It reminded me how different the term “Global Citizenship” can sound depending where in the world you come from: the UK, Palestine, Colombia, USA, Zimbabwe, Pakistan or any other country.
Some attending the event don’t even have citizen rights in their own state. For others the term is implicitly linked to helping other countries ‘develop’. Particularly in this country where the term has so strongly underpinned the support for Millennium Development Goals. So it’s often used with the presumption that a Global Citizen mindset will support global development by inclining the richer countries towards a fairer distribution of the world’s resources. A way of ‘fixing the world’s problems’.
Some people shook their heads in disbelief at Westerners like me: that we might be naïve enough to think that this notion could catch on in Western cultures so palpably committed to maintaining their own lifestyles. Or Eastern cultures so determined to catch up with the carbon-guzzling lifestyles that have for so long consumed the product of their labour.
A Global Citizenship perspective reminds us that – if the world were a village and the civilisations of the planet were compressed into that village in representative proportion; it would be a very poor village. The richest would look obscenely rich by comparison, and would probably live in fear of the poorest forming some kind of citizen uprising. An ‘Arab Spring’ might find my home with bullet holes in the wall… and its supporters would have no basic healthcare if I struck back.
But one principle of Global citizenship, like all other democratic expressions of citizenship, would be a commitment to peaceful solutions and the maintenance of a single community under one rule of law.
Our multicultural village would spend most of its time in council: comparing cultural inheritances and assumptions and working out how they can occupy one space in peace and harmony with as little loss as possible to anyone’s treasured cultural rights. It would have endless discussions about economic justice and the pathways to some form of equality for all people.
At least, though, it would be a community. A single community. So it would have to find solutions. It couldn’t manage differences through boundaries and borders.
It reminded me that most of our learning for life in organised community comes in groups that have some form of boundaries and borders. These are the ‘given’ communities that we arrive in by accident of birth: be they our regions, countries, religious or ethnic groups. They are the places from which most people assimilate the nature of membership. “We are like this, not that”; “we behave like this, not like that”.
Such institutionalised learning within our fist experiences of life forms strong and instinctive reactions to life’s many differences. It creates what we feel to be the natural limitations of our freedom as well as the natural extent of our ambitions. It circumscribes the extent to which we’re bound to that community and should forfeit our own aspirations in order to maintain that community: or to which we might depart from our first communities and seek or autonomous path in life. The very thing that ‘network forming’ in western countries seduces us out of by helping to legitimise and then prioritise our ‘found’ identities over our ‘given’ ones.
Globalisation is forcing the world out of the most closed and entrenched versions of states as communities defined by their religious, ethnic and territorial boundaries. Such communities will find the greatest threat from the underground streams of trade or mass communication that mix up our values and demand their review.
But meanwhile, those who have the loudest voices in the room – the Westerners with the money that dominates the terms of economic interaction or the 50 years head start on producing content for the mass communication networks – have to recognise that like everyone else, we will lose as well as gain by being Global Citizens. We have to prepare ourselves to reckon with those losses if the world is to achieve a new equilibrium, or to absorb the losses involuntarily should the world demand it.
Channel 4’s ‘Make Bradford British’ asks what it means to be British in the twenty first century. What happens when you bring together people who usually live segregated lives?
I manage the InterACT programme, which also brings together diverse groups of people. I was interested in drawing comparisons between the ‘Big Brother style’ TV programme and the outcomes of my own work.
To demonstrate how difficult it is to define Britishness, Make Bradford British starts with Bradford residents sitting the UK citizenship test, with over 90% of them failing. From that 90%, eight were chosen to take part in a ’social experiment’ to see if they could live together harmoniously.
Challenging misconceptions
Predictably, tensions quickly flared up, which often seemed to be caused by a lack of knowledge and understanding about each other’s values and beliefs. In some cases, participants did change their views, notably Maura, who initially joins in criticism of Rashid for going to the mosque to pray five times a day. However, watching Rashid pray during a group trip, Maura starts to admire his religious devotion.
Challenging misconceptions is an important outcome for the InterACT project. In Birmingham, the local young people initially showed a lack of understanding of what an asylum seeker was and the kinds of issues they faced. Working together on the project the group identified that there are not enough opportunities for young people from different cultural backgrounds to interact and developed a drama to campaign for more multicultural youth provision. One of the participants explained her changed attitudes:
‘When Helen [recently arrived from Eritrea] was speaking [about her difficulties in being able to communicate and make friends with her limited English] I felt really emotional…At first I still didn’t really like [the young refugees and asylum seekers] very much. But now I’ve realised they’re just like us’
– InterACT participant, 2010
Storytelling
Some powerful moments in Make Bradford British were caused by participants sharing experiences and stories. This was not always comfortable watching. In one scene, ex-policeman Jens tells the group that he thinks its fine to use terms like ‘Paki-bashing’ as long as it’s used ‘jokingly’. Audrey, who admitted to using the word ‘Paki’ was shocked to hear Sabbiya talk about the discrimination her parents faced. She started to make the connection between the language she had been using and the racial discrimination she herself had experienced.
Sharing experiences and storytelling has proved a powerful tool for developing mutual understanding in InterACT. For instance, in Swansea, the young people opened up to each other about experiences including claiming asylum, homelessness and drug addiction:
‘The young people have nicknamed this project ‘I teach you, you teach me’. Sharing stories really opened new understanding for them. Not only have the young people we work with challenged their ideas about young asylum seekers and refugees, but it’s worked both ways. The young people from DPIA have had the chance to understand more about the challenges around heroin addiction.’
– Key Worker from Swansea, 2010
During a residential weekend, the Swansea participants took part in lots of team building activities. As their confidence grew, they began to open up about their own experiences.
Developing common understanding
Make Bradford British attempts to unite participants under the banner of ‘Britishness’. This proves a challenge as participants struggle to define what it means to be British. Audrey expressed her frustration at the way other people saw her identity: ‘the fact that I’ve got a British passport tells me I’m British, but the colour of my skin tells everyone else I’m not.’ The programme shows that achieving cohesion is about more than just bringing people together.
InterACT sees social action as facilitating social cohesion. Through working together to design and deliver a social action project in their local community, participants have the opportunity to work with people they might not otherwise work with and to realise what they have in common:
‘[InterACT has really challenged the young people we work with to think differently about young refugees and asylum seekers and it’s been fantastic working with them and watching bonds form between them as they recognise that at the end of the day, they’re all just young people.’
– Key Worker from Birmingham, 2010
Space to listen and learn from each other
The debate about Britishness is interesting but perhaps academic. For one thing, we do not have one identity, we have many and identities change over time. I like Mark Easton’s claim that defining Britishness is like trying to ‘paint the wind’. This means cohesion must embrace the fact that people are different.
However, the programme does show the importance of having a space for people to interact, challenge their own prejudices and to learn from each other. This is the most important outcome of InterACT. At the end of the the first two years of the project, 100% of the local young people said that InterACT has increased their understanding of the challenges facing refugees and asylum seekers in their communities. Bringing people together to do something positive highlights the things we share and provides the space for people to learn about each other. Which is surely what cohesion is all about.
The UK government plans to reduce the importance of citizenship education in schools. On Tuesday I asked former Education Secretary David Blunkett about his concerns for a demoted citizenship curriculum.
What follows is a full transcript of the interview, accompanied by videos of each question.
Removing the national standards for teaching citizenship
Ten years ago - as Education Secretary - you succeeded in getting citizenship education onto the secondary curriculum as a statutory subject. The current government is proposing that there should no longer be a national standard for citizenship in schools. How do you feel about that?
“Well I’m both disappointed and extremely worried. Along with information technology and design & technology, the idea is that citizenship will float about somewhere within the school but will not only not be part of the core curriculum but will not have determined outcomes at national level.
“[It] will not have a national programme of study and therefore all that goes with it in terms of best practice.
“And of course a downgrading in relation to funding of teacher training.
“So the package that is on the table at the moment is really very bad news.”
Impact on democracy
Relegating the citizenship curriculum to the Basic Curriculum: what impact will that have on democracy?
“Well we knew, before I established the citizenship and democracy curriculum - after the working party chaired by Professor Sir Bernard Crick - that we had at that time, back in the ’80s and ’90s, the least politically literate electorate in he developed world. The work that was done at York University demonstrated that.
“The recent work from the National Foundation for Educational Research has demonstrated not only that the citizenship programmes already increase the awareness, the political understanding, but also the participation of young people; including in the 2010 election the 19 and 20 year-olds voted substantially more than the age group just above them.
“And I think that demonstrates that it’s already had an impact. But - crucially - that it’s also increased the active participation of youngsters in terms of volunteering; it’s had an impact on the quality of of outcomes in other study areas - in other words, the engagement of young people with the community and with an understanding of society around them - has actually had an impact on other subject areas.
“And it’s no good saying that, well, we can teach it through history or geography: subject teachers in those areas are specialists within their own field; what they don’t have - what many teachers never had - was an understanding of the political arena, the legal arena and the economic arena, or the ability to be able to teach it.
“And a combination of the withdrawal of the backup from national level of best practice - and of the kind of materials that make it possible to do the job well, and of outcome measures - would simply leave citizenship literally floating in the air.”
Teach all ages
We’re talking at the moment about the secondary curriculum. Would you go as far as to say actually it should be even earlier than that? I know the government maybe would say that the National Citizen Service would cover some of that, but would you that actually citizenship ought to be there right from the start?
“Well I think there are four steps. I think that at primary level youngsters really do need to understand what’s happening around them. They do need to start appreciating their role in the community; not heavily, not prescriptive, not actually boring tuition in a way that would turn them off, but just an understanding of how decisions are made: the interaction within their own family and the wider community, decisions in the school, responsibility, understanding of other people’s points of view; literally the way in which we learn to rub along together, to make decisions, to be appreciative that sometimes we have to give a little.
“And then move on to the secondary curriculum, where it’s really important that there is a proper programme of study, that there are powerful bodies of knowledge that we need to draw down on, that we do have social values that we need to transmit and to ensure that people understand together; because that develops a common identity, develops a common sense of belonging, and therefore it avoids the syndrome of people feeling alienated and separated out, which we saw regrettably in August 2011 in the disturbances.
“And then we move on to the National Citizen Service, where people get a taster of commitment and volunteering and work around them.
“And finally that we encourage young people to become volunteers at times in their life. I’m in favour of a full-time volunteer programme sometime between 16 and 25, where young people would have six to nine months of literally giving and receiving by being part of a volunteer programme, but above all that people learn that the more they participate - the more they give, the more they’re part of a vibrant democracy - the more they’ll get out of it and the more influence they’ll have over what’s happening to their lives.”
Delivery over structure?
Simon Hughes - Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats - told me, and I’ll quote this: “I’ve never thought the fact that something is compulsory as opposed to not compulsory, or dictated nationally as opposed to delivered locally, is the thing that makes the difference. It’s actually the delivery that matters more than the structure”. What would you say to that?
“I think it is the delivery that matters more than the structure, but if it’s not taught at all then there’s no delivery.
And we knew before 1998, when we embarked on this programme originally, that unless you actually said to schools ‘This is something on which you will be judged, this is something on which there will be defined outcome measures,’ they didn’t do it.
“A handful of schools in the state sector took it really seriously. Paradoxically, in the private sector they really did teach the young people - that they saw as the leaders “of the future - about politics, about the law, about economics; because they expected that not only would they participate but they would lead.
“I want leaders from my community; I want leaders from my schools; I want young people to believe that they will be Prime Minister; and despite what’s happened over the last two hundred years, and despite the efforts that, we put in to persuade people that teaching this openly and effectively and interestingly in schools, we’re still revolving back to a Cabinet dominated by people who went to public school.”
What should Labour do?
So then what should Labour do? When I spoke to Stephen Twigg he strongly supported citizenship education, but he did not go as far as saying that the government should keep its national statutory curriculum; that is, with a programme of study and assessment criteria. So what promises would you like to hear from the Shadow Education Secretary?
“Well I’d like an imaginative approach from the opposition, from my own party, which says: ‘Look, by 2014 the majority of secondary schools will be academies, the National Curriculum is therefore not directly applicable, we will have a silly situation where we pretend we have a national curriculum but we’ve effectively disemboweled it it and great parts of it will no longer be required and other parts will not be applicable to schools that have become Academies or Free Schools’.
“So what I’d like to see is that there is a requirement on schools - as there would be for English, maths, science, geography, history - to actually have a particular period in which they are expected to teach citizenship and that Ofsted would have an obligation to inspect. And a schools would find itself judged just as much by whether it’s teaching citizenship and whether it’s teaching it effectively as they would from those subject areas that Michael Gove is committed and minded to make part of the core curriculum.
“So we’d have a common-sense approach right across the board; there’s no point in having a core curriculum and a secondary curriculum if most of your schools don’t have to follow the curriculum. They’d certainly have to follow outcomes in terms of what was expected of them in terms of inspection and the way in which the school was judged, and there would be a national framework which schools could draw down on so that the most up-to-date materials and lesson plans could be shared so that teacher training was undertaken on an effective basis, rather than believing that somehow somewhere another subject teacher with a particular specialism can maybe for a small part of every week suddenly become the citizenship teacher: it just doesn’t work that way.
“And I am a trained teacher, I did a post-graduate certificate; as well as being Education Secretary I did teach: I understand very well what happens if you don’t require that there is at least some outcome measure and that outcome measure is measured.”
Can we expect that then? If the current government takes citizenship off the national curriculum, will the next Labour government put it back on?
“Well I shall press very hard that the next Labour government provides for citizenship teaching the same requirements that it provides for other key subject areas ranging from English and maths through science, geography and history.
“In other words: that there is an expected outcome, that there is a measurable progress that has to be made, that there is proper investment in training and that we do ensure that materials, lesson plans and the best that’s on offer is made available in a way that encourages schools to use it.”
Tomorrow we launch the latest research into the impact of citizenship education. It looks at the understanding and behaviour of those who were the first to receive Citizenship from age 11. It was taken after they had been able to vote for the first time, at the General Election of 2010.
The launch will be in the House of Commons and all MPs and Lords are invited.
It comes at a timely point after the Curriculum Review published on 20th Decemebr 2011 recommended a change in the status of citizenship education.
The Review created two new categories within the statutory curriculum: both intended to free up teachers’ discretion around their subject delivery. They move the choice of course content into the hands of teachers within each school.
The top tier of content-defined curriculum will still be called the ‘National Curriculum’, and the next two, more localised tiers will be the Basic Curriculum and the Local Curriculum. So Citizenship remains in the statutory curriculum, but is in the latter two categories.
The government will prescribe the content of the National Curriculum (not the Basic or Local) under its traditional Programmes of Study which define what all students should know. This time the skills that students should develop will not be included as educational outcomes. The revised curriculum is conceived around knowledge.
The distinction is never that simple of course.
For example: knowledge for citizenship would be different to knowledge about citizenship. Knowledge about the conclusions that our society has drawn from history would be different to knowledge about things that have happened. Knowledge relating to human geography is very different from countries and climates…
It is an unenviable task to sort all that out and I would happily credit Michael Gove with having both the intellect and dynamism to take on that battle: more than most Education Secretaries of our time.
We have a fundamental gripe though.
We think that there really is an omission here. It has come in deciding that Citizenship has no core knowledge that every member of the next generation needs to have: what the Review has called ‘socially valuable’ or ‘powerful knowledge’. Knowledge that unlocks doors and perspective for other knowledge and that facilitates development of the intellect, of understanding and of capabilities. Basically for citizenship: contextualising knowledge you won’t get anywhere else.
The research backs this up – not necessarily by showing how refined the most civically active can become – but by illustrating how far on the outside some can be left.
Every morning I walk past one of the anti-capitalism camps in the City of London, and at night I often tune into TV shows talking about the limits of capitalism. This weekend’s BBC News featured an article about the Occupy movement being invited to talk to citizenship classes in a school near where I live. These are live issues relating to the need to transform the system in a country that is rapidly choosing neither capitalism nor socialism.
What will it choose and how will we choose?
Young people need fundamental knowledge here. They have to grasp how two ecosystems work. The two that they are being handed as a debt burden from the previous generation. Two very complex and intertwined ecosystems. The first is the global economy and the second is the global climate.
But the choices that they will face will not be technical. They will be social. Everyday life-choices that will see some join the next equivalent of the English Defence League and others downgrade their lifestyle or demand restraint on others’ freedoms. Choices that will set citizen against citizen and demand of us a refined capability to manage the argument in a potentially more divided nation.
It is hard to believe that such life choices should not be part of education. No offence to History, but surely more important than Geronimo and the colonisation of the American West (illustrative though they may be).
We’re not holding out for Citizenship as the only subject that one could possibly use to teach such issues – but to say that it isn’t something everyone in the next generation needn’t have a grasp of, and isn’t fundamentally powerful knowledge… well, no offence to RE: but it beggars belief.
