Who’s Afraid of Political Education? The Challenge to Teach Civic Competence and Democratic Participation

This edited volume contributes to current debates around the fate of democracy in times of uncertainty. As with so many areas of life, education has been widely posited as the answer to promoting and defending the principles of democracy but – as with so many areas of life – schools and educators have their work cut out. As Henry Tam notes in the Introduction to the volume, 17% of eligible British citizens are not even registered to vote, and of those who are, around one third fail to exercise their right to vote in UK general elections (1).

A number of recent events have made an informed engagement with politics more important than ever. Some such events are concisely outlined by Tam in his introduction. It should be noted here that the book focuses largely on the UK and the US (with some notable exceptions in the second half of the volume), but this still allows for plenty of examples that give cause for alarm to those who believe democracy is under threat. In the US, Donald Trump continues to receive the support of millions of Americans despite having made ‘over 30,000 false claims in his public statements’ (3; referencing the work of Kessler et al., 2021). Meanwhile, in the UK the supposedly democratic vote that saw Britain pledge to leave the European Union in 2016 is argued to have been subject to ‘extensive false claims’ and ‘pervasive interference’, with voting ‘disconnected from the core issues’ (2).

Add to this the new requirements in the UK and the US for photo ID to be able to vote in elections (a move likely to adversely affect the young and the most disadvantaged members of society) and the picture looks bleak indeed. So what is to be done? Who’s Afraid of Political Education approaches this question through three separate sections. The first outlines some of the complexities of the issue and explains ‘why changes are needed’. Part two addresses ‘what could be done differently’. Finally, the third – and perhaps most crucial section – considers ‘how to make a lasting impact’ by offering a way forward via a number of different recommendations and suggestions based on research evidence.

The four chapters included in Part I – three focused on the UK; one on the US – place issues of citizenship and democracy within the wider social agendas and discourses of neoliberalism, freedom of speech, anti-‘woke’ and cancel cultures, and moves to tackle extremism. Indeed, it is a strength of the book that it argues for school-centred change to promote and teach democratic values whilst also recognising the enormous external pressures that schools are under.

This is ably demonstrated by Diane Reay in her chapter exploring the challenges of offering a meaningful political education to students in the English context of austerity and rising social inequalities, arguing that a wider political disconnect exists under ‘a populist and authoritarian Conservative government with little connection to traditional ideals of British democracy’ (19). Add to this a neoliberal agenda favouring individual success as measured through test results and school league tables, and the result is ‘a citizenship education where the focus is often on a depoliticised curriculum of personal “responsibilisation”’ (17). This often takes the form of charitable giving and volunteering as part of being a good citizen rather than an active participant in political issues. Such curricula favour those students from wealthier, more advantaged backgrounds, driving working class young people even further from engagement with meaningful political education.

The solution, as so often in this book, lies with teachers and school staff in collaboration with wider political reforms of the education system; in this case, a ‘three-pronged approach’ (29) of improved citizen education combined with ‘radical changes’ to imbue the education system with more cooperative values (drawing particularly on the ideas of Dewey (1916)), and grassroots efforts to campaign for a fairer society. The first prong of this approach chimes with Tony Breslin’s assessment in Chapter 5 of citizenship education’s delivery in schools in the UK in the face of competing discourses around extremism and British Values as well as subject and discipline hierarchies, concluding that citizenship has been marginalised in the education system as a result. He argues that it is possible to resurrect its original goal of teaching the political dimensions of democracy if it is delivered in both subject-specific and cross-curricular formats, instilling essential skills of cooperative engagement.

Part II of the volume under review continues to consider possible pedagogical and curricular changes, but drives the debate forward a little by considering how broader political disengagement might be tackled in a variety of ways. The unifying theme here is community; as Edda Sant points out in her chapter on national identity: ‘our identification with political communities operates at the emotional level … our need to belong to something larger’ (98). The four chapters in this section encompass the acquisition and exercise of shared authority for students-as-citizens through classroom activities that draw upon Freire’s (1970) ideas around problem-posing and Follett’s (1918) theories of organisational control; Sant’s aforementioned discussion of the complexities around national identity and the sharing of such an identity with fellow citizens; the use of community projects and youth projects in the UK to engage young people, so often marginalised from political decision-making, to develop a greater political understanding and voice in democratic processes; and the role of higher education institutions in the development and application of political thinking skills in practical community contexts.

Finally, Part III pulls together the central themes of the book by suggesting ways in which the education systems in the UK, USA and beyond can be reshaped to allow for greater democratic and political engagement for all its citizens. This section is very much research-driven, reporting on various initiatives and their impact on raising political understanding and democratic participation. Thus, in Chapter 10, David Kerr and Bryony Hoskins review research evidence from Europe and America and conclude that whilst teachers remain the primary way in which political knowledge is transmitted to students, learning opportunities should be more fairly distributed to ensure none of the marginalised young people discussed earlier in the book continue to miss out on democratic participation. The practical dimensions of this – open classroom climates, school activities such as councils and elections, contextualised debates – are reiterated in Chapter 11, which echoes the message that as well as imparting knowledge, the role of the teacher is to foster emotional engagement and political literacy through their practice. Murray Print draws upon his own extensive body of work in Chapter 12 to argue that both a new formal school curriculum and reform of the informal school curriculum is needed if the decline of civic learning is to be reversed, and the book draws to a close with a reiteration of the need to connect ‘content, pedagogy and applied practice’ (12) as one of five ‘pathways’ in Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg’s ‘roadmap’ to civic learning.

Much of what is suggested in this book will take time to develop and implement, as well as political cooperation from those in positions of authority; schools cannot do it alone. It is also apparent that many of the ideas presented here draw on work that is over 50 (and sometimes 100) years old. Nevertheless, this is a timely volume that makes an important contribution to debates around democracy in a wide-ranging, evidence-informed and non-reductive manner.