“Who’s Afraid of Political Education?”

The Challenge to Teach Civic Competence and Democratic Participation.

Edited by Henry Tam.

Policy Press, 2023

One of the key purposes of education is to help people acquire the knowledge and skills to participate and contribute to society as citizens, by developing their political literacy. Becoming politically literate means learning about power and how it’s shared and used. It requires an understanding of how change happens and an ability to see our social and economic system from different perspectives and to evaluate any policies being proposed. As with all literacies, this is a social process, best developed and evaluated in community with others, including within educational settings where we can develop a critical understanding of the world.

‘Who’s Afraid of Political Education?’ (Policy Press, 2023) is an excellent new book, edited by Henry Tam, which brings together a range of expert contributors to address the challenges of political education in our current context, to propose some alternative approaches and to outline what a pedagogy of democracy might look like.

The question in the title is a sign of our times. Why would we fear political education? Is it too risky to discuss politics in the classroom for fear of opening a Pandora’s box of disagreement and conflict which can’t then be closed? Are teachers equipped to tackle those dreaded ‘controversial issues’ and risk crossing the line between objectivity and taking sides? Will they be pilloried for ‘indoctrinating’ their students if they try to examine the full range of political ideas?

The theme of this collection is that a functioning democracy needs political education and that both are under threat. Henry Tam opens his introduction with the challenge: “Citizens, we have a problem” and his contention is that “democracy cannot function if citizens aren’t aware of how it works”. The familiar evidence of dysfunction includes low voter turnout, an unfair distribution of power, voter disenfranchisement and the increased acceptance of unevidenced claims and fake news.

Is this a new problem? Was there ever a golden age of democratic engagement when citizens were fully prepared for active participation in a liberal democracy? Certainly, there was a moment in England around the turn of the century when it seemed that Bernard Crick and New Labour might help us create an education fit for a functioning democracy.

Many of the authors in this collection refer to Bernard Crick’s contribution to putting political education on the agenda for schools and colleges via his influential reports:

“We aim at no less than a change in the political culture of this country …for people to think of themselves as active citizens, willing, able and equipped to have an influence in public life and with the critical capacities to weigh evidence before speaking and acting; to build on and to extend radically to young people the best in existing traditions of community involvement and public service, and to make them individually confident in finding new forms of involvement and action among themselves.”(Bernard Crick, ‘Citizenship for 16-19- year-olds in Education and Training’, 2000).

As a college principal at the time, I was very involved in developing and implementing Crick’s 16-19 recommendations. I was inspired by the vision and shared the optimism – and for a while, it did seem that the curriculum might be finding a new social purpose.

But that moment has passed, and the old consensus can’t be conjured up in today’s very different context. In England, and elsewhere, the very idea of education for democracy, political engagement and criticality is now highly contested, with calls to clampdown on teaching about anti-racism, anti-capitalism and environmental campaigning for example.

The crisis in political education is part of a crisis of democracy and a sign that our system is not delivering. Crisis has given us a politics of less rather than more, of mitigation rather than hope. It feels like at best, we can expect to stop a few bad things from happening rather than make any good things happen. The idea that politics could offer us better ways of organising society seems utopian, and the focus is on how to make emergent catastrophe less unbearable. This is the world we are educating for.

And yet, we still hold to the radical promise of democracy. If taken seriously this requires us all to help shape the way power is exercised in society, including in the economy of production, consumption and distribution on our finite planet. But a commitment to such democratic transformation threatens the current order and its beneficiaries. In the neoliberal ‘republic of capital’, there is no need for democratic choices which might challenge corporate power, gross inequality and market rule. When money speaks loudest and billionaires call the shots, politics is both a form of entertainment and the means to legitimise and shore up the system as it is.  

This is not to say that there is no political education, but as Diane Reay points out in her brilliant chapter ‘Political education in an unequal society’, citizenship education, where it exists, is often depoliticised, promoting individual responsibility and moral character-building.

Education is now generally framed in terms of building human capital. This makes politics into a personal matter, with individuals expected to take responsibility for coping with system crises, choosing their own opinions and expressing them by picking a side at election time. Focusing on our duty to participate in elections and the mechanics of voting domesticates political disagreement and narrows the scope for social action and social change. Politics is sanitized and controversy constrained within the boundaries of the status quo, with bland appeals to harmony such as: ‘we all really want the same thing’ or ‘there’s more that unites us than divides us’.

While there is much value in consensus-building, politics is about conflict and change, the clash of interests, inequality, injustice and power. We have a shared history of fighting for change through social movements, unions, parties, protests and struggles of every kind and this legacy needs a place in our political education curriculum.

In ‘Different approaches to teaching civic and national identity’, Edda Sant acknowledges the political legitimacy of identity and emotion while reminding us that knowledge is socially constructed. Political disagreement is healthy and emotions are an important part of political engagement. Sant characterises three ways of teaching identity: partisan, deliberative and agonistic, drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s notion of agonism as distinct from antagonism. Political conflict is essential and can never definitively be resolved, so political opponents need to be accepted as legitimate rather than as enemies to be destroyed. Sant adds that, although agonism is better than the alternatives, it cannot deal with all political dilemmas.

Diane Reay reminds us of John Dewey’s advocacy of ‘democracy as a way of life’ which educators need to cultivate, and Paulo Freire’s distinction between ‘the practice of compliance’ and ‘the practice of freedom’. Freire’s conception of autonomy is not individualistic but flows from collective decision-making. Education providers should themselves be communities where political literacy can be acquired through discussion and collective practice.

Barrett Smith and Sarah Stitzlein examine the notion of free speech and the teaching of ‘contentious’ issues in ‘Classroom conflict, ‘divisive concepts’ and educating for democracy’. They draw on climate change, the Israel-Palestine conflict and Black Lives Matter to reflect on how to present new and emerging ideas that are not yet ‘received wisdom’ and the politics of knowledge production. Citizens are best defined in terms of what they do rather than what they know, and both are co-constructed, often by engaging with dissent.

Many of the contributors identify the authoritarian variants of populism as part of the threat to political literacy. But in their chapter ‘Populism, classrooms and shared authority’, Kathleen M. Sellers and Kathleen Knight Abowitz make a good case for a populism which raises genuine social concerns and questions the legitimacy of elites. We can learn from those populist movements which are driven by a democratic egalitarianism expressed through a critically active ‘we’. Sellers and Knight Abowitz propose a role for education which is ‘co-active’ rather than coercive, where democratic authority is expressed through a critical problem-posing pedagogy which promotes active enquiry into authentic problems.

Kalbir Shukra contributes a chapter, ‘Active learning of marginalised young people’, informed by democratic youth work which aims to create positive experiences of voice and agency for young people based on their concerns and their locality, with the caveat that these may not automatically lead on to adult political engagement. For me, this chapter recalled the brilliant work of ‘Leaders Unlocked’ with college students acting as peer researchers in student commissions which investigate issues that affect them, such as knife crime, racial harassment or sexual violence, and develop proposals for action and campaigning.

In their piece ‘Citizenship education: building the future‘, Lee Jerome and Liz Moorse show how citizenship education can make a real difference, using five compelling case studies which involve community organising, counter extremism, equalities, social justice and sustainability work.

There are many other excellent chapters in this collection, making it a vital contribution to an important debate. The authors offer us the tools we need to build a new commitment to educating for political literacy.

Inevitably, there is more to be said and done about many of the issues raised, for example bringing in perspectives from Europe and the global South and from all phases of education, together with fuller accounts of the roles of ideology and technology. A more global perspective would expose more of the inequalities and injustices of power and consumption, war and environmental collapse which urgently require a new politics and therefore new a new political literacy. And a focus on the potential of new technologies to support new forms of participation would be fruitful.

There is also more to be said about political literacy work in further, adult and community education and the specific contribution of colleges to this. A sector which is universal, inclusive, and rooted in communities is well-placed to develop popular critical literacy and citizenship.

In his conclusion ‘Lessons for democratic health’, Henry Tam describes education providers as ‘epistemic institutions’, championing understanding and criticality and in this capacity they are under threat and need protecting. Henry Tam concludes by saying that rather than “keeping politics out of education”, we need to “keep educating about politics”.

In short, we need to embrace political education rather than fear it. To give in to fear would be to give up on democracy, the development of popular alternatives, the possibility of system change and criticality itself.

See also:

Education, social justice and survival in a time of crisis. (July 2022) 

A political education. (May 2022) 

Freire for today (March 2021)

The mighty pencil (November 2019)

Learning through conflict (November 2017)

Giving young people a stake in their future (July 2017)

The habits of democracy (May 2017)

Crick reloaded: citizenship education and British values. (Sep 2016)

Voting and the habit of democracy (May 2014)

Post-16 citizenship in tough times (May 2014)

Contributors to ‘Who’s Afraid of Political Education?’:

Titus Alexander, Sheffield University.

Tony Breslin, former Chief Executive of the Citizenship Foundation.

Bryony Hoskins, University of Roehampton.

Lee Jerome, Middlesex University.

Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, Tufts University.

David Kerr, University of Reading.

Dina Kiwan, University of Birmingham.

Kathleen Knight Abowitz, Miami University of Ohio.

Liz Moorse, Chief Executive, Association for Citizenship Teaching.

Murray Print, University of Sydney

Diane Reay, University of Cambridge.

Edda Sant, Manchester Metropolitan University.

Kathleen M. Sellers, Miami University of Ohio.

Kalbir Shukra, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Barrett Smith, University of Cincinnati.

Sarah M. Stitzlein, University of Cincinnati.

Henry Tam, Director of Question the Powerful.