plant, 1998; Mitchell, 1999; Rowe and Newton, 1994). These were in the tradition of earlier schemes such as those of the Schools Council and Nuffield Foundation, in that they were not the products of government agencies (although government sponsorship was occasionally involved) or constrained by statutory requirements. They, too, were characteristic of a system in which schools and local education authorities (LEAs) could exercise choice and discretion in what was to be offered in the curriculum.

With the inclusion of Citizenship Education in the National Curriculum (following a further curriculum review in 2000), numerous official documents have been produced by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA). These began with pamphlets of initial guidance on PSHE at key stages 3 and 4 and PSHE and Citizenship at key stages 1 and 2 (QCA 2000a and 2000b), and culminated in large, hard-backed folders containing substantial and detailed schemes of work (QCA 2002a, 2002b, 2002c). So imposing are they, that whatever is said about them being examples of how schools might approach this aspect of the curriculum, I suspect the impression for many teachers will be that “this is what you have to do”.

So however old the idea of Citizenship Education might be, and however much the content might (or might not) be a re-framing of what schools have, to greater or lesser degrees, always done, what are new are the force of law in making it compulsory, the idea of a national entitlement and the power of the guidance emanating from the Government agency responsible for the curriculum in state schools. Politically, this is a significant move from the local determination of the curriculum, in which the form which preparation for adult life took was largely a matter of the discretion of the headteacher. In its place we have a statutorily required curriculum whose aims, objectives and broad content are laid down (QCA 2000c) and whose delivery is articulated in the schemes of work produced by the Government’s Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

  1. How might the ‘rediscovery’ of Citizenship Education as a curriculum priority at the level of National Government be explained and in what ways is it problematic?

Curriculum innovations do not just happen. Someone, somewhere, decides that change is required, whether it is a change in method or content, or the addition of a new subject. Arguments for change may be made on grounds of entitlement (as was the case for a National Curriculum), effectiveness (as in the Plowden Report on child-centred primary teaching methods), social justice (e.g. correcting bias in access to ‘gender appropriate’ subjects) or economic necessity (e.g. the priority given to ICT). In a sense, all such decisions may be seen as political, but in the case of Citizenship Education, politics is of the essence.

According to Bernard Crick, architect of the ‘Crick Report’ (Advisory Group on Citizenship, 1998) upon which the Citizenship curriculum is based “(n)early everywhere there is citizenship education in schools …. some historically contingent sense of crisis has been the trigger” (Crick, 2000, p. 149). What ‘crisis’ was ‘sensed’ in the UK in the last decade or so of the 20th Century which might account for the emergence of Citizenship Education as a priority?

A number of writers have identified a specific event as particularly important (Inman and Burke, 2002, p. 19). This was the setting up in 1988 of an all-party committee (the ‘Speaker’s Commission’) to consider ‘what is meant by citizenship and how this applies to institutions, voluntary organizations and individuals’. This followed the concern of the Speaker of the House of Commons at the ignorance of political issues and democratic processes displayed by young people visiting the Houses of Parliament (Johnson and Holness, 2001, p.2). This event has been described as “seminal” (ibid), and since Citizenship Education had no specific place in the National Curriculum introduced at that time, the Commission did represent a significant development.

Not only was the level of apparent ignorance of political institutions and processes of concern; so also, was the lack of interest in them. The percentage of the electorate exercising their right to vote in elections for local and national government had been falling for some time, particularly amongst younger people. The election of New Labour to power in 1997 did not reverse the trend. In the 2001 General Election, just 38% of 18- to 24-year olds voted, the lowest (according to Guardian Education, 3/9/2002, p.2) since the extension of votes to all men and women. One source of moral panic - at least for politicians - has been the perceived link between ignorance, disinterest and an apparent growth in cynicism about politicians, their parties and their capacity to change anything much for the better. However, there are wider forces at work.

Arguably, a combination of political, social and ideological trends, apparent since the 1960s, and given point by a number of specific events, have been significant in raising the profile of the political functions of education and the problematics of citizenship:

  • The gradual but powerfully symbolic decline of Britain as a world power in the aftermath of its empire and the fragmentation of its ‘commonwealth’. (Anachronistically, but significantly, the Crick Report includes the Commonwealth as one of the contexts in which each aspect of the citizenship curriculum should be considered);
  • A concern for national identity in the context of Britain’s membership of the European Union. (The current furore over the proposal to “join the euro” is the latest manifestation);
  • A sense of social fragmentation and moral decline, often associated with the libertarianism of the 1960s, the ‘breakdown’ of the family and the ‘traditional values’ of British society, together with highly publicized youth and juvenile crime rates. Successive Prime Ministers promoted a “back to basics” philosophy, showing a nostalgia for, if not actively advocating, a return to ‘Victorian values’ of deference, obedience and respect for ‘law and order’;
  • The increasing ethnic, racial and religious diversity of the British population resulting from immigration, both from mainland Europe (as in the 1930s) and from the Commonwealth, particularly during the post-WWII period. The effects of the consolidation of ‘ethnic minority’ communities in identifiable geographical areas, their under-representation in local and national government, periodic social disturbance and ‘race’ riots have been causes for concern, especially for those on the political Right.
  • Since the failure of communism, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the ‘Cold War’, the emergence of ethnic and religious divisions as the main threat to world peace. The failure of successive Governments to engineer a solution to the strife in Northern Ireland is a local example, but conflicts in the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent, numerous African nations and south-east Asia may all be seen as instances of a general trend towards conflict based not on political ideologies but on cultural groupings (Fukuyama, 1995, p. 5).
  • A general sense of uncertainty, often identified with ‘Post-modernity’ and exacerbated by the fin de siecle experience of the millennium which has made inroads into the confidence of political intellectuals as much as it has that of the social and natural sciences. Questions of identity (who am I?), meaning (what’s it all about?), destiny (where am I heading?) and allegiance (with whom do I travel?) seem never to have been harder to answer.
  • Uncertainty about communities and what is expected of their members consequent upon devolution of political power to provincial or regional assemblies, together with the insularity of growing fundamentalism in religious and cultural contexts.

What these add up to is a powerful sense that social order cannot be taken for granted. If it is to be protected (it might be argued), children need to be socialized into the principles and processes of democracy, a sharing of core values, and a sense of identity, belonging and loyalty to the state. This, pretty much, is the rationale of the Crick Report which insisted that “(c)itizenship education must be education for citizenship [my italics]” and must address “three strands: social and moral responsibility, community involvement and political literacy” (p. 18). But such a conception is not unproblematic.

Education for citizenship is meaningful only if we are clear what citizenship involves, yet citizenship is widely acknowledged to be “a contested concept” (Evans, 1998. P.2; Lister, 1997, pp. 3, 14). To some extent this is because it is diffuse and its force and direction vary according to which of its manifold aspects is taken as the focus. According to a major thinker in the field, T. H. Marshall (cited in Turner, 1993, p. xi), it has civil and social aspects as well as the political. Turner (1993, p. x) says that “from the perspective of philosophy and constitutional law, citizenship is normally defined as a bundle of rights and duties relating to an individual as a member of a political community”. Citizenship as active involvement in civic life has been seen as a “prime moral virtue” at least since Aristotle (Crick, 2000, p.2) and according to Lynch (1992, p. 2) particular levels of personal consciousness and social participation are requisite for the effective citizen. But as Turner (1993, p. xi) points out, citizenship has been seen rather differently in the post-WWII welfare state as a status which protects the individual, acting as a “buffer against the marketplace” and entailing rights to social services of one kind or another.

There are also ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ definitions of citizenship. Terence McLaughlin (1992) suggests that these may be seen in terms of continua from maximalist to minimalist interpretations of citizenship in respect of

“the identity that it is seen as conferring upon an individual, the virtues of the citizen that are required, the extent of the political involvement on the part of the individual that is thought to follow, and the social prerequisites seen as necessary for effective citizenship” (p. 236).

To all this might be added the ambiguities that exist regarding legal identity where nationality and citizenship are not synonymous, a matter exacerbated by membership of the European Union (Johnson and Holness, 2001, p. 5). Such ambiguities are highlighted from time to time by specific events such as the return of Hong Kong to China, the current debate about the future of Gibraltar and the plight of asylum-seekers from central Europe and elsewhere.

Nor is the concept of citizenship to be taken as unambiguously ‘a good thing’. The failure of the state to provide equality of respect, treatment and opportunity for significant groups (such as those with disabilities) has been used to attack the concept of citizenship as partial and discriminatory, and a robust critique of the concept on these grounds has come from feminist theory (e.g. Lister, 1997; Prokhovnik, 1998).

The curriculum for citizenship education might be seen as itself ‘partial and discriminatory’. As indicated earlier, curricula do not ‘happen’. In Dennis Lawton’s famous phrase, a curriculum is “a selection from the culture”, and in a diverse and pluralistic society, how that selection is made and who makes it are important questions. Here the possibilities of indoctrination - as much by omission as commission - cannot be ruled out, however free and open the consultation process may appear to be. The Crick Report was itself attacked from some quarters for its neglect of the implications for citizenship of EU membership (Johnson and Holness, 2001, p. 3). Whether it is safer to leave individual schools and their teachers to make the selection is, of course, debatable. Those who view teachers as professionals may argue that it is, and that, as in curriculum matters generally, the imposition of requirements from ‘above’ is an infringement of professional autonomy that ought not to be countenanced. Such an argument is not, of course, new, but from the initiation of the “Great Debate” by the (then) Prime Minister James Callaghan in 1975, it became increasingly unfashionable and, since 1988, was effectively neutralized by legislation.

3. What are the implications for affective education?

The Education Reform Act of 1988 embodied a concept of education as more than the initiation of children into the ‘school knowledge’ of traditional subjects and prescribed a curriculum which would prepare children for “the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of adult life”. In this regard, the first National Curriculum published in the following year was something of a disappointment, consisting of a collection of traditional subjects not too dissimilar to those studied in schools fifty years earlier. The promotion of personal, social, moral and health development was left for schools to devise and somewhere to squeeze into the timetable. As we have seen, the addition of cross-curricular elements of uncertain status did little to make good the deficiency. The development of Citizenship Education and PSHE within the National Curriculum might therefore be roundly welcomed. Here, at last (we might say), are programmes of study, some with the force of law, which have preparation for adult life at their centre.