Governmentality, Curriculum Policies, and Citizenship Education

What is it about?

This article historically problematizes current ways of talking about (global) citizenship education. The results of our research show that the two major cycles of socio-institutional restructuring in Western countries –from the crisis of the nineteenth-century liberal regimes to the present– have imposed different trends in relation to citizenship education in schools. The first cycle reached its culmination with the implementation of Welfare States after the Second World War. It was not a coincidence that the first major defense for democratic citizenship education appeared in this moment, with the reformist impulse that gave rise in 1916 to Social Studies in the US. The recognition of socio-economic rights and the formation of citizenship appeared inextricably linked in the texts of the reform, in an attempt to establish a new “regime of truth” that radically redefined the meaning of education for all, and not only for a privileged minority. This redefinition also implied a criticism of the patriotic and nationalistic purposes of education. This language, however, started to become blurred as neoliberal policies instituted their own frames in the 1980s with Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK. Citizenship education began to adopt the rhetoric of accountability with its emphasis on testing, performance levels, skills, etc. and the focus was on promoting responsible and active citizenship that clearly emphasized duties over rights. Thus, it began to be assumed that citizens should be responsible for their own well-being and not the State. Recent discourses on global citizenship education should be seen as heirs of this last redefinition. After all, global citizenship education “aims to empower learners to engage and assume active roles, both locally and globally, to face and resolve global challenges” (UNESCO, 2014, p. 15), assuming that the responsibility of solving those challenges lies with the individuals, not on governments or international organizations.

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Why is it important?

In the last decades, there has been an explosion of official reports and academic research related to (global) citizenship education. Certainly, this attention has considerably enriched our knowledge about it. However, in our opinion, a significant portion of that literature has not discussed enough its starting presuppositions. But we do not refer to the theoretical and ideological assumptions adopted explicitly –all researchers are aware that (global) citizenship education is not a neutral concept. Rather, we refer to those tacit understandings that impregnate the language we use to designate, and attribute meanings to, reality.