Halliday J 1999 Political Liberalism and Citizenship Education - Towards Curriculum Reform [BJES]

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This article was downloaded by: [Corporacion CINCEL] On: 30 November 2012, At: 08:04 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK British Journal of Educational Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbje20 Political Liberalism and Citizenship Education: Towards Curriculum Reform John Halliday a a Faculty of Education, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, G13 1PP, UK E-mail: Version of record first published: 05 Jul 2010. To cite this article: John Halliday (1999): Political Liberalism and Citizenship Education: Towards Curriculum Reform, British Journal of Educational Studies, 47:1, 43-55 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8527.00102 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Transcript of Halliday J 1999 Political Liberalism and Citizenship Education - Towards Curriculum Reform [BJES]

Page 1: Halliday J 1999 Political Liberalism and Citizenship Education - Towards Curriculum Reform [BJES]

This article was downloaded by: [Corporacion CINCEL]On: 30 November 2012, At: 08:04Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: MortimerHouse, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

British Journal of Educational StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbje20

Political Liberalism and Citizenship Education:Towards Curriculum ReformJohn Halliday aa Faculty of Education, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, G13 1PP, UK E-mail:Version of record first published: 05 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: John Halliday (1999): Political Liberalism and Citizenship Education: Towards Curriculum Reform,British Journal of Educational Studies, 47:1, 43-55

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8527.00102

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form toanyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contentswill be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug dosesshould be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions,claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

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POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND CITIZENSHIPEDUCATION: TOWARDS CURRICULUM REFORM

by JOHN HALLIDAY, Faculty of Education, University of Strathclyde

ABSTRACT: This paper is concerned with Rawls’s (1993) account ofan overlapping consensus and recent proposals to introduce citizenshipeducation in parts of the UK. It is argued that both Rawls and theproposals mistake the significance and nature of such a consensus.Partly as a result of this mistake the proposals are insufficiently radi-cal.

Keywords: citizenship education, political liberalism

1. INTRODUCTION

Interest in citizenship and values education in the UK has beenheightened by the recent work of Tate and Talbot (1997) and Crickof the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA 1998). In itsinitial report to the Secretary of State for Education andEmployment, the committee chaired by Crick makes some ‘essentialrecommendations’, the principal among these being that

citizenship education [should] be a statutory entitlement in thecurriculum . . . established by setting out specific learningoutcomes. . . . The learning outcomes should be tight so that stan-dards and objectivity can be inspected. . . . They should take nomore than five per cent of curriculum time across the key stages.This time can be distributed as blocks, modules, as part of exist-ing tutorial time or general studies time, or as a regular weeklyperiod. (QCA 1998: 7).

Thus all students and pupils should become good citizens by achiev-ing learning outcomes specifically concerned with citizenship withina national statutory curriculum.

This renewed emphasis on citizenship has been widely welcomed.For nearly two decades emphasis in the UK’s curriculum policy hasbeen placed on the individual acquisition of skills and knowledgethat appear to be easily assessable and instrumentally valuable in the

BRITISH JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES, ISSN 0007–1005VOL. 47, NO. 1, MARCH 1999, PP 43–55

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. and SCSE 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, OxfordOX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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quests for economic prosperity and educational accountability.Policy has been little concerned with those social and politicalconcepts that enable participation in a liberal democracy and thathelp to determine the ends to which economic prosperity should bedirected. It is hoped that through programmes of citizenship educa-tion students might come not only to gain better understanding ofthemselves and their roles within existing society but more impor-tantly to enable them to contribute to the development of that soci-ety. It is hoped, too, that such programmes might help to reduce thenumbers of disaffected, sometimes violent and disruptive studentsthat are excluded from school and from what is referred to as ‘thelearning society’.

According to the initial report of the group chaired by Crick(QCA 1998) a citizenship curriculum will empower all students ‘toparticipate in society effectively as active, informed, critical andresponsible citizens’ (QCA 1998: 6). This is an ambitious aim forwhat amounts to a supplement to an existing curriculum structure,which has left many students alienated – the ‘outsiders’ as Macrae etal describe them

For these young people the academic side at school has at best leftthem cold and at worst, been a damaging, humiliating experiencefrom which they have escaped at the earliest opportunity (Macraeet al 1997: 502)

In contrast students who Macrae et al (1997: 507) describe as‘embedded’ readily accept the acquisition of nationally accreditedknowledge, values and skills and prepare to use them under theirautonomous control in the future. It is not at all obvious thatstudents of the former type will become more like students of thelatter type through the introduction of a citizenship curriculumalone. There is a danger, to which this paper draws attention, thatprogrammes of citizenship education within existing school andnational curriculum frameworks might not achieve the kind offundamental ‘change in the political culture of this country’ (QCA1998: 4) that the Crick committee advocates.

It is argued that there are two main problems with the proposalsmade by the committee. First, the use of the language of entitlementand empowerment masks the problem of which parts of the existingcurriculum structure are to be jettisoned to make way for the imple-mentation of the proposals. Crick himself acknowledges that suchlanguage is less harsh than what amounts to compulsory participa-tion in certain sorts of activities (Crick 1998: 16). There is a dangerhowever that without guidance to the contrary, it will be precisely

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those activities that actually enable inclusive participation in aliberal democracy through rigorous engagement with public modesof reasoning that will be jettisoned. In their place lessons in valueseducation may be designed to inculcate a shared sense of ‘social andmoral responsibility’ (QCA 1998) which is one of the strands of theCrick committee’s proposals.

The second problem follows on from the first and is concernedwith the nature of the National Curriculum itself. It is argued thatwhat empowers people is not so much an enforced supplement to atightly prescribed curriculum that privileges certain forms of reason-ing over others and that disenfranchises too many students. Rathera more flexible structure makes room for teachers and students toengage with some degree of rigour in a wider range of practices thatconnect with students’ prior and concurrent interests. There aremany modes of public reasoning that enable people to resolveconflicts of value, recognise constraints of power and know whenand how to try to influence the direction of the society of which theyare members.

These problems arise partly out of the Crick committee’s inter-pretation of the idea that citizenship education ‘implies developingvalues’ (QCA 1998: 15). This idea prompts the question of whichvalues should be developed and the committee finds an answer inthe work of the National Forum for Values in Education and theCommunity. (QCA 1998: 15). This forum comprised 150 people ofdiffering backgrounds who set out a list of values that were commonto all of them. Later through a MORI pole ‘approximately 95% of1500 people consulted agreed with the values outlines in the Forumstatement.’ (Tate and Talbot 1997: 3)

Talbot is a member of the Crick committee and the Forum state-ment provides for her, ‘a simple and empirically justifiable answer tothe question of which values should be instilled in the young’ (Tateand Talbot 1997: 1). Tate and Talbot believe that they are oftenmisinterpreted as suggesting that the common values identified bythe Forum and only these values should be taught in schools. Ratherthey insist that rational disagreement about values is only possible ifthere are some ‘values to which every person of goodwill will agree’(Tate and Talbot 1997: 3, original emphasis).

Quite apart from the possibility of circularity in this insistence itis worth noting, as Mulhall recently does, that the degree of passion-ate controversy already provoked in debates about the work of theNational Forum suggests

that any hope of establishing such a consensus at any practical

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level of concrete detail is unrealistic in the extreme. (Mulhall1998: 162)

Fairly obviously there are many different views of what constitutes agood life and some of these views conflict. People may readily agreeon a list of what appear to be obviously good and general values suchas tolerance and human dignity until those values contradict theirown deeply held personal and particular beliefs about abortion,animal rights and the distribution of material resources for exam-ple. Mulhall suggests with the author that Rawls’s (1993) work canusefully shed some light on the nature of what could comprise anoverlapping consensus within a liberal democracy.

2. POLITICAL LIBERALISM

In his 1993 publication Rawls attempts to distinguish political fromcomprehensive liberalism. He recognises that a modern democraticsociety is characterised by many incompatible yet reasonabledoctrines about what constitutes a good life. This recognition givesrise to the question that he (1993: xviii) is concerned to answer andthat is central to the debate about citizenship education.

How is it possible that [free and equal citizens] deeply opposedthrough reasonable comprehensive doctrines may live togetherand all affirm the political conception of a constitutional regime?(my amendment in brackets)

Rawls’ (1993) answer to this question is to argue that questionsabout what is truly good can be avoided in political discourse provid-ing that there is a sufficient ‘overlapping consensus’ of reasonabledoctrines that are based on the moral principle of justice as fairnessto which all citizens subscribe and to which the state can appeal inorder to justify its coercive power. Thus citizens are bound todisagree about what is truly good, but they may nevertheless sharecertain doctrines that enable them to coexist peacefully. The Forumstatement of what constitutes a consensus of values seems to be aparadigmatic example of the content of an overlapping consensus.

A Rawlsian and indeed a QCA citizenship curriculum ought togive priority, therefore, to the inculcation of political values such astolerance and compromise over any comprehensive values held byindividuals. That is because those comprehensive values will alwaysbe rejected as unreasonable by those who do not share them. Hencesuch a citizenship curriculum should convey and inculcate

just those virtues and capacities required for taking on the rights

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and responsibilities of citizenship . . . in ways that abstain as far aspossible from embodying or implying judgements about the rela-tive worth of the competing comprehensive doctrines to whichcitizens might commit themselves (Mulhall 1998: 165).

As Mulhall points out, however, the problem with such a curriculumis that many reasonable people who would agree on the priority ofpolitical values in most circumstances would nevertheless want tomake exceptions for certain deeply held beliefs to which they mighthope to persuade others to accept. In order to distinguish thereasonable from the unreasonable Rawls has to appeal to thecomprehensive value of reason that is embodied within his versionof political liberalism. Hence the distinction between political andcomprehensive liberalism begins to dissolve. The conclusionMulhall draws is that it cannot be assumed

that a conception of citizenship to which all can happily assent iseither available in the public political culture or the only conceptsuitable for the task in hand (Mulhall 1998: 174).

3. MODUS VIVENDI OR CONSENSUS?

Rawls distinguishes an overlapping consensus from a modus vivendi(Rawls 1993: 147). The former is based on universal acceptance ofthe moral value of justice as fairness whereas the latter is merely anarrangement of convenience between two or more parties fulfillingtheir own different interests without regard for values of an intrinsickind. Just as the distinction between comprehensive and politicalvalues cannot be tightly maintained, so too the distinction betweenan overlapping consensus and a modus vivendi cannot be tightlymaintained either.

As Ackerman points out (1989: 17) a modus vivendi

may be the best liberals can realistically hope for under one oranother extreme set of conditions – where allowing the seriouspolitical consideration of the power that comes from property orwhatever will tear the place apart, and lead only to the destructionof a polity that might otherwise have generated productive politi-cal dialogue on other issues.

Only in the extreme cases of ‘riots on the streets’ might politiciansbe tempted to tamper with a modus vivendi and attempt to examinein detail the meaning of justice as fairness. That is why it is temptingto add citizenship education to an existing curricular structure

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rather than to rethink the whole idea of a political education whichmight encourage radical changes in curricular structure, schoolhierarchies, unequal property rights, access to opportunities and soon.

However, it cannot be assumed that tampering is always betterthan radical re-thinking. It is not clear whether greater justice orstability results from working within an existing mode or attemptingto overthrow that mode. That is a further reason why the distinctionsbetween political and comprehensive liberalism, modus vivendi andoverlapping consensus cannot be tightly maintained. Where aparticular group appears to negate a preferred comprehensivevalue, it might be perfectly reasonable for an individual holding thatvalue to try to overthrow the group. It might also be perfectlyreasonable for others to try to hold on to it. The dilemma is similarto the one that Kuhn (1970) describes between normal and revolu-tionary science. As Habermas (1971) reminds us in these times,politics become increasingly conservative and differences presentedincreasingly as if they were technical in nature. If Habermas iscorrect then it looks as if the value of justice will most often betrumped by the value of stability. Rawls’ retreat from comprehensiveto political liberalism may be seen to be his best hope that politicalphilosophy has to defend ‘reasonable faith in the possibility of a justconstitutional regime’ (Rawls 1993: 172). However, a further retreatmay yet be necessary.

4. REINTERPRETING AN OVERLAPPING CONSENSUS

Suppose that thinking about citizenship was not concerned withtrying to work out and communicate a common set of values.Suppose that such thinking was more concerned with the resolutionof disputes locally and in contexts in which their resolution makes adifference. Suppose that a good life is conceived not so much as onethat is dominated by what appear to be big issues such as the forma-tion of moral codes and the ways in which such codes are applied toa range of circumstances. Suppose, rather, that emphasis is placedon the local resolution of differences when resolution is necessaryand the private attempt to convince others of the wisdom of holdingcertain comprehensive beliefs when people care both about thosebeliefs and about the very people they are trying to convince. Inshort, suppose that emphasis in proposals for citizenship educationwas placed on engaging everyone in at least some of those publicpractices that enable people to resolve conflicts in contexts in whichthe resolution has a point for them.

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Suppose the notion of an overlapping consensus is reinterpretedas a ‘family resemblance’ type of notion. In Philosophical Investigations65–67, Wittgenstein (1953) explains how there is nothing incommon between uses of the same word or group of words, but thatthere is a ‘complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities ofdetail.’ He characterises these similarities as ‘family resemblances;for the various resemblances between members of a family: build,features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap andcriss-cross in the same way’. Suppose that an overlapping consensusof doctrines is interpreted in a similar way to the one described byWittgenstein for concepts. According to this interpretation of anoverlapping consensus, consensus is much more localised and tran-sitory than Rawls, Tate, Talbot, Crick and others suppose. Indeed,the consensus consists not so much in doctrines as on beliefs aboutwhat ought to be done in particular circumstances.

On the face of it such a reinterpretation suggests a limited role forcitizenship education. If all that could be said to unite the membersof society is a series of localised agreements with no explicit valuesuniting them, then it is hard to see how the state could justify anyattempt tightly to legislate about any kind of values education. It isinteresting to note that the communitarian thinker MacIntyre seemsnow to accept that ‘the nation state is not and cannot be the locusof community’ (MacIntyre 1994: 303). Rather the locus of commu-nity ‘has to be a relatively small scale and local form of political asso-ciation’ (ibid: 302).

5. CONVERSATIONAL RESTRAINT

The picture that is suggested here is a series of localised transitoryagreements sharing no one thing in common but a series of familyresemblances between different agreements made by neighboursand groups of neighbours in contingent association with oneanother. Such resemblances overlap one another. Let us complicatethe picture still further by imagining that no one is a member of justone group but that everyone is a member of a number of groups.On such a picture, conflicts between groups and individuals areaccepted as a normal part of ordinary life. In most cases it is neitheruseful nor possible to appeal explicitly to what might have beenlearnt as common ground between all members of society becausethere is no such common ground, merely shifting sands of agree-ments to which appeal can be made on a transitory basis.

Ackerman illustrates the notion of conversational restraint with

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the aid of a Venn diagram. He supposes society to be made up ofmany groups. P1, P2, P3 . . . Pn represent the set of moral proposi-tions the members of each group affirm in conversation betweenthemselves. L is the area of overlap between the propositionsaffirmed by particular groups that members of those groups mightuse to settle disagreement between them. For most purposes,conversation should be restrained to the search for L, what might becalled following Lakatos (1978), ‘touchstone’. In the case of scien-tific theory preference, Lakatos suggests that the proponents of tworival theories must establish some common ground or ‘touchstone’by which the rival theories are to be judged before judging cancommence. Similarly for Ackerman, neighbours need to establishsome common grounds between them before any conflict can besettled. They do not of course have to settle differences over theirreligious beliefs or the justice of unequal distribution of property.Nor do they have to agree on touchstones for all time. Rather theyhave to be able to take part in a wide variety of public practices sothat they maximise their opportunities to secure touchstone withtheir neighbours at particular times.

It is not that thick, general and somewhat vague statements ofvalue such as those contained in the Forum statement are entirelyuseless. Such statements may serve a variety of purposes such as thestarting point for productive argument or a rallying cry to what isbelieved to be desirable. The mistake is to imagine that such state-ments are necessarily more important than any other kind of state-ment. Certainly there are occasions when people need to talk abouttheir deepest moral disagreements or about injustices that arestrongly felt. For example Coombs (1997: 186) worries that, throughtaking account of ‘the diversity of moral traditions represented inschool populations, educators will attempt to carry out moral educa-tion by engaging students in “conversational restraint” ’. ForCoombs this would be an impoverished form of moral education.Conversational restraint is not a principle to be applied at all timeshowever. A responsible citizen can neither cut herself off from polit-ical practice, nor from explorations of her private morality inconversation with others. Responsibility of this kind can be encour-aged in schools and other contexts without imagining that funda-mental moral concerns need to be to the fore in all contexts or thatschool provides the only or main context for fundamental moraldeliberation.

There is no need, for example, to try to force students publicly torecount their innermost thoughts – their domestic arrangements, or tolisten to contrived classroom debates about abortion, environmental

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degradation, animal rights or unequal distribution of property with-out ever having acquired the fundamental knowledge about biology,philosophy, or politics that bring some rigour to such debates. Thatis not to suggest that any member of the Crick committee wouldcountenance such debates. It is however to suggest that the movefrom tightly prescribed outcomes to tightly prescribed activitiesdesigned to achieve those outcomes is all too easy to make in aclimate that favours immediate and obvious measures of account-ability.

What some members of the Crick Committee might counte-nance, however, is the attempt by individual schools to emulate theNational Forum for Values in Education and the Community bysetting out a statement of their common values. Such a statementmay then be used to establish what is and what is not acceptablebehaviour within the school. However, there are two main dangerswith such an attempt. First, schools are not noticeably democraticinstitutions and it is not clear that their statements of values andmore importantly their interpretations of those statements can avoidreflecting that fact about their governance. Hence, students onlylearn about democratic values through their absence in practice.Second, as Smith (1997) points out, there is an essential indetermi-nacy about moral life which implies neither moral objectivism norrelativism but confidence to make room for the development ofmoral judgement. The idea that institutionally sanctioned state-ments of general values can guide individual behaviour is danger-ously wrong.

According to this reinterpreted account of political liberalism,the possibility of a citizenship education rests not so much on talkabout moral principles or principles of justice. The search is not fora sort of super-set of moral principles LM that can applied across allpractices P (1-n). Rather it is to accept that practices contain theirown set of moral principles and to try to maximise social and politi-cal capital (Rawls 1993: 157) so that people are inclined to listen tothe views of those with whom they disagree, to tolerate those viewsand sometimes to accept them even though they conflict with selfinterest. The more that people have genuine opportunities tounderstand and solve differences with strangers, the more social andpolitical capital is accumulated within a community. The morepeople know about the practices in which others engage, the morelikely it is that conflicts can be settled without recourse to legal andbureaucratic procedures. They come to see their common human-ity without recourse to what could be a debilitating attempt toresolve what is common to all of them.

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While Rawls uses the device of the original position to try to stripaway all those life experiences that make disagreements so impor-tant in the first place, Ackerman rejects this device. For Ackermanthe original position is a hopeless attempt to get a view from no-where that must be a view from somewhere, however well disguised.Similarly Ackerman rejects Habermas’s device of an ideal consensusas an attempt to provide a roughly similar vantage point. Bothattempts are subject to similar objections which Neurath (1932)summarises through the analogy of a boat. There are no neutralfoundations that can be used to adjudicate between different viewsof what is good. Rather there are occasional glimpses of what mighthave been or is good and bad that arise when people bleed, showcharacteristic reactions to pain and joy and so on. These glimpsesanchor what might otherwise be a floating web of propositions.Apart from these glimpses, talking to one another is all that peoplehave to help them to determine what they ought to do.

This account suggests some reasons for initiating more radicalcurriculum reform than that which appears to be suggested by theCrick committee. The present curriculum does not encourage thosestudents who are neither adept nor inclined to deliberate in theways favoured by it. Their immersion in other kinds of social prac-tices outside school does not prepare them well for participation ina limited number of practices in which the use of the pen is domi-nant. The point is that there are many practices through whichpeople can locate ‘touchstone’ to enable them to join in conversa-tions with others to determine what they ought to do. Politically andeducationally these can be just as important as those practices thatguide utterances in the current components of the national curricu-lum.

6. TOWARDS CURRICULUM REFORM

One difficulty that arises from having too inflexible a nationalcurriculum is that it works against those teachers who seek to engagestudents educationally by making connections between the student’simmediate interests and those areas of study that could expandthose interests in productive ways. Another difficulty that arises fromhaving a national curriculum that is dominated by propositionalknowledge is that it privileges certain practices without warrant. Inhis 1993 publication, Hirst acknowledges the primacy of ‘know-how’over propositional knowledge. He sees propositional knowledge as‘developments within the contexts of practice . . . and generalisa-tions concerning successful and unsuccessful practices rather than

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disinterested truths’ (Hirst 1993: 193). In other words appropriateuse of terms such as ‘know’ and ‘knowledge’ is part and parcel ofmany practices and not essential determinants of those practices.According to MacIntyre (1981: 187), a practice is

any coherent and complex form of socially established co-opera-tive human activity through which goods internal to that form ofactivity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those stan-dards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially defin-itive of, that form of activity.

If it is accepted that there are a multitude of practices into whichstudents can be inducted and that through such induction, studentslearn to distinguish between internal and external goods in the waythat MacIntyre (1981: 188) describes, then a practical induction isnecessarily a moral education. This argument provides grounds fora curriculum, designed to encourage citizenship, to be concernedminimally with engaging all students in sufficient depth in at leastone practice so that they come to distinguish those values that areintrinsic to the successful development of the practice from thosethat arise instrumentally out of the practice. Without an ability tomake such a distinction, all conflicts must be resolved by resortingto power of one sort or another.

More than that, a curriculum for citizenship should be concernedto maximise opportunities to find ‘touchstones’ by inductingstudents into as many practices as possible so that they come toacquire those many forms of reasoning that enable participation ina democratic form of life. Referring back to the Venn diagram, prac-tices overlap each other to varying degrees and there are good polit-ical as well as educational reasons to encourage people to take partin those practices that have the greatest degree of overlap – practicesthat are morally, cognitively and instrumentally rich.

There are good reasons then for favouring physics as a curriculumsubject to petrol pump attending even though the latter mightappear to be more immediately useful. Legal studies not only over-laps with a wide range of practices but such studies are also immedi-ately useful. Rightly the Crick committee stresses the importance ofsuch studies. The committee is right, too, to argue the case for polit-ical studies. Such studies overlap with a wide range of other practicesand it seems indefensible that they should not be systematicallytaught in schools and colleges. Technologies of various kinds areinteresting, they overlap with many practices, and they are immedi-ately useful. British curricula and the committee pay little attentionto such studies, however, despite their potential for encouraging

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people to take part in educational and political conversations.Practices such as joinery and building have internal goods, are wellestablished, widespread and interesting. An induction into thesepractices can be as thorough as an induction into any other practice.Schools and colleges might not be the best sites for these types ofinduction to take place however which has implications for thecurrent interest in work-place and lifelong learning.

A central problem with the introduction of any new reformula-tion of practices such as citizenship is that these reformulations lacka tradition through which ways of distinguishing good from bad areestablished. A similar argument might be employed against discretecourses in the reformulations of ‘health education’ or ‘social andpersonal development.’ These courses tend to become abstractionsof practice that lack the rigour that comes from working with estab-lished standards of goodness within traditional practices. They onlyhave a home, and often only a temporary home at that, withineducational institutions.

A further problem for the Crick committee arises out of its advocacyof the use of learning outcomes to encourage a form of values educa-tion. The very formulation of ‘outcomes’ works against the valuesthemselves and favours a behavioural manifestation of those values inthe supposed interests of standards and objectivity. Moreover, a highlyprescriptive national curriculum tends to privilege a kind of superficialpastiche of practices in which external goods dominate. That isbecause legislative prescriptions attempt to make goods, which areinternal to a practice, explict. Such a curriculum also diverts attentionaway from those diverse practices in which people engage outwithschool and from which they develop a sense of themselves and theirlocal community. The citizenship committee is right too to stress theimportance of engagement in community and social activities outsideschool. Where the committee goes wrong, according to the argumentsadvanced in this paper, is in its lack of criticality towards existing curric-ular structures in the UK, its lack of guidance about what should bedropped from the national curriculum to make way for the entirelylaudable proposals it makes concerned with community, legal andpolitical education, and its assumptions about the nature and extent ofan overlapping consensus.

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and its Future Citizens, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 32 (2), 161–176.NEURATH, O. (1932) Protokollsatze, Erkenntnis, 3, 201–14.QCA (1998) Initial Report of the Advisory Group on Education for Citizenship and the

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CorrespondenceJohn HallidayUniversity of StrathclydeGlasgow G13 1PPUKEmail: [email protected]

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