Citizenship And Political Education Today

Citizenship and Political Education Today brings together a collection of essays from around the world; including discussion of politics and education in Australia, The United States of America, New Zealand, Norway, England, France, Germany and the wider European Union. The contributors discuss vital and interesting issues involved in the engagement of citizens in politics and political institutions and the role of education in encouraging education for citizenship. The book is an important contribution to ongoing debates on citizenship.

This book analyzes the issues surrounding civilian national service policy from a fresh and original perspective. The author connects national service programs to the political theories of civic republicanism and communitarianism, assesses the practical consequences of these theories, and examines past youth service programs such as the CCC and Peace Corps to see if they are appropriate models or ideals for a national program. Gorham engages the issue of compulsory versus voluntary service and questions whether service tasks can instill a sense of "citizenship" in young people, as defenders of the program claim. Using the work of Michel Foucault, Charles Taylor, Carole Pateman, and others, he suggests that national service, as presently planned, will not create the "citizen" so much as a post-industrial and gendered subject. In the concluding chapters, he presents an argument for a democratic national service and offers an alternative program for policymakers to consider.

Volume VI is concerned with political education and citizenship. Papers from several countries lend an international perspective to currently significant concerns and developments, including democracy, and democratic education, human rights, national identity and education for citizenship.

This volume examines both concepts and realities of citizenship education from various international and research perspectives. It is divided into two main sections. The first group of chapters are all by researchers closely associated with the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) study into citizenship education and focus on the findings reported in the study as well as on the processes of the study itself and the indications for the future. The second group of chapters report on research projects and complement the insights of the first group of chapters. Whereas Part One involves broadly quantitative empirical data, Part Two features chapters with a more qualitative approach. The chapters have a broad geographical range, including the USA, the United Kingdom, Australia, Hong Kong, the Czech Republic and Germany. They also report on a variety of different data sets, use different research approaches, and include findings from the large-scale IEA study as well as a personal account of a research network and two qualitative studies.

Drawing on contemporary global events, this book highlights how global citizenship education can be used to critically educate about the complexity and repressive nature of global events and our collective role in creating a just world.

This volume provides new perspectives into the challenges of citizenship education in the age of globalization and in the context of multicultural and conflict-ridden societies. It calls on us to rethink the accepted liberal and national discourses that have long dominated the conceptualization and practice of citizenship and citizenship education in light of social conflict, globalization, terrorism, and the spread of an extreme form of capitalism. The contributors of the volume identify the main challenges to the role of citizenship education in the context of globalization, conflicts and the changes to the institution of citizenship they entail and critically examine the ways in which schools and education systems currently address – and may be able to improve – the role of citizenship education in conflict-ridden and multicultural contexts.

Why does it appear that many young people are disengaging from democracy and political participation? For many governments, politicians, academics, social commentators and researchers this is a serious and challenging problem. Consequently widespread interest exists on how to engage young people in politics and democracy.

Political, economic, technological and cultural changes have taken place all over the globe, changes which have transformed the meanings of citizenship and citizenship education. This volume represents an effort to analyze the implications of these changes.