Citizenship Education

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate salient approaches to citizenship and civic-normative education in liberal democratic life. The chapter argues that core technocratic assumptions about clarity, linearity, and predictability feeding into civic-educational deployment and change warrant critical attention. The chapter aims to shed new light on states' instinct to regard themselves and their value sets as seamless conceptual wholes. A range of ramifications of this typical approach are interrogated, in principle as well as in relation to Swedish civic-educational matrices. The chapter refines a heuristic model for unpacking citizenship and civic-normative education thinking in liberal democracy originally presented in an earlier work by the author. It is concluded that even as the enormous policy efforts that go into organizing and revamping public civic-normative education in response to new societal challenges have little chance of meeting governments' intentions; they may still be important since they are exerted in highly visible public spaces and domains.