Citizenship values and social cohesion mean different things to different people. These concepts could be viewed as a soft form of integration with the emphasis on conforming to certain ideals, argues Alex Moore, as he questions whether social cohesion is the answer to problems that may not even exist.

Concepts like ‘citizenship’ and ‘social cohesion’ clearly mean different things to different people. Quite often, I think, they represent a soft form of integrationism, the emphasis strongly on conforming to certain ‘officially validated’ ideals. Perhaps we need to remember that social cohesion is a construct, something that effectively didn’t ‘exist’ in the past, which sometimes makes me wonder whether it is itself a constructed answer to constructed or possibly imagined or invented problems – problems which tend, I think, to be deliberately located within minority ethnic and immigrant groups rather than within, for example, government policies or ongoing inequalities and prejudices. When I think back to the era when multiculturalism was first talked about in schools I ask myself was the country more racist and less pluralistic than it is now. I’m not sure. Perhaps it is, though we still have a very monocultural national curriculum and a citizenship education programme that seems more interested in getting young people to conform to some kind of ‘national identity’ than celebrating difference.

Dr Dina Kiwan, who lectures on Citizenship Education at Birkbeck College and is a former PhD student of mine, talks very lucidly about the debates that engulf citizenship and this concept of identity. Her book Education for Inclusive Citizenship, which deservedly won a prize recently, explores some of the issues around identity and national identity, including politicians’ and policymakers’ attempts to recognise difference at the same time as identifying cross-cultural ‘core values’. Dina suggests that the idea of shared values or ‘community’ might sound good but often simply promotes otherness. Like Lord Parekh and others, Dina argues for a politics of inclusion linked to inclusive citizenship – i.e. a citizenship that everyone can relate to and believe in regardless of their social, religious or ethnic background. Obviously, this means that all citizens, including young citizens, must have a sense of fair play in the system. They also need to have a belief that their actions can change things for the better – so I would argue that education for citizenship needs to be encouraging young people to recognise the strengths and weaknesses in our democratic system and to have the desire, the belief and the skills to work together to make what we have better, to help our democracy to evolve so to speak rather than to simply reproduce what we already have. This is what some people call ‘activist’ citizenship’, as opposed to just ‘active citizenship’ which is more about doing voluntary community work and going out to vote at elections. You can be an active citizen without actually working for fundamental change – like the example that’s sometimes given of doing something by working with people in old people’s homes without trying to change a system that often makes life very hard for older people.

Dina’s work prompts me to ask: How can we have a system of common values when I am not sure we know or can all agree even what that means? It’s fine to say we should all have values that are shared – but what about those values that we very definitely do not all share? And what do children make of all this when they experience on a daily basis differences of values between school and home or school and community or school and friends, or even within the values systems of schools themselves? For example, there seems to me to be a fundamental problem in teaching children the importance of democratic participation, when they spend most of their lives on the wrong end of autocracy – including at school, where the vast majority have very little or no say in what goes on. It seems to me that if we want young people to become more interested in democracy, more active or more activist as citizens, we might start by making classrooms more democratic - though again we need to think very carefully about what that might (or might not) mean. One of the great ironies is that on a recent academic visit to China, including school visits, it became very apparent to me that the Chinese, who are constantly being berated in the West for not being democratic, were seeking to make their schools and classrooms far more democratic than in the past, while here we seem bent on making them less and less democratic, foisting more and more impositions and restrictions – we could say more regulation – on young people and systematically marginalising their voices. I must say I find the idea of democratic citizenship and regulation uncomfortable, sometimes contradictory: government here repeatedly argues against regulating many aspects of the lives and conduct of people in the wider world, for example regulating their financial dealings or the market place, and yet it’s a different proposition when it comes to education – though even there there’s a contradiction: you know, let’s have more ‘free schools’, less state interference within schools, at the same time as wanting everyone in state schools to wear a uniform, follow a highly prescriptive curriculum, now, it seems, even learning Latin for some strange reason.

Going back to an earlier point we were discussing, I was recently reading Radical Future: Politics for the Next Generation, edited by Ben Little and published by Soundings and Compass Youth. It’s a collection of short articles mostly by young people, mostly contradicting a commonly held view that young people are apathetic about what’s going on in the country and that that’s why they don’t turn out to vote at elections and that citizenship education can get them politically aware and more likely to want to take part. Basically, what the articles are saying is that young people are not apathetic; they just feel marginalised and let down. They’ve lost faith in mainstream politics, the political and social systems that they believe are no longer working and particularly not working in their interests or for their future. They are political, but they’re also very cynical about recycled neo-liberalism. They choose to engage in political activity, but not always to engage so much in formal political systems.

It’s interesting – and important – to take that on board, because I do believe that much of the citizenship agenda arises out of moral panic - people wringing their hands asking why young people are the way they are, and why young people are not voting or engaging with their community. The reality is that young people have their own networks, whether that be in tangible terms or virtual worlds such as online social forums, and often their own sense of community that is quite different from the idea of community espoused in Cameron’s ‘Big Society’, say, which seems to hark back to a golden and probably non-existent past. Let’s face it, we have witnessed traditional communities being systematically destroyed over the last fifty years, partly through having a weakly fettered market, partly through the enduring ethos of selfishness espoused by Thatcher – so it seems a bit rich, not to say hypocritical, to be telling people, especially young people, now that they should be doing more for their communities.

This idea of a ‘return to the community’ brings us back to something else we’ve been discussing – the idea of so-called free schools, away from the demonic clutches of the ‘nanny state’, run by these existent or non-existent communities or groups of individuals – a sort of educational entrepreneurialism. This idea doesn’t come as any surprise, as there has always been a wing of the Conservative party – perhaps even two wings! – that has not liked the idea of state schools, or of state involvement in education at all. Keith Joseph was the secretary of state for education from 1981 and one of the architects of Thatcherism. He actually went on record to say that he wished the state had never become involved in education. Within broad neo-liberal discourse and to the right of that, the idea of public sector state education is complete anathema. To be frank I suspect they would prefer the state to be completely privatised so that public sector spending need never be an issue again.

One of the ways of ‘selling’ this new idea (of ‘free schools’), of course, is to demonise the existing state system – to create this myth of failing schools and inadequate teachers: a myth that governments and the electorate continue to buy into even when the government’s own statistics indicate a clear and sustained improvement in state education. Standardised tests and examinations – what Foucault called the ultimate ‘technology of power’ - play an important part here, and they are, so to speak, multifunctional. As Bauman argues, they standardise or ‘normalise’ people in a sense - force students and teachers to conform to what is really a very narrow mode of learning and knowledge acquisition and use and also of what it is to be what we used to jokingly call ‘a proper living person’, but they can also be used to suggest an ‘improvement’ when it’s convenient to government, or a lack of improvement when that’s convenient (by arguing that tests, exams, or whatever, have simply got too easy, for example and that perceived improvement is really a mask for continually falling ‘standards’). They have this function of a peg on which to drape contradictory arguments – and unfortunately to hang the nation’s young people on too.  

An interesting point about SATs, by the way, is that they were originally introduced in Victorian times, near the beginning of state education, but the then Chief Schools Inspector, Matthew Arnold, condemned their impact saying they simply produced rote learning and unimaginative teaching. A shame some of our leading politicians don’t bother to mug up on their history! SATs are on the way out now, but only after countless thousands of young people have suffered because of them and experienced the impoverished education they have created. This time around, of course, it was from the direction of America that SATs re-arrived – reaching us just when the Americans were beginning to experience their shortcomings. Free schools are the same. They have them in the States, many of them are failing, but they are still being touted here as a good idea. My own view is that they offer a very depressing scenario for anyone who believes in inclusive education, and for anyone who holds a view of social cohesion that is fundamentally about young people living and working together in an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding.

Alex Moore is an Emeritus Professor in the faculty of children and learning at the Institute of Education. He spent eighteen years as a secondary school teacher and ten years in initial teacher education. His main areas of interest include the learning and experiences of beginning teachers; teachers' work; and young people's experiences of schooling. For the last eight years, he has developed more specific interests in curriculum studies - in particular, the nature and effects of cultural bias in school curricula - and education for citizenship. Methodologically, he has become increasingly interested in using psychosocial approaches to the analysis of research data. His publications include 'The Good Teacher': Dominant Discourses in Teaching and Teacher Education. London: RoutledgeFalmer (2004) and Teaching and Learning: Pedagogy, Curriculum and Culture. London: RoutledgeFalmer (2000).