Session Information
07 SES 13 C JS, Education for Citizenship and Social Justice
Joint Symposium NW07 and NW23
Contribution
In this paper, I take up the issue of citizenship, schooling and ‘educational disadvantage’ and ponder the following questions: What does citizenship education mean to students attending schools that serve predominantly low socio-economic communities? Or perhaps more to the point, what could it be mean if their schools took citizenship seriously? The term ‘educational disadvantage’ works in this paper to name the ways in which schooling systems in all nations contribute to the (re)production of social stratification and hence sustain a strong correlation between educational success and high family socio-economic status. To ponder these questions the paper works with the following axioms: The nation is involved in border-work of various kinds, and of late this work has intensified as nation states grapple with ungovernability (Offe 1987) pressures from both inside and outside of the nation. This border-work takes many guises and importantly citizenship is a key site for constituting the nation (Balibar 2015). As such, schooling plays a key role in the constitution of the citizen, and that recently citizenship education is being redefined in terms of a weak version of citizenship (Tudball and Henderson 2014; Balibar 2015) that supports trends towards de-democratisation (Brown 2015) and authoritarian forms of governmentality (Lazzaroto 2015). After this introduction the chapter make five moves. The first move provides a brief account of the influence of neoliberalising social policies, and especially the trend towards rising inequality and an intensifying class struggle being waged on the terrain of neoliberalising capitalism (Lazzarato 2012). The second move provides an account of the relationship between citizenship and democracy and provides a strong version of citizenship that draws on Ranciere’s thesis on politics as an unsettling of the distribution of the sensible. The third move reviews recent moves in Australia to refashioning citizenship education in ways that ignores the strangling of citizenship that is being waged by the nation. The fourth move, provides a short portrait of one secondary school in Australia that provides an exemplar of ‘how schools do policy’ (Ball, Maguire et al. 2012) and specifically how schools work with their own local rationalities that often work with/against the rationality of policy. The final move provides a tentative conclusion that argues for citizenship-as-equality (Riuitenberg 2015).
References
Balibar, E. (2015). Citizenship. Cambridge, UK, Polity Press. Ball, S., M. Maguire, et al. (2012). How Schools Do Policy: Policy Enactments in Secondary Schools. London, Routledge. Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the Demos: neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution. New York, Zone Books. Lazzarato, M. (2012). The Making of Indebted Man. California, USA Semitext(e). Lazzaroto, M. (2015). Govening by Debt. California, USA, Semitext(e). Offe, C. (1987). Ungovernability: On the renaissance of conservative theories of crisis. Observation of the "spiritual situation of the age". J. Habermas. Cambridge, MA., MIT Press. Riuitenberg, C. (2015). "The practice of equality: A critical understanding of democratic citizenship education." Democracy and Education 23(1): 1-9. Tudball, L. & D. Henderson (2014). "Contested Notions of Civics and Citizenship Education as National Education in the Australian Curriculum." Curriculum and Teaching 29(2): 5-24.
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