"Debating the citizenship debate"

'Education for citizenship' presupposes a critical understanding of the limitations of its own contemporary definition. (Carr and Hartnett, 1996)

This time last week, I was speaking to a group of local community activists on a poor housing estate in the north of Edinburgh. And, for my sins, what I was talking about was 'citizenship' - which seems to be part of the core curriculum wherever you go these days. As it turned out, they did most of the talking and I did most of the listening. Essentially, what I heard from these eminently 'active citizens' - all good working-class people without work - was cynicism, contempt and anger. For them, at any rate, the current debate about citizenship, to the extent that it impinged on their social reality at all, was a way of not talking about what mattered most to them: their own poverty and inequality, and their sense of their own identity and anger being actively excluded from the public business of democracy. Citizenship was for them a diversionary discourse. And all this, in the bright new dawn of Scotland's 'democratic renewal'. I will come back to anger at the end of what I have to say today.

In 'debating the citizenship debate', my purpose, in a sense, is to focus on what seems to be missing from this debate. I want to fill in some of the blanks and clear some ground, both pedagogically and ideologically - so that this debate can be more open and honest, democratic and constructively critical and, hopefully, creative. In doing this, I must emphasise that I do not speak for an educational sector or an institutional or professional interest. Rather, I want to speak from a particular tradition of critical, social purpose adult education - and consequently for a political and ideological position. Incidentally, I think this kind of adult education has always been centrally concerned with issues of citizenship because it exists at the interface between the liberal tradition of citizenship, as the individual rights attached to a political status within the formal politics of the state, and the civic republican tradition of citizenship, as a collectively asserted social practice largely within the informal politics of civil society (eg see Lister, 1997). Inevitably, 'debating the citizenship debate' from this perspective means asking some awkward questions. I hope I won't sound like a 'wrecker', but I must emphasise that what I want to say is a million miles away from 'Who wants to be a millionaire?'

We live in strange times. Just think about what’s happened in recent weeks. The Prime Minister of the UK and leader of the British Labour Party goes off to Barcelona to champion 'free market reforms' among his fellow EU leaders. Meanwhile, back home, the leader of the Conservative Party goes off to Harrogate to open his party's annual Spring conference by declaring that the Conservatives must champion the cause of Britain’s 'disadvantaged', 'vulnerable' and 'dispossessed'. As a citizen of Edinburgh, I'm afraid I have to give Glasgow - more specifically, Easterhouse - the credit for this remarkable, Damascene conversion.

Strange times, indeed! Times with which I find it difficult not to feel decidedly out of joint. This is partly because I want to argue that in 'debating the citizenship debate', our starting point should be that we cannot speak of citizenship without speaking of democracy, and we cannot speak of democracy without speaking of social justice and equality. In my view, education for citizenship, as distinct from training people to be 'good citizens', must start from this vital set of moral, political and, I emphasise, material connections (eg see Phillips, 1999).

Most of us did not really need Paulo Freire to tell us that education is political (Freire 1972). So, as educators, let us not be afraid to speak politically of education. Here I must come clean, declare an interest and use the dreaded 's' word: socialism - not something we hear much about these days.

Now I don't want to sound confessional (there is too much of the residual Scottish Presbyterian in me for that), but I have always been a socialist and internationalist. And, as I look back, I realise that (perhaps like some other people here?) this is one of the reasons why I chose to work in adult education. As a child of the Sixties, I believed we could make a better world, and that education - and, in particular, a particular kind of adult education - had an important part to play in this process. And I still do.

I don’t mean 'socialism' in some complicated or doctrinaire sense, but actually in a very simple and straightforward way. This expresses three core beliefs: first, that all human beings, whatever their differences, share what Raymond Williams called an 'essential equality of being'; second, that as human beings we are social and political animals, ie our individuality and humanity reaches its highest expression (or what Freire called our 'ontological vocation') in relationships and collective endeavour and caring about each other; and therefore, third, that human society, including its material and cultural resources, should as far as possible be organised to honour this shared equality of being and, in doing so, enhance our capacity to be human and to live in a meaningful, fulfilled and useful way. This, it seems to me, is essentially what moral democracy and civic virtue are about.

There is, of course, a key role for education in all of this - and particularly the adult education of social purpose and political engagement, as our history has shown. In fact, I am now of the view that the kind of democratic society I believe in requires a socialist state. For me, the problem with socialism is not that it has failed, but that we never really tried it. Unsurprisingly, then, one cannot but be disappointed by the so-called 'PAP' of New Labour. Its populism and pragmatism: its concern to 'woo' the electorate rather than 'lead' the electorate; its insistent mantra that 'What matters is what works' (Lister, 2001). And, of course, the managerialist gloss and 'spin' that goes with this - which, incidentally, does so much to put ordinary citizens off politics, actively to de-activate them.

In thinking about 'education for citizenship', it is first necessary to reach some clarity about what education can and cannot be expected to do, as well as to consider why it is that the state has suddenly - or not so suddenly (remember Douglas Hurd's version of 'active citizenship'?) - become interested in all of this. So, we need to set some parameters and enter some caveats. I confine myself to five points drawn from a variety of old favourites

First, what is the nature of the state’s current interest in citizenship? The disabled scholar and activist Michael Oliver (1996) writes:

It seems that when the relationship between the State and its population is in crisis, citizenship becomes the device whereby such a crisis is talked about and mediated.

Is there a crisis? If so, what is the nature of this crisis? Is it about political legitimacy and popular participation in the system? Is it about consensual meritocracy and law and order? Is it about the place of the 'other' in our social and political life? Or is it about not asking other kinds of questions about the way we live? We need to think about these things.

Second, Ralph Miliband in his book Socialism for a Sceptical Age argues that true citizenship presupposes a ‘rough equality of condition’. Indeed, he goes on to claim that 'equality of opportunity is a mere slogan in societies marked by deep inequalities of condition' (Miliband, 1995). Here I must, in passing, point out the coyness of currently fashionable discourse of 'social capital' about such awkward matters. By 'condition' I understand both people's material circumstances and a political culture in which they are treated as citizens, ie with dignity, honesty and justice. Of course, part of problem with so-called ‘spin’ is that it is deeply contemptuous of the citizen’s right to know, to understand and to be trusted. And, incidentally, we need to understand much more about what I would call the wider 'political economy of trust', ie the material and cultural conditions which predispose us to trust each other and our leaders. Sadly, we seem to have learnt little about this from this year’s Reith Lectures. The main point is that any government interested in citizenship education has a primary role and duty to create the educative conditions in which citizens learn to be informed and active because they are trusted as social actors and political agents

This leads directly to the third point: we must also think about the wider socio-economic context in which we are called upon to act as citizens. We live in an increasingly globalised system of production, distribution and exchange which systematically generates very different and unequal conditions of citizenship. As RH Tawney, one of our great socialist adult educators, put it: 'What rich people call the problem of poverty, poor people with equal justice call the problem of riches'. There is no time now to talk about globalisation and turbo-capitalism, and the vast wealth, inequality, venality and corruption this capricious system so predictably generates (eg see Forrester, 1999). But, as we keep being told, we live in the ‘fourth largest economy in the world’, so you probably know what I mean! I will just make one further point about this, couched in the fashionable language of 'social exclusion', by quoting the feminist scholar Ruth Lister (2001):

What is at issue is not just the exclusion from the bonds of common citizenship of those at the bottom, but also the way in which those at the top can exclude themselves from these bonds and thereby fail to acknowledge the equal worth of their fellow citizens.

Social exclusion works both ways. One question for us to think about is: Did last week's Budget really help to close this gaping gap between citizens at the top and citizens at the bottom?

Fourth, as educators, we must be careful to consider the realistic and legitimate aims and parameters of our work. I repeat the salutory warning of the sociologist AH Halsey (1972) that we should avoid treating

education as the waste paper basket of social policy - a repository for dealing with social problems where solutions are uncertain or where there is a disinclination to wrestle with them seriously.

It seems to me that this is something we still need to say tell ourselves every time we get up in the morning and go off to work.

Fifth, and finally, in all of this we are, of course, talking about a particular kind of adult education and education for citizenship. I would call it the social purpose tradition or the 'adult education of engagement' (eg see Fieldhouse, 1996; Jackson, 1995). And I insist that in the kind of individualistic and terribly unequal society in which we live, this kind of adult education cannot but be a dissenting vocation. One thing we are certainly not talking about here is the sort of lifelong learning which now dominates the policy agenda, which seems to me to be far too much about earning and not nearly enough about yearning. If we are really interested in democratic citizenship, we really must learn to yearn as well as earn. I was recently on the phone to a colleague at a prestigious, ‘research-led’ university not far from here. She suddenly broke off the conversation, saying she would have to go. I asked: 'Where are you going?' She said: 'Board of Lifelong Learning'. I replied: 'Aye, I know what you mean.'

The main point coming out of all this is that, as educators, we need to delimit rather carefully our legitimate and practical interest in education for citizenship, ie that interest for which we can reasonably be held accountable. Unless we do this, we will just end up, yet again, filling Halsey’s waste paper basket. So I want to suggest very briefly some of what I would consider to be the key non-educational preconditions for active and democratic citizenship.

We need to think seriously about things like: how our electoral and parliamentary systems work, and in whose interests; how our education, health and welfare services continue to reproduce and, indeed, legitimate inequality; how free we really are as citizens to know and say what, within reason, we want. And all of this, of course, within the familiar constraints and contradictions of what has curiously been called 'market democracy'. What this suggests is that we should exercise considerable caution in assessing what education can and cannot be expected to do to create the conditions in which citizens, as distinct from 'stakeholders' or 'partners', can be expected to be active and civically minded agents.

One of the central purposes of the kind of critical, engaged adult education I am interested in is precisely to enter such caveats, set such preconditions and refocus attention from effects to causes, from pathology to structure. And, incidentally, what Stella Dadzie said yesterday in her account of the issues raised by the current agenda for citizenship education for 'minority' communities made me realise the extent to which the dominant discourse of citizenship is now a pathological discourse, ie one in which problems and deficits and dangers are always located in the disaffected, apathetic or alien 'other'.

As educators, we must always show not only how the personal is the political but also how, increasingly, policy seeks to reverse social and political progress by transmuting the 'public issues of structure' back into the 'personal troubles of milieux' (Wright Mills, 1970). In my view, it is this kind of civic, social purpose adult education that has, historically, been important and influential in contesting the terrain of citizenship because it has been a key agent and resource for citizenship education understood as a process of learning democracy. This is partly because it has always recognised that education is a dialectical and contested field characterised by shifting conflicts, alliances and compromises between competing interests; and partly because it has always valued in ordinary people those two essential prerequisites of democratic life: the capacity for scepticism and the possibility of dissent.

Indeed, it is worth remembering that many of us have been lucky enough to be both the beneficiaries and the agents of precisely this kind of adult education. And if not, we don’t know what we’ve missed!

But today, for a variety of reasons (none of them accidental), this kind of critical, engaged and open-ended adult education has almost disappeared - perhaps because it is precisely the kind of education which cannot be dumbed down to sound bites, bullet points or SMART targets. This is simply not how democracy, or learning democracy, works! I must emphasise that, despite all the apparent interest in citizenship education, there is almost none of this kind of adult education left (at least within capital E education). It has been commodified, credentialised, incorporated, co-opted, marketised, competence-ised out of existence. In other words, the educational space for 'deliberative democracy', in which citizens learn, on their own terms, to be active in their own communities, workplaces and social movements as well as the wider body politic has, in effect, been closed down. And, incidentally, in terms of such of social and political engagement, I do not think adult education has well been well served by the retreat of some of our academic colleagues into the effete vacuities of a certain kind of fashionable postmodern theorising.

All of which, I'm afraid, brings to mind the last sentence of Raymond Williams' essay 'Adult education and social change' (Williams, 1993):

.... this is a social order which really does not know in what crucial respects it is ignorant, in what crucial respects it is incompletely conscious and therefore in what crucial respects this collaborative process of Adult Education is still central.

Dwelling on the theme of ignorance for a minute, I just want to suggest one respect in which the current debate about citizenship seems to be woefully - perhaps wilfully - ignorant, or at least deficient. Feminist scholars, like Ruth Lister, Fiona Williams and Ruth Levitas (eg see Critical Social Policy 21(4), 2001), argue that any inclusive notion of citizenship must recognise a non-gendered 'ethics of care' as key dimension of citizenship, ie as a civic virtue which is equal and complementary to the dominant and almost entirely economistic ethic of paid work so earnestly espoused by New Labour. Similar arguments are now coming from the disabled people's movement and some minority ethnic and cultural communities. What this means is finding new ways of thinking about citizenship and struggling for it. In other words, if we are really interested in and serious about a more inclusive and democratic social practice of citizenship, it is necessary to ask some hard intellectual questions and do some hard political work about the relationship between the social, political and cultural axes of citizenship. Otherwise and inevitably, citizenship will operate - and operate systematically - as much as a mechanism of exclusion as inclusion

So, in re-casting citizenship and trying to address the necessarily difficult notions of 'cosmopolitan citizenship' and 'solidarity in difference', we must face up to the uncomfortable fact that the political economy of citizenship still reflects and reinforces the major social divisions of power in terms of class, gender and 'race', and systematically excludes many 'others'. This is the importance of the emerging concept of ‘post-national democracy’, ie a way of living together democratically, based on the recognition of fundamental and universal human rights, which combines political solidarity with social and cultural difference. I think it is now essential for us to start thinking about citizenship in this expansive and non-national way.

But, of course, all of this runs completely counter to the economistic and exclusionary discourse of citizenship that is embedded within current government policy.

In conclusion, I want to make two points.

First, Ralph Miliband (1994) speaks of 'the practice and the habit of democracy'. In other words, democracy needs to be understood and enacted as a way of life and to be experienced as part of the texture of our everyday lives - and one might pause to consider how far our educational institutions provide a model for learning democracy in this respect. This, of course, was the distinctive territory of the radical and social purpose adult education. But, as we have seen, there is not much of it left. So, if we are really interested in democracy and citizenship as deliberative educational processes, we need to get it back! It is an essential educational resource for learning citizenship, for activating citizens and for supporting already active citizens. As such, it can help us 'learn our way out' of the mess we find ourselves in (see Finger and Asun, 2001).

Second, and finally, I come back to the angry community activists I met in Edinburgh last week. Real citizenship reflects and expresses people's sense of agency, ie their willingness and capacity to act politically. Developing agency is also the central purpose of adult education. Agency can, of course, be expressed in different ways: creatively, destructively or cynically. In this case, it was expressed as anger because, in a sense, it could be expressed in no other way. This is certainly a problem for democracy, but it is also a possibility. What I want to suggest is that a key civic virtue in a democracy is the capacity for dissent and, if necessary, anger - or what the great French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu (1998), called 'legitimate rage'. It seems to me that there is a great deal of 'legitimate rage' around at the moment and, moreover, that the government's citizenship agenda is constructed not to address it. In this sense, the managerial state suffocates the politics of citizenship. It does so partly because it is simply out of touch with the lives of many good, ordinary and angry people. And, of course, as we know from recent events in France, anger and apathy can be very dangerous things in a democracy. However, what I finish with is the thought that, historically, the kind of adult education I have spoken about enabled angry people to use education as resource, and sometimes as a weapon, in their own struggle for democracy and citizenship. In conclusion, then, it seems to me that in 'debating the citizenship debate', it is important to recognise that anger can be positive or negative, creative or destructive. And I suggest that citizenship education needs to start by confronting the Janus-faced nature of people's anger, and making the most of it. I quote from a recent biography of Franz Fanon (cited in Turnbull, 2001):

Anger does not in itself produce a political programme for change, but it is perhaps the most basic political emotion. Without it, there is no hope.

And, of course, making anger hopeful is an educational task.

Bourdieu, P (1998) Acts of Resistance, Polity Press.

Carr, W and Hartnett, A (1996) 'Civic education, democracy and the English political tradition' in Demaine, J and Entwistle, H (eds) Beyond Communitarianism: Citizenship, politics and education, Macmillan.

Finger, M and Asun, J (2001) Adult Education at the Crossroads: Learning our way out, NIACE.

Fieldhouse, R et al (1996) A History of Modern British Adult Education, NIACE.

Forrester, V (1999) The Economic Horror, Polity Press.

Freire, P (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Penguin.

Halsey, AH (1972) Educational Priority: EPA problems and policies, HMSO.

Jackson, K (1995) 'Popular education and the state' in Mayo, M and Thompson, J (eds) Adult Learning, Critical Intelligence and Social Change, NIACE, pp 182-202.

Levitas, R (2001) 'Against work: a utopian incursion into social policy', Critical Social Policy 21(4), pp 449-465.

Lister, R (1997) Citizenship: Feminist perspectives, Macmillan.

Lister, R (2001) 'New Labour: a study in ambiguity from a position of ambivalence', Critical Social Policy 21(4), pp 425-447.

Miliband, R (1994) Socialism for a Sceptical Age, Polity Press.

Oliver, M (1996) Understanding Disability, Macmillan.

Turnbull, R (2001) Editor's review: 'Fanon, pas mort?', Edinburgh Review 106, pp 5-11.

Williams, F (2001) 'In and beyond New Labour: towards a new political ethics of care', Critical Social Policy 21(4), pp 467-493.

Williams, R (1993) 'Adult education and social change' in McIlroy, J and Westwood, S (eds) Border Country: Raymond Williams in adult education, NIACE, pp 255-264.

Wright Mills, C (1970) The Sociological Imagination, Penguin.

Ian Martin
Department of Higher and Community Education
University of Edinburgh
Holyrood Campus
Edinburgh EH8 8AQ
Scotland, UK
Email: Ian.Martin@ed.ac.uk

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