Exploring Citizenship and Enterprise in a Global Context

Abstract

This paper is in three parts. The first part looks in fairly broad terms at national and international trends that help to explain the current interest in citizenship and enterprise. Here reference is made to globalization, social capital theory and the knowledge economy. It is argued that these trends can be interpreted both positively and negatively. Similar ambivalences are evident in the second part of the analysis which examines the discourses of citizenship and enterprise in their applications to education. Both terms are shown to be subject to various interpretations and this malleability is an important part of their attraction to policy makers. Examples of different approaches to the promotion of economic literacy, as one aspect of enterprise, are discussed. In the third part, consideration is given to the overlapping concerns of groups variously involved in citizenship education, enterprise education, education for personal and social development, civics education and values education. It is suggested that the policy agendas of these various groups, while complicating the work of teachers in the short term, contain the possibility of opening up discursive territory that has been closed off in recent years. Exploring this territory leads to encounters with fundamental questions of meaning and purpose in education. This can serve as a starting point for a challenge to the narrow instrumental approaches to educational policy, which have dominated since the 1980s.