Perhaps the aim of Citizenship education should be give students the ability to think whatever suits them about absolutely anything as long as they are not setting out to deliberately destroy the freedoms and human rights of others?
Surely by not voting in elections and being detached from the mainstream political process young people are simply setting up their own alternative forum for political action. The problem for us as educators is to respond to this new paradox - clearly the tradiational politicians cannot respond to it. They cannot respond to it since it threatens their comfortable and priviliged position.
Citizenship education holds the possibility of being a completely new model of 21st century education, that of the young person led and focussed course. Let your students choose their own courses. If they want to study the political campaigns of the anti-globalisation movement, then let them do that. If they want to engage the local council in a debate over the refusal of outdated models of western democracy to engage with the grass roots, then facilitate that. The whole concept of Citizenship education is surely just a sop from the priviliged classes who control the western "democratic" system to give a pretence of valuing political participation.
Citizenship teachers should be helping their students to go on anti-war protests or to organise petitions against the tyranny of Westminster politics if that is what the students want to do. Teachers cannot do Citizenship without being political. Maybe putting it on the curriculum will be the long term undoing of the present political system.
If you will not tackle these issues jbooth then maybe you are not fully appreciating the reality of the situation that now exists in the world.
I look forward to posting in my subject areas where issues involving Politics, Sociology and History come up. Thank you for this great new pan European forum.
