4. Education for citizenship: Wales and the global dimension

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1 4. Education for citizenship: Wales and the global dimension David Sullivan Abstract The Welsh curriculum recognises the importance both of teaching about the values and traditions of Wales and the need for children and young people in Wales to understand their role as global citizens. Yet these ideals of commitment to both local and global citizenship are frequently seen to be in conflict, both in contemporary debates and in earlier theories of citizenship. This paper outlines some of the underlying theories that inform these debates and discusses their implications for the Welsh approach to citizenship education. 1. National and international dimensions of citizenship education Is it possible to be a good and loyal citizen of one nation, or state, and also be a citizen of the world? Will such a person find that loyalties are so divided that they cannot fully commit to either, or will one loyalty dominate to the exclusion of the other? How should the curriculum be structured to reflect these concerns, and should it place more importance on one form of citizenship than the other? These are questions that inevitably arise when a country, like Wales, takes seriously its responsibility both to educate its children to appreciate the values and traditions of their own society and to appreciate their global roles and responsibilities. This paper argues that locating discussion about citizenship and education in Wales in a broader historical and global context helps to show that issues that might appear to be particular to Wales are part of a much wider problem about citizenship and education and about the local and the global. Situating a discussion of citizenship education in Wales within a much wider context reflects the wide-ranging character of the ideas and practices that have influenced Welsh curriculum designers. As Sheila Bennell and David Norcliffe point out in their paper, although ESDGC in Wales has a particularly Welsh character, it has been influenced by a very

2 78 David Sullivan wide range of other types of education. The length of the list they provide twelve distinct items is instructive because it emphasises the range and venerability of the underlying ideas. Moreover, as they also argue, not only do the pedagogies associated with these types of education belong to a long tradition in twentieth-century thought, they are also global in origin. So while not denying the particular contribution that Wales has made to citizenship education through the development of ESDGC, it is also important to recognise that this is one facet of a much broader movement of ideas and practice. Indeed, not only is it part of a much wider, twentieth-century and twenty-first-century global phenomenon, there is also, as we discuss later, a very long history behind the development of citizenship education. A proper appreciation of this broader historical and global context helps us to recognise a number of tensions within Welsh understanding of citizenship and citizenship education, and in particular the tension between the requirements of national citizenship and the belief in the importance of cultivating an awareness of responsibility as global citizens. As the previous papers have all indicated, internationalism is one of the key motifs of the Curriculum Cymreig. Welsh curriculum developers have had the aim of encouraging pupils to grow up aware of themselves as Welsh people who are also global citizens, who should be tolerant of other people and other cultures and also take responsibility for the physical environment, both local and global, in which they live. These constructive and outward-looking ideals reflect deep-seated traditional Welsh values, such as those of Welsh Liberalism and Nonconformity. They can be seen as expressed in many ways. Physically, in such monuments to internationalism as the Temple of Peace in Cardiff, politically in the abiding influence of the work of politicians such as the Temple s creator, David Davies of Llandinam with his commitment to the internationalist ideals of the League of Nations 1 (Morgan, 1 The spirit of David Davies commitment to international justice continues to be fostered by the David Davies Memorial Institute, now at the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University.

3 Education for citizenship: Wales and the global dimension ), and educationally in the Urdd s annual message of goodwill from the children of Wales to the children of the world. 2 But there is another side to the influence of internationalism on the curriculum. This internationalism is itself a reflection of the fact that Welsh education is inevitably influenced by the wider British, European and global context. Robert Phillips, Heather Piper and Dean Garratt have argued (2003: ) that the context in which citizenship education has developed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been one of neo-liberalism, globalisation and post-modernism. These powerful economic, political and cultural forces have radically challenged the way in which communities at all levels have shaped and even had control over their educational policies. Wales has been no exception, and important as the process of devolution has been in facilitating a significant measure of divergence within the United Kingdom, the influence of the neo-liberal agenda and economic globalisation, in particular, has been profound for all four home nations. So too has membership of the European Union. Some commentators have considered education to be a cause of tension between the European Union and a number of its member states. This is in part because one important way in which nations use their educational policies to help build a sense of national identity is through the prioritising of the national language, or languages. Michael Byram has argued that this raises difficulties in a European context because it is in tension with the need to communicate at a European level in a range of languages for economic, political, social and cultural purposes (Byram, 2008: 197). This is particularly problematic for minority languages, such as Welsh. Furthermore, he continues, it is tension without any hope of creating a sense of European identity in parallel with the introduction of European citizenship. accessed 25 January accessed 25 January 2011.

4 80 David Sullivan As Byram says, the issue of language is only one part of a wider issue about national identity and citizenship. In England there has been a great deal of controversy over the extent to which education should reflect a particular set of English values. This is partly because, by comparison with the situation in Wales and Scotland, there is considerable public disagreement in England over what it means to be English. The British government s deliberations, which eventually led to the Crick Report, were partly driven by a desire to find a way of establishing core English (or in the view of some, British) values, though Crick himself was always more sanguine about this aspect of the project, pointing out on occasions that a truly active citizenry could not be counted upon to act or think as the government wished (Crick, 2002: ). 2. Communitarianism and citizenship education So, we might ask, where do we start in the effort to trace the connection between identity, community and citizenship? European ideas about citizenship are usually seen as having their origins in Greek thought and practice. Plato discusses aspects of citizenship in the Republic, partly in response to the constant debates about the duties and roles of citizens in Athens and other Greek city states. The Republic has also had a profound influence on the way Europeans have seen education and its relationship to citizenship not least the way in which Plato s ideas were appropriated by the British education system at the height of Empire in the nineteenth century (Burnyeat, 1998). Aristotle s account in the Nichomachean Ethics and especially the Politics also addresses the political and moral aspects of citizenship in the Greece of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, has been as least as influential as Plato s writings on the subject, and is currently enjoying a significant revival of interest (Aristotle, 1995: Book III; Collins, 2006). One of the most important features of Greek citizenship is that it was exclusive. A foreign settler in Athens, even if he (women could not be citizens) was from another Greek city state, could not become an Athenian citizen. Aristotle, who was born in Stagira, was always considered by many Athenians to be an outsider in Athens, even though he spent

5 Education for citizenship: Wales and the global dimension 81 many years there as both student and teacher (Hughes, 2001:2). Following on from this, many writers, such as MacIntyre (2007), Sandel (1982, 2010) and Walzer (1983, 1994), have argued that citizenship is inextricably linked to particular communities, a consideration which has particular resonance in Wales, with its historically rich cultural traditions and its more recent devolved political power. This approach is at the heart of communitarianism, a theory of considerable importance in contemporary political and moral thought and also in education. 3 For communitarians, education ought to be grounded in the specific moral values of the community. It is primarily through being a member of a specific community, and being educated in the values shared by its members, that the ideal of social responsibility can be properly understood. So communitarians emphasise the need to preserve the culture of the community, the importance of helping people to understand and accept the moral values of their community and the need for the state to protect the values of the community where they might be under threat. For such thinkers, an emphasis in the Welsh curriculum on Welsh history, culture and language would be both right and necessary. Communitarians do not reject all ideas of obligations to those beyond the community, but, to use Michael Walzer s terminology, they argue that people have a thick set of moral and social obligations to members of their own community and only a thin set of obligations to those beyond their borders (Walzer, 1994). For Walzer, the idea of global citizenship is meaningless (Walzer, 2002; Linklater, 2007:110), and so global citizenship should have no place on the curriculum. There is also a close link between communitarianism and nationalism. David Miller (2000) is an influential communitarian thinker who traces a close connection between citizenship and nationalism, and who claims that national identity offers one way of filling out the otherwise rather 3 For a helpful discussion of the implications of Communitarian thought for education and some of the potential dangers see Callan and White (2003).

6 82 David Sullivan abstract idea of citizenship. The relationship between community, citizenship and nationality came to be seen as particularly problematic in Western thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It can be seen very clearly in Rousseau for whom the General Will of a specific community will be distinct and separate from the General Wills of other communities, and for whom allegiance and, where necessary, subservience to the General Will is a requirement of membership of the community and the citizenship which it brings (Rousseau, 1997; Wokler, 1995: chapter 4). In the intense debate over citizenship in Europe and North America in the eighteenth century it was often assumed that small communities were essential for citizenship to flourish, and James Madison s argument against this in The Federalist Papers was of great importance both for the new American Republic and for the subsequent acceptance that citizenship could be an important force in large political communities (Madison, Hamilton and Jay, 1987; Honohan, 2002: chapter III). In the early nineteenth century, communitarians such as Hegel argued for the importance of citizenship in much larger societies (Hegel, 1991: especially Section 3) and later nationalist thinkers and activists, even when they were opposed to Hegel on other issues, tended to agree with him in seeing both the nation and the citizenship it entailed in terms of societies on a much greater scale. Mazzini s Europe of nation states consigned many smaller national groupings to membership of larger communities the Irish to the greater British community for example because size was an important element in the viability of those communities (Mack Smith, 1996: 154 6). 3. Multi-layered identities This brings us back to the important question about the place of citizenship education in the Welsh curriculum. The Curriculum Cymreig has significant things to say about the importance of promoting an international awareness, and of openness to ideas and traditions beyond Wales. But it also places understandable emphasis on Welsh values and traditions, and is concerned to foster a sense of Welsh

7 Education for citizenship: Wales and the global dimension 83 identity. How far are these two aims compatible and to what extent do they conflict? It is not unusual to find people assuming that there is something essential about Welsh identity, and thus about the citizenship based upon it. But such assumptions, which are, of course, made by members of many other nations as well, significantly underestimate the importance of a multiplicity of identities in our lives. As Jacquie Turnbull has pointed out, in the specific context of Welsh education whatever citizenship is for the individual, it is a multi-layered concept that acknowledges local, community, national, international and global identities (Turnbull, 2003: 79). This concept of multiple identities is a staple feature of much contemporary discussion. Amartya Sen, for example, argues strongly for the idea of multiple identities (Sen, 2006). It is misleading, he claims, to define a person or a community in terms of one particular identity. This makes him highly critical of communitarianism for defining a person s identity exclusively, or mainly, in terms of the community of which he or she is a part: Many communitarian thinkers tend to argue that a dominant cultural identity is only a matter of self-realization, not of choice. It is, however, hard to believe that a person really has no choice in deciding what relative importance to attach to the various groups to which he or she belongs, and that she must just discover her identities, as if it were a purely natural phenomenon (like determining whether it is day or night)... The existence of choice does not, of course, indicate that there are no constraints restricting choice. Indeed, choices are always made within the limits of what are seen as feasible. [But there is nothing remarkable about this]... Indeed, nothing can be more elementary and universal than the fact that choices of all kinds in every area are always made within particular limits (Sen, 2006: 5). This, Sen argues, is a feature of modernity and in many ways the tension between a commitment to traditional values and a belief in the right of the individual to choose for him or herself is at the heart of a central conflict that runs through modernity. This does not mean that the issue is a simple one

8 84 David Sullivan between modern and traditional. The very notion of what counts as traditional of which values can be properly identified as traditional and which are more recent constructs on the basis of what it is imagined the tradition was is problematic. This has clear implications for citizenship education in Wales. There is a tension between national and global identities but there are also fissures within Welsh identity. One of the most pronounced of these tensions is between Welsh speakers and monoglot English speakers. The Welsh language is primarily a local language (though spoken throughout a widespread diaspora) and one which is profoundly important in the preservation and nurturing of cultural traditions and values. The English which is spoken in Wales and the rest of the United Kingdom is a global language, permeated and in many ways restructured by global values and perspectives. 4. Cosmopolitanism There is, though, another tradition of citizenship in European culture, in contrast to communitarianism, which stresses the possibility of a citizenship that transcends local identities and which, indeed, recognises at least a duality of identities, of the universal and the local. This is cosmopolitanism, a theory which argues that it is our common humanity which is most important in creating our moral and political obligations rather than the particular place in which we happen to have been born and educated. It has an avowedly universalistic ethic, which stresses that, because human beings belong to the same species, we should treat everyone with equal respect and dignity, irrespective of national or ethnic background. Because its adherents see it as a practical theory, they argue that these moral obligations have certain social and political implications, amongst which is the consideration of what kind of educational provision is best suited to help prepare the next generation of citizens. This cosmopolitan approach to citizenship, which has its origins in ancient Stoicism, has been undergoing a revival in recent years, partly in terms of wider political theory but also with regard to education and global citizenship.

9 Education for citizenship: Wales and the global dimension 85 Nigel Dower, an influential contemporary writer on cosmopolitanism, argues that the modern cosmopolitan takes from Stoicism a recognition of the importance of local community, and one s obligations to it, but that this has to be understood in the context of belonging to a greater world community made up of all humanity: What is crucial is the contrast between the accidental nature of one s membership of a political community and one s essential nature as a rational human being (Dower 2003: 23). This might suggest the subservience of the local community to a larger political authority but Dower argues that this idea of a world community, powerful as it is, should be understood metaphorically rather than literally. He refers to a much quoted passage from Martha Nussbaum, a leading contemporary cosmopolitan philosopher, who herself begins by quoting from the Roman Stoic, Seneca: Let us take hold of the fact that there are two communities the one which is truly great and common, embracing both gods and men, in which we look neither to this corner nor to that, but measure the boundaries of our state by the sun; the other, the one to which we have been assigned by our birth. Nussbaum comments: This clearly did not mean that the Stoics were proposing the abolition of local and national forms of political organisation and the creation of a world state. Their point was even more radical: that we give our first allegiance to no mere form of government, no temporal power, but to the moral community made up by the humanity of all human beings (Nussbaum, quoted in Dower, 2003: 23). The idea of world citizenship as a metaphor has some attraction, but there are also some significant difficulties, which will have particular resonance in Wales, and for Welsh education. Many cosmopolitans share this emphasis on world community as metaphor, and particularly with regard to education (Heater, 2002: 39 40). But, as Chris Brown has pointed out (Brown, 2001:8 9), there is a danger when writing about these topics in allowing ourselves to be carried away with metaphors. Overfamiliarity with metaphors sometimes

10 86 David Sullivan leads us to treating them as theories about reality. Moreover, some very important contemporary cosmopolitans argue that the idea of global citizenship is more than merely metaphorical. David Held s highly influential writings on cosmopolitan democracy, for instance, emphasise the need to reform and strengthen international institutions such as the United Nations with a view to making them more effective tools of global governance (Held, 2004, 2006). Held argues strongly for the importance of democratic controls on these empowered international institutions, and he does not advocate a fully fledged world state, but he certainly is not thinking in metaphorical terms. Discussion of global citizenship in terms of a world community certainly has to be treated with care. In Wales that awareness will be all the more acute because of a widespread perception of the negative effect of an Englishspeaking British Empire on Welsh education in the nineteenth century. It is not surprising against this historical background that the Curriculum Cymreig gives greater emphasis to the local community than to the international. The contrast of its approach to citizenship education with that of the European Union is instructive, beginning from the perspective of the continental (not wholly dissimilar geographically from the Roman Empire at the time of Seneca) and places the national and the regional within that larger context. Nor is it at all obvious that the idea of world or even European citizenship has the power to exert the same influence over people as does the local. The European Union s concept of citizenship is intimately linked to the ideal of establishing and consolidating a peaceful, democratic Europe where nationalist and regional conflicts have been eradicated. In the current phase of European development, however, this ideal has to compete with strong resurgent senses of national and regional identity. This is particularly apparent as increasing mobility in Europe has brought people into contact with different concepts of citizenship and their underlying identities. Such mobility has not been without its difficulties in recent years in Wales. As with many previous waves of migration, there has been considerable resistance on the part

11 Education for citizenship: Wales and the global dimension 87 of some Welsh people to the influx of newcomers from other parts of Europe. In this context it is useful to refer again to Sen and to his discussion of what he describes as the disparate pulls on our sense of identity, such as history, culture, language, politics, profession, family and comradeship. These, he argues, have to be adequately recognized, and... cannot all be drowned in a single-minded celebration only of community. He then draws from this a significant point about the nature and limits of choice over one s identity: The point at issue is not whether any identity whatever can be chosen (that would be an absurd claim), but whether we do indeed have choices over alternative identities or combinations of identities, and perhaps more importantly, substantial freedom regarding what priority to give to the various identities we may simultaneously have (Sen, 2006: 38). 5. Education and transformation This brings us back to questions about education and its broader role, both in the lives of individuals and of society. Bennell and Norcliffe address this in their paper in this issue when they ask whether ESDGC and the revised curriculum for Wales are transformative: Will they enable future generations substantially to remodel society and re-examine their values to meet the needs of sustainability or are they an attempt to enact change while trying to maintain dominant norms? They go on to suggest that ESDGC, although some way along the continuum towards being transformative, is not yet quite there. Bennell and Norcliffe also point out how slow many schools have been properly to embed ESDGC into their teaching. One answer to this is to increase the emphasis on ESDGC in initial teacher training but, as Sheila Bennell has shown, the slowness with which ESDGC has been incorporated into ITET, and the partial nature of that incorporation, indicate that there is still much to be done in this area. Why should there be such evident reluctance? Much of it is practical, as Benell and Norcliffe have explained, and barriers such as lack of resources and time to think through in detail what is required are understandable and potentially

12 88 David Sullivan resolvable. But there is also a deeper problem, which lies in the contested nature of citizenship and the lack of a clearly defined, commonly shared, sense of what it means to be a good citizen. The question of whether the relationship between the local and the global is to be understood under communitarian or cosmopolitan categories is one facet of this wider issue. This lack of consensus should not be dismissed, as it sometimes is in Wales, as the result of a disagreement between different political ideologies, or even between political parties. The question of the relationship between the local and the global is one that it at the heart of contemporary debate about the significance and impact of globalisation, of which the discussion of education for global citizenship is just one (though very important) part. This lack of such a widely shared concept of citizenship means that it is hard to focus on just what citizenship education means, and, by extension, how to apply it in practice. Education for sustainable development offers a partial exception to this, and in a way that is revealing. Some schools have embraced the ideas of sustainability, in both their formal teaching and their organisation and practice, and offer a clear vision of what is involved. But that is because there is a broad consensus in our society, at least amongst those who have a commitment to environmental conservation, about what sustainable living entails and, as Bennell has demonstrated, there has been a concentrated attempt to introduce this into ITET. Although much thought has gone into developing the theory and practice of citizenship in Wales that embraces both its Welsh and global aspects, there is no final consensus on what citizenship is. This is not surprising given the complexity of the conceptual issues that surround this debate both historically and in contemporary discourse. But the seriousness with which the questions are discussed, and the desire to develop a curriculum which manages to balance the complex, and sometimes conflicting, demands of the local and the global is an indication of the resourcefulness and sophistication that Wales brings to the global debate on citizenship education.

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