Educating Future Citizens in Europe and Asia

Abstract

In 2002, the United Kingdom introduced citizenship into the curriculum as an independent subject. Other European countries, notably Spain, are undertaking reforms along the same lines. The Council of Europe declared 2005 as the European Year of Citizenship through Education and, since 1997, has been developing several programs and projects to promote the teaching of democratic citizenship. Elsewhere, in Asia China took a further step to consolidate the teaching of citizenship by replacing politics instruction with character training and social studies in elementary and junior secondary schools in 2001, and the new syllabus has been implemented since 2003. This move marked an end to almost four decades of a core curricular area that had overtly aimed at providing training for socialism. In a series of educational reforms introduced in recent years in Japan, the debates on the national curriculum have carried out a most scrupulous examination, especially on the teaching of citizenship and history. Indeed, the teaching of some form of citizenship has been gaining ground in education throughout the world (Benavot and Amadio 2004; chapter by Fiala). There are several reasons why citizenship has gained broader public attention, and why this has subsequently been reflected in the field of education. With the collapse of the polarized world system, the hegemony of liberal human rights ideologies and democratic principles has become prevalent. The increasing dominance of liberal market ideologies undermines the existing definitions of the welfare (or even the socialist) state and the citizen/state relationship. There has been increasing awareness of the world as a connected place engendering new (perceived and real) interdependencies, together with the need for individual competencies to face the challenges of such a connected world. Consequently, a renewed model of citizenship is envisioned. There have also been recent developments in some world regions that have hastened the need to rethink the education of young citizens. For example, in Europe, the entry of Eastern European countries into the world of ‘modern, democratic nation-states’ and declining electoral participation in Western European countries are posing challenges to the practice of democratic citizenship. Moreover, the recognition of diverse