Citizenship, Identity, Democracy: Engaging the Political in the Anthropology of Education

Abstract

Anchored in insights from my evolving research in Mexico and the United States, this article engages the literature on democratic citizenship education and proposes a potentially unifying research program for the anthropology of education. I urge anthropologists of education to address questions of political order and to bring democracy and citizenship toward the center of our concerns. Just as anthropology has much to contribute to the challenges of citizenship education around the world, a reinvigorated cross-cultural comparison can enrich our working theories of democracy and enliven our contributions to the democratization of education in the United States. [citizenship, identity, democracy, public anthropology, Mexico and the United States] I begin this article with the observation of an irony that will be central to it. Over the last 25 years, dominant discourses of economic competitiveness, academic basics, and accountability have driven national education policy in the United States and several other liberal democracies. While embracing the rhetoric of democracy, this trend has actually crowded out policies and practices oriented toward civic education for democratic citizenship. In the United States, the movement toward privatization has shrunk the public sphere and occluded practices of democratic education rooted in traditions as diverse as Jeffersonian republicanism, Horace Mann's common school, Horace Kallen's cultural pluralism, Deweyan participatory democracy, or Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, civic empowerment. To be sure, countermovements such as the Coalition of Essential Schools or the National School Reform Faculty at the national level, as well as local practices such as service learning and common school uniforms, have kept these democratic educational traditions alive. Still, they swim presently against a very strong current. Now more than ever, our schools overwhelmingly seek to create the economically competent or adaptable worker, not the democratic or intercultural citizen. The practical consequence of such trends has been the eclipse of subjects and teaching methods that impart the skills and dispositions of democratic citizenship, by the subjects and teaching methods suited for imparting standardized academic knowledge. Much of the latter is justified by a discourse in favor of so-called lifelong learning-arguably a euphemism to train flexible labor for capital. Over these same 25 years, meanwhile, there has been an explosion of interest in democratic citizenship and civic education around the world (Stevick and Levinson forthcoming). This appears to be one of the many paradoxes of globalization: As states everywhere generally shrink or background their political-economic functions,