Citizenship



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an often prized status that confers rights of settlement and of freedom to enter and leave the
territory of a State. In the UK, many migrants who are residents may be denied the formal
status of citizenship until they satisfy certain conditions determined by the government,
including possibly being required to pass a test of knowledge of ‘life in the UK’.

These two traditions of citizenship and democracy and citizenship and nationality are the
basis of much of the debate and discussion around the concept of citizenship today.
Citizenship education was made a formal requirement of the national curriculum in
England in 2002. Since there are many students in schools who are not British citizens, and
education is itself a human right, there is a moral imperative for citizenship education to be
based on a broader definition than national citizenship.

By understanding citizenship as a feeling, a status and a practice (Osler & Starkey, 2005)
we can start to conceptualise citizenship in a way that is potentially universal rather than
national. Citizenship is a feeling of belonging to a community, or more likely communities,
what Parekh (2000) drawing on Etzioni (1995) refers to as ‘a community of communities’.
Each of these overlapping communities has its own identity and citizens will therefore have
multiple identities. Citizenship is also a practice because there is an expectation that
citizens recognise that they have responsibilities to others and that they should act
accordingly. Citizens have status deriving from their nationality. However, they also have
status as persons deriving from their entitlement to universal human rights.

The capacity to claim and exercise human rights is a hallmark of citizenship (Gardner,
1997) and in this respect children are citizens rather than future citizens. Since 1989 they
have been entitled to universal rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
If it is predicated on the fundamental importance of universal human rights, citizenship in
schools should have a global as well as a local and a national dimension. This position is
non-controversial in England and it is written into the national programme of study.

Citizenship education based on an awareness of the universality of human rights and an
acceptance and celebration of diversity has been characterised as education for
cosmopolitan citizenship (Osler & Starkey, 2003, 2005).

However, this position appears to be contested at the time of writing in October 2006, since
the DfES has set up a review panel to consider the possibility of increasing consideration of
‘modern British cultural and social history’ within the citizenship programme. There are
clearly pressures from some quarters within government for citizenship education in
England to be explicitly framed as education for national citizenship.

There are many arguments against a citizenship education that seeks to prioritise a national
as opposed to a cosmopolitan perspective. One is that it would be to invent an approach to
education that died out with empire. Whilst some nations promote the national flag and
other symbols of nationhood through education, there has been no recent tradition of flag
flying and the singing of a national anthem in schools in England.

Thus, almost as soon as it has been introduced, citizenship education, not unexpectedly, is a
site of struggle and controversy. This is to be expected in a healthy liberal democracy.

Reflecting Education

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