QUESTIONING ALLEGIANCE Education about living in society and in the world is a vital task of schools. Yet such civic education is not always critically examined, and few among us have been encouraged to reflect on our civic education experiences. Around the world, one’s civic education most often looks like a black box. How it works is unclear. When human harm, violence, and oppression can be seen in a wide variety of contexts, it is worth critically examining civic education. Could it be that civic education is not playing a helpful role in society? Can it be done differently and better? As one reflects on the contemporary social world, it is helpful to examine the assumptions surrounding education for living together, to think about current modes and possible alternatives. Otherwise, one might end up promoting allegiance to civic and partisan entities which are themselves black boxes (the ‘nation’, the ‘people’), failing to notice when and how what goes on in civic education is morally questionable. This book aims to elucidate some of the black box of civic education, and focuses on some of its main operations across contexts. Offering a new framework for students and academics, this book questions existing thinking and shifts the focus of attention from the right balance to strike between local, national, and global allegiances to the more fundamental question of what counts as ‘local’, ‘national’, and ‘global’, and what might be involved in cultivating allegiances to them. It looks at allegiance to not just transnational but also sub- global ‘civilisations’ and it problematises the notion of the ‘local community’ in new ways. Liz Jackson is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of Hong Kong. She is President of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia and Director of the Comparative Education Research Centre at the University of Hong Kong. ‘Questioning Allegiance is a capacious examination of the role of education in helping people to live together well in multiple spatial and geographical contexts. Jackson makes a finely wrought, crucial contribution for our ambivalent ever- localizing and ever- globalizing time.’ – Cris Mayo, Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, West Virginia University, USA ‘In her new book Questioning Allegiance philosopher Liz Jackson attempts to relocate civic education (the subtitle), arguing that most social learning about global issues already takes place outside the school and programs of civic education. Jackson explores how young people are learning about themselves and how to live together in different and sometimes competing overlapping contexts from the local to the global. She explores the implications for a different conception for civic education and for curriculum and teaching. A revealing analysis and useful book that is highly recommended.’ – Michael A. Peters, Distinguished Professor of Education, Beijing Normal University, China ‘Jackson’s book is a major contribution to the theoretical literature on civic edu- cation. Her impressive breadth of scholarship and her personal experience of edu- cation on several different continents shine through the text. Her position on education for allegiance is carefully worked out, persuasively argued and boldly expressed: it invites civic educators around the world to think again about what they are trying to achieve. It has another quality too, one that is all too rare in edu- cational theory and yet of the first importance for the improvement of educational practice: it is unassailably correct.’ – Michael Hand, Professor of Philosophy of Education, University of Birmingham, UK QUESTIONING ALLEGIANCE Resituating Civic Education Liz Jackson First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Liz Jackson The right of Liz Jackson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Jackson, Liz, 1980– author. Title: Questioning allegiance : resituating civic education / Liz Jackson. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019002893 | ISBN 9781138351103 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138351110 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780429435492 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Citizenship–Study and teaching. | Civics–Study and teaching. | Education–Social aspects. | Education–Political aspects. Classification: LCC LC1091 .J33 2019 | DDC 370.11/5–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019002893 ISBN: 978-1 -1 38-3 5110- 3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1 -1 38-3 5111- 0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0 -4 29-4 3549- 2 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK CONTENTS Foreword vi Preface ix Acknowledgements xiii 1 The challenge of learning to live together 1 2 Civilisation and culture in education 14 3 Patriotism and nationalism in education 29 4 Globalisation and education 46 5 Localism in education 65 6 Interpersonal relations in education 77 7 The individual in education 93 8 Media and civic education 108 9 Rethinking civic education 122 10 Conclusion 140 Index 148 FOREWORD I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Every day, millions of American schoolchildren stand with hand on heart and pledge allegiance to the flag. It is an understandably controversial ritual in the US, and to those of us from less demonstrative parts of the world, a rather alien one. But the Pledge of Allegiance is just an unusually vivid manifestation of an idea widely accepted by the architects of national education systems: that it properly falls within the remit of public schools to cultivate allegiance to the nation- state. This is an idea that has received a fair bit of attention in educational theory over the past 25 years. Two articles by Martha Nussbaum have been influential in setting the terms of the debate. In her celebrated 1994 essay ‘Patriotism and cosmopolit- anism’, Nussbaum considers and rejects the case for cultivating patriotic sentiment in the young: ‘this emphasis on patriotic pride’, she writes, ‘is both morally dan- gerous and, ultimately, subversive of some of the worthy goals patriotism sets out to serve’. She proposes that civic educators should instead focus their attention on the ideal of the cosmopolitan – ‘the person whose primary allegiance is to the commu- nity of human beings in the entire world’. But in her 2008 piece ‘Toward a globally sensitive patriotism’, Nussbaum does an about- turn. She repudiates her earlier cosmopolitanism, at least insofar as it involves the thought that ‘particular obligations are correctly understood to be derivative from universal obligations’, and now argues that patriotism can be ‘puri- fied’ of its harmful tendencies. On her new view, liberal democratic nation-s tates ‘cannot remain stable without moral sentiments attached to their institutions and their political culture’, and this entitles them ‘to engender sentiments of love and support in their citizens’. Foreword vii Nussbaum’s question – whether educators should concentrate on cultivating allegiance to the nation-s tate or to the world – has seemed to many to be the cen- tral one for the theory and practice of civic education. But it may be a red herring. Perhaps educators have no business trying to determine the recipients of children’s allegiance, or to insist on a pecking order among them. Perhaps their task is not to cultivate allegiance at all, but rather to help children question it. That is the possibility mooted and cogently defended by Liz Jackson in Questioning Allegiance: Resituating Civic Education. Jackson begins by widening the pool of potential recipients of allegiance to include not just national and global communities but also local communities, families, and multinational groups or ‘civilisations’. She then argues that in none of these cases is it the role of educators to foster children’s loyalty, not least because there is deep and reasonable disagree- ment about how each of these communities is conceptualised or ‘imagined’. What Jackson proposes is a largely non- directive approach to teaching about allegiances – which is to say, an approach that neither endorses nor denounces allegiances but equips children to interrogate and assess them. She calls for civic education programmes in which students ‘examine diverse views of the features and challenges of local, national, global, and other communities’ and ‘evaluate mul- tiple perspectives on rights, responsibilities, belonging, and engagement’. It is, she contends, for young people themselves to work out their loyalties and the priorities among them. Jackson’s book is a major contribution to the theoretical literature on civic education. Her impressive breadth of scholarship and her personal experience of education on several different continents shine through the text. Her position on education for allegiance is carefully worked out, persuasively argued and boldly expressed: it invites civic educators around the world to think again about what they are trying to achieve. It has another quality too, one that is all too rare in edu- cational theory and yet of the first importance for the improvement of educational practice: it is unassailably correct. Michael Hand University of Birmingham, UK PREFACE The human world faces serious challenges. Violence and oppression are normal parts of life in a wide variety of contexts. These problems and others invite us to explore the situation of civic education— how people learn to live together. Education about living in society and the broader human world is a vital task of schools. Is civic education helping? Can it not be done differently, and better? It may seem strange to write about civic education from a global view, because civic education is not conducted in the same way across societies. Some societies do not even feature a subject on civic education in schools. Yet on the contrary, even if it is not obvious in every context, civic education does exist everywhere. It is ubiquitous at the same time that it is ‘not universal or unified [but] discursive, het- erogeneous, dynamic, fragmented’ (Nicoll, Fejes, Olson, Dahlstedt, & Biesta, 2013, p. 838). By civic education, I mean to discuss not just a single school subject, but varieties of school- based learning, about the world, how to live together, and how to relate to others, near and far. This learning may take place in classes on ‘political science’ or ‘moral education’, or outside classes, in school hallways or through off- campus extracurricular activities. When topics are important, complex, and con- troversial, it is unwise to not consider carefully how they are taught and learned. How people are to live together in the world, and relate to others near and far, are important, controversial, complex topics. So how can one write about civic education generally, if it is hidden in one place, called ‘political science’ over here and ‘moral education’ over there? Isn’t it like comparing apples and oranges? There are actually significant commonalities across societies when it comes to the main lessons and goals of civic education (Kennedy, 2004; Petrovic & Kuntz, 2014). All societies teach about people near and far in schools, and how they do and can ‘live together’, in different senses. Another commonality is that significant elements of civic education are hidden or obscured from view in most societies.