Fearing youth, fostering democracy: conceptions of children and young people’s good citizenship and citizenship education in European policy (1976 – 2021)

ABSTRACT

Discussions on citizenship always reflect broader political debates on the desired moral fabrics of a society. Evolving from a merely national subject, questions on children and young people’s citizenship and citizenship education have over the past decades gained interest in European policy. Through a thematical-rhetorical analysis of European policy documents, this article engages in the European moral-political discussion on good citizenship and citizenship education for children and young people. The study shows that European conceptions of good citizenship and citizenship education fluctuate over time, responding to major societal crises. Focusing on the future of European society, European policy seems to project contemporary societal concerns onto children and young people’s desired forms of citizenship, endorsing the idea of children as citizens-in-the-making. Overall, European policy adopts a highly depoliticised perspective to citizenship that risks constricting, rather than enabling, the actual democratic citizenship of children and young people.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• politics
• moral values
• children
• young people

Acknowledgements

The authors want to thank Prof. Dr Michel Vandenbroeck and Prof. Dr Anne Trine Kjørholt for their very useful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Gert Biesta, Robert Lawy and Narcie Kelly, ‘Understanding Young People’s Citizenship Learning in Everyday Life: The Role of Contexts, Relationships and Dispositions’, Education, Citizenship and Social Justice 4, no. 1 (2009): 5–24; Emmanuel Sigalas and Isabelle De Coster, ‘Citizenship Education at School in Europe – 2017’, Euridyce Report, Luxembourg: Publications office of the European Union, 2017, https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/6b50c5b0-d651-11e7-a506-01aa75ed71a1/language-en; Concepción Naval, Murray Print and Ruud Veldhuis, ‘Education for Democratic Citizenship in the New Europe: Context and Reform’, European Journal of Education 37, no. 2 (2002): 107–28.

² Audrey Osler and Hugh Starkey, Changing Citizenship (London: McGraw-Hill Education, 2005); Andrew Peterson et al., The Palgrave International Handbook of Education for Citizenship and Social Justice (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51507-0; Sigalas and De Coster, ‘Citizenship Education’; Wiel Veugelers and Isolde de Groot, ‘Theory and Practice of Citizenship Education’, in Education for Democratic Intercultural Citizenship, ed. Wiel Veugelers (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 14–41.

³ Robert Lawy and Gert Biesta, ‘Citizenship-as-Practice: The Educational Implications of an Inclusive and Relational Understanding of Citizenship’, British Journal of Educational Studies 54, no. 1 (February 2006): 34–50; Derek Heater, A History of Education for Citizenship (London: Routledge Falmer, 2004).

⁴ Terence McLaughlin, ‘Citizenship Education in England: The Crick Report and Beyond’, Journal of Philosophy of Education 34, no. 4 (2000): 541–70.

⁵ Gert Biesta, Learning Democracy in School and Society: Education, Lifelong Learning, and the Politics of Citizenship (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2011); Naval, ‘Education for Democratic Citizenship’; Hessel Nieuwelink, Paul Dekker, Femke Geijsel, Geert ten Dam, Peter Thijssen, Jessy Siongers, Jeroen Van Laer, Jacques Haers and Sara Mels, ‘Experiences with Democracy and Collective Decision-Making in Everyday Life’, Political Engagement of the Young in Europe: Youth in the Crucible (London: Routledge, 2016), 174–98.

⁶ Also see Margot Joris and Orhan Agirdag, ‘In Search of Good Citizenship Education: A Normative Analysis of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS)’, European Journal of Education 54, no. 2 (2019): 287–98.

⁷ Gustavo E. Fischman and Eric Haas, ‘Moving Beyond Idealistically Narrow Discourses in Citizenship Education’, Policy Futures in Education 12, no. 3 (March 2014): 387–402.

⁸ Heater, History of Education for Citizenship.

⁹ Kirsi Pauliina Kallio and Katharyne Mitchell, ‘Introduction to the Special Issue on Transnational Lived Citizenship’, Global Networks 16, no. 3 (March 2016): 259–67; Avril Keating, ‘Educating Europe’s Citizens: Moving from National to Post-National Models of Educating for European Citizenship’, Citizenship Studies 13, no. 2 (2009): 135–51; Veugelers and de Groot, ‘Theory and Practice of Citizenship Education’.

¹⁰ Daniel Faas, ‘The Nation, Europe, and Migration: A Comparison of Geography, History, and Citizenship Education Curricula in Greece, Germany, and England’, Journal of Curriculum Studies 43, no. 4 (August 2011): 471–92.

¹¹ Faas, ‘The Nation, Europe, and Migration’; Deborah Michaels and Stevick Doyle, ‘Europeanization in the “other” Europe: Writing the Nation into “Europe” Education in Slovakia and Estonia’, Journal of Curriculum Studies 41, no. 2 (March 2009): 225–45; Naval et al., ‘Education for Democratic Citizenship’; Olga Bombardell and Marto Codato, ‘Country Report: Civic and Citizenship Education in Italy: Thousands of Fragmented Activities Looking for a Systematization’, Journal of Social Science Education 1, no. 2 (2017), 74–81; Stavroula Philippou, Avril Keating and Debora Hinderliter Ortloff, ‘Citizenship Education Curricula: Comparing the Multiple Meanings of Supra‐National Citizenship in Europe and Beyond’, Journal of Curriculum Studies 41, no. 2 (2009): 291–9.

¹² Keating, ‘Nationalizing the Post‐National’.

¹³ Gert Biesta, ‘Good Education in an Age of Measurement: On the Need to Reconnect with the Question of Purpose in Education’, Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability 21, no. 2 (2009): 33–46.

¹⁴ Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 125.

¹⁵ Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Taylor & Francis, 2005).

¹⁶ For example, Jakob Evertsson, ‘History, Nation and School Inspections: The Introduction of Citizenship Education in Elementary Schools in Late Nineteenth-Century Sweden’, History of Education 44, no. 3 (February 2015): 259–73; Jenny Keating, ‘Approaches to Citizenship Teaching in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: The Experience of the London County Council’, History of Education 40, no. 6 (October 2009): 761–78; Pamela Munn and Margaret Arnott, ‘Citizenship in Scottish Schools: The Evolution of Education for Citizenship from the Late Twentieth Century to the Present’, History of Education 38, no. 3 (May 2009): 437–54.

¹⁷ François Audigier, ‘Teaching About Society, Passing on Values’, European Education 31, no. 1 (December 2014): 99.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Aristotle, as quoted in Heater, History of Education for Citizenship, 171.

²⁰ Dawn Oliver and Derek Heater, The Foundations of Citizenship (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994).

²¹ John Boli, New Citizens for a New Society: The Institutional Origins of Mass Schooling in Sweden (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 2014); Andy Green, Education, Globalisation and the Nation State (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997); Oliver and Heater, Foundations Citizenship; Asemin Nuhoglu Soysal and David Strang, ‘Construction of the First Mass Education Systems in Nineteenth-Century Europe’, Sociology of Education 62, no. 4 (1989): 277–88.

²² Heater, History of Education for Citizenship.

²³ Ibid., 64.

²⁴ Green, Education, Globalisation and Nation-State, 134.

²⁵ Allison James, Chris Jenks and Alan Prout, Theorising Childhood (New York: Polity Press, 1998), 4.

²⁶ Pauline Phemister, John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

²⁷ Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965).

²⁸ Denise Meredyth and Deborah Tyler, Child and Citizen: Genealogies of Schooling and Subjectivity (Queensland: Griffith University, 1993).

²⁹ Ministry of Education, Citizens Growing up at Home, in School and After (London: HM Stationery Office, 1949), 4.

³⁰ Biesta, Learning Democracy in School.

³¹ Thomas Marshal, Citizenship and Social Class and other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 25.

³² See Gert Biesta and Robert Lawy, ‘From Teaching Citizenship to Learning Democracy: Overcoming Individualism in Research, Policy and Practice’, Cambridge Journal of Education 36 (2006): 63–79.

³³ Biesta, Democracy in School and Society; Gert Biesta, Maria De Bie and Danny Wildemeersch, eds., Civic Learning, Democratic Citizenship and the Public Sphere (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014).

³⁴ Biesta, Democracy in School and Society; Maria Bouverne-De Bie, Rudi Roose, Filip Coussée and Lieve Bradt, ‘Learning Democracy in Social Work’, in Biesta et al., Civic Learning, Democratic Citizenship and the Public Sphere, 43–54; Sigalas and De Coster, Citizenship Education at School.

³⁵ Gert Biesta, Good Education in an Age of Measurement: Ethics, Politics, Democracy (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2010).

³⁶ Engaging with Mouffe’s theory describing politics as ‘the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions which seek to establish a certain order and organize human coexistence’. See Chantal Mouffe, ‘Post-Marxism: Democracy and Identity’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13, no. 3 (1995): 259–65.

³⁷ For example, Laurence Brockliss and Nicola Sheldon, eds., Mass Education and the Limits of State Building, c.1870–1930 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

³⁸ For example, Munn and Arnott, ‘Citizenship in Scottish Schools’; Audrey Osler and Hugh Starkey, ‘Citizenship Education and National Identities in France and England: Inclusive or Exclusive?’, Oxford Review of Education 27, no. 2 (2001): 287–305; Hamish Ross and Pamela Munn, ‘Representing Self‐in‐Society: Education for Citizenship and the Social‐Subjects Curriculum in Scotland’, Journal of Curriculum Studies 40, no. 2 (2008): 251–75; Judith Torney-Purta, John Schwille and Jo-Ann Amadeo, eds., Civic Education across Countries: Twenty-Four National Case Studies from the IEA Civic Education Project (1999), https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED431705; David Scott and Helen Lawson, eds., Citizenship Education and the Curriculum: International Perspectives On Curriculum Studies, 1530–5465 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2002).

³⁹ Avril Keating, Debora Hinderliter Ortloff and Stavroula Philippou, ‘Citizenship Education Curricula: The Changes and Challenges Presented by Global and European Integration’, Journal of Curriculum Studies 41, no. 2 (2009): 145–58; David Kerr, ‘Citizenship Education in the Curriculum: An International Review’, School Field 10, no. 3/4 (1999): 5–32; Judith Torney-Purta, Rainer Lehmann, Hans Oswald and Wolfram Shulz, Citizenship and Education in Twenty-Eight Countries (Amsterdam: IEA, 2001).

⁴⁰ Susannah Wright, ‘Citizenship, Moral Education and the English Elementary School’, in Brockliss and Sheldon, Mass Education and the Limits of State Building, 21.

⁴¹ Walter Parker, Teaching Democracy: Unity and Diversity in Public Life (New York: Teachers College Press, 2003), xv.

⁴² Green, Education and State Formation, 134.

⁴³ Of course, as Dale reasons, these European policy efforts remain ‘qualitatively distinct from Member States’ national education systems, in terms of their scope, mandate, capacity and governance’. Nonetheless they possibly produce different discourses on children’s and young people’s citizenship that are unexplored. See Roger Dale, ‘Studying Globalisation and Europeanisation in Education: Lisbon, the Open Method of Coordination and Beyond’, in Globalisation and Europeanisation in Education, ed. Roger Dale and Susan Robertson (Oxford: Symposium Books, 2009), 121–40.

⁴⁴ European Commission, Erasmus+. Strategic Partnerships, https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/opportunities/strategic-partnerships-field-education-training-and-youth_en (accessed August 21, 2020).

⁴⁵ For a detailed overview, see Table 1. The analysed documents will be referred to as indicated in Table 1.

Table 1. Overview of the policy documents analysed

⁴⁶ Youth and Education policy is primary the responsibility of nation-states. Articles 165 and 166 of the 1957 Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union are the basis for EU action in the domain of Youth but any harmonisation of Member States’ legislation on Youth is explicitly excluded. The 1957 Treaty of Rome recognised vocational training as a field of Community action. In 1992, Education was formally acknowledged as an area of EU competence through the Maastricht Treaty.

⁴⁷ The Council of Europe is an international organisation, currently including 46 member states, of which 27 are members of the European Union. Recommendations are not binding on member States. However, the Statute permits the Committee of Ministers to ask member governments ‘to inform it of the action taken by them’ in regard to recommendations: https://www.coe.int/en/web/portal/home.

⁴⁸ The European Union is a political and economic union of 27 member states.

⁴⁹ The European Community was an economic organisation that was incorporated in the European Union, as an economic entity by the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009, with the EU becoming the legal successor to the Community.

⁵⁰ The European Commission is the executive branch of the European Union.

⁵¹ A.

⁵² Ibid.

⁵³ B, 6.

⁵⁴ Council of Europe, ‘Ministerial Conferences’, https://www.coe.int/en/web/youth/ministerial-conferences (accessed July 28, 2021).

⁵⁵ C, 14.

⁵⁶ C, 16.

⁵⁷ D, 5.

⁵⁸ D, 4.

⁵⁹ C, 14.

⁶⁰ C, 19; D, 4, 6, 7.

⁶¹ C, 14.

⁶² D, 4.

⁶³ C, 16.

⁶⁴ Ibid.

⁶⁵ E.

⁶⁶ G, 1, 31.

⁶⁷ F, 16.

⁶⁸ Ibid, 17.

⁶⁹ See, e.g., I, 1–2.

⁷⁰ J, 16.

⁷¹ See, e.g., F, 17, 32; Council of Europe, I, 1; J, 13, 21, 53.

⁷² J, 11.

⁷³ See, e.g., E, 24; F, 11, 14; G 1, 5.

⁷⁴ See, e.g., F, 15; G, 1, 3.

⁷⁵ See, e.g., F, 7, 15, 16; G, 1, 6; H, 104, 4; J, 16, 31.

⁷⁶ F, 18.

⁷⁷ J.

⁷⁸ See, e.g., G, 1, 4, 7; H, 4; I, 1.

⁷⁹ H, 7.

⁸⁰ Ibid.

⁸¹ D, 5.

⁸² See, e.g., G, 1, 5.

⁸³ I, 1.

⁸⁴ H, 7.

⁸⁵ K, 2.

⁸⁶ See M, 3, 5; N, 8.

⁸⁷ See N, 15, 29; K, 2.

⁸⁸ See L, 1; K, 2; N, 7, 14, 15, 19.

⁸⁹ See K, 2; L, 1; N, 8.

⁹⁰ See K, 2; L, 1; M, 3; N, 8.

⁹¹ See K, 1; L, 2; M, 3.

⁹² L,1.

⁹³ N, 19.

⁹⁴ Ibid., 3, 14, 18, 28.

⁹⁵ L, 1.

⁹⁶ See, e.g., K, 1; L; N, 2, 48.

⁹⁷ K, 2, 20.

⁹⁸ N, 8.

⁹⁹ See, e.g., K, 3; L, 1; N, 6, 8.

¹⁰⁰ See, e.g., K, 2; N, 3.

¹⁰¹ N, 7–10.

¹⁰² N, 10.

¹⁰³ Ibid., 9.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid., 10.

¹⁰⁵ Ibid, 9–10.

¹⁰⁶ L, 3.

¹⁰⁷ N, 14.

¹⁰⁸ Ibid., 30.

¹⁰⁹ See, e.g., L, 3; N, 19, 30.

¹¹⁰ N, 21.

¹¹¹ See, e.g., L, 1; M, 4; N, 7.

¹¹² See, e.g., Q, 1; U, 7.

¹¹³ See P; T.

¹¹⁴ U.

¹¹⁵ T, 2.

¹¹⁶ S, 4.

¹¹⁷ Ibid.

¹¹⁸ O, 3.

¹¹⁹ See, e.g., O, 1; Q, 2; T, 4, 5.

¹²⁰ See, e.g., P, 1, 2; T, 4, 5; U, 6; V, 9.

¹²¹ W, 2.

¹²² See, e.g., W, 2, 4; X, 36; Z, 4, 10, 13, 18.

¹²³ W, 2.

¹²⁴ See, e.g., W, 3; Y, 10, 13.

¹²⁵ See, e.g., W, 2; Y, 36.

¹²⁶ Ibid.

¹²⁷ See, e.g., W, 3; European Union, Y, 10.

¹²⁸ See, e.g., W, 2; X, 4, 13, 18.

¹²⁹ Y, 4.

¹³⁰ F, 17.

¹³¹ X, 5.

¹³² Allisson James, ‘Talking of Children and Youth: Language, Socialisation and Culture’, in Youth Cultures: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Vered Amit and Helena Wulff (London: Routledge, 1995), 43–62.

¹³³ See, e.g., N, 10; V, 2; Y, 4.

¹³⁴ Audrey Osler and Hugh Starkey, ‘Learning for Cosmopolitan Citizenship: Theoretical Debates and Young People’s Experiences’, Educational Review 55, no. 4 (2003): 243–54.

¹³⁵ Marshal, Citizenship and Social Class.

¹³⁶ Gert Biesta, The Beautiful Risk of Education (London: Paradigm Publishers, 2013), 7.

¹³⁷ Mouffe, The Return of the Political; Mouffe, On the Political.

¹³⁸ Mouffe, On the Political.

¹³⁹ See, for example, Gary Marks, Liesbet Hooghe and Kermint Blank. ‘European Integration from the 1980s: State‐Centric v. Multi‐level Governance’, JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 34, no. 3 (1996): 341–78, and Erik Jones, Daniel Keleman and Sophie Meunier, ‘Failing Forward? The Euro Crisis and the Incomplete Nature of European Integration’, Comparative Political Studies 49, no. 7 (2016): 1010–34.

¹⁴⁰ Mouffe, The Return of the Political; Mouffe, On the Political.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eveline Meylemans

Eveline Meylemans is a PhD student at the Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy at Ghent University. She focuses on historical conceptions of citizenship in childhood studies. Her research interests include children in/and society, child-driven research methodologies and child policy. https://twitter.com/EvelineMeyl, https://www.linkedin.com/in/eveline-meylemans/.

Lieselot De Wilde

Lieselot De Wilde specialises in the history and philosophy of education. She gained a PhD in Educational Sciences, focusing on government interventions in the parent–child relationship during the twentieth century, in 2015. Her publications currently deal with childhood studies, foster care and the politics of apology. She has been a tenured professor since 2019 at the Department of Social Work & Social Pedagogy, at Ghent University, Belgium. https://www.linkedin.com/in/lieselot-de-wilde-39358a30/

Lieve Bradt

Lieve Bradt is Professor of Social Pedagogy at the Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy, Ghent University in Belgium. She is also the coordinator of the Youth Research Platform, an interdisciplinary and interuniversity policy-oriented research centre subsidised by the Flemish government. Her research focuses primarily on processes of inclusion and exclusion of young people in relation to education and leisure, and on the social-pedagogical mandate of social work practices. https://www.linkedin.com/in/lieve-bradt-4b212166/.