Conference Agenda

Conceptions of citizenship education are always constituted by ideals about how a community ought to be. In pluralist democracies, the politics of citizenship education are thus bound to be controversial (Biesta, 2011; Gutmann, 1999). Yet, recent (European) citizenship education research and policy has shifted the focus from definitions, their contentiousness, historical contingency, and inherent normativity, to questions of governance and didactical implementation (Gunter, 2015; Plank & Boyd, 1994). Citizenship education is largely portrayed as an authoritative instrument meant to convey universal and seemingly uncontroversial values such as “freedom, equality, tolerance and non-discrimination” (European Commission, 2017, p. 17).

By adopting an explicitly historical and political focus, this panel aims to (re-)expose the normativity ingrained in citizenship education. The panel will present and discuss selected findings from our working group’s years of work on heterodox understandings of citizenship education in Europe. It will do this by leveraging a carefully selected sample of historical case studies of political and educational actors ranging from Catholic organisations to secular movements to educators, which ask: what aspects of dominant understandings of community and citizenry did these actors contest and what counter-ideals did they propose? Which conceptions of citizenship education complemented these ideas and how did these actors seek to introduce them into the educational debate and implement them in practice?

The panel relies on this common set of questions to investigate the relationship between education and political ideals. The contributions focus on specific actors, whose activities span the 1920s to the present, and the European continent from Spain to the Hungary, and from the UK to Italy. The discussion will highlight comparative insights and their implication for European citizenship education, its theory, politics, and history.

The panel promises significant empirical and theoretical contributions. Empirically, by focusing on the educational views and strategies of thus-far overlooked movements, it contributes towards a history of 20^th century European citizenship education from the bottom up. It fosters an approach to citizenship studies that is aware of frictions and controversies, and which integrates potential contributions of actors that act outside state and supra-national institutions. From a theoretical perspective, the Special Issues will refine our understanding of contingency of, and politics behind, understandings of citizenship education, including those dominating the current debate – thus shedding light on the relationship between educational and political views more generally.

In 1969, Hungary firstly participated in a western educational project since the communist takeover (1949); it was the Six Subject Survey, initiated by the IEA. Civic Education produced a big problem in the research, as Professor Árpád Kiss, the driving force of the Hungarian team wrote in a letter to Neville Postlethwaite: we couldn’t record these tests, «because our aims and objectives in Civic Education deviate from yours in so many respects»(Kiss, 1969). Our question is targeting to this core point: What are the meanings of the umbrella term civic/citizenship education in a non-democratic society? The timeframe of our overview will last from the restauration of the communist power after the revolution (1957) to the crisis of the existing socialism (mid-1980s), the so-called Kádár Era. We would like to highlight the discrepancies between the official (and idealistic) images of conscious, active socialist citizens and the reality of different reactions to these needs from apathy to imitate the requested attitudes. The ideological scheme was stable during these decades, but the interpretations of the key notions (socialist democracy, socialist citizenship, internationalism, and so on) differed in many ways. According to an overall accepted hypothesis in Hungary, the state incorporated and nationalized its citizens through the obligatory political socialization of the schools after WW2 (Szabó, 2000; Jakab, 2022). The direction was opposite to the practice of Western countries in that time: civic education did not speak about rights, autonomy and individual conditions needed to defend from the encroachments of a strong state, but to subordinate these to the Marxist-Leninist ideology. Contemporary analyses about the history of Hungarian citizenship education usually started the detailing story from the 1990s (Dancs & Fülöp, 2020; Hera & Szeger, 2015; Holle & Ványi, 2022): we would like to show the roads leading to here.

Dancs, K. & Fülöp, M. (2020). Past and present of social science education in Hungary. Journal of Social Science Education, 19(1), 47–71. Hera, G. & Szeger, K. (2015). Education for Democratic Citizenship and Social Inclusion in a Post- Socialist Democracy. In Majhanovich, S. & Malet, R. (Eds.), Building Democracy through Education on Diversity. Leiden, Brill, 41–56. Holle, A. & Ványi, É. (2022). Conceptualizing Citizenship. Eastern European Inputs to the Contemporary Debates. Insights from Hungary. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, European and Regional Studies, 21(1), 1–24. Jakab, Gy. (2022). Demokrácia demokraták nélkül? Oktatási reform és állampolgári nevelés [Democracy without democrats? Educational reform and citizenship education]. Gondolat, Budapest. Kiss, Á. (1969). Letter to Neville Postlethwaite. Hoover Institute, IEA Archive, Vol. 59. Szabó, I. (2000). A pártállam gyermekei [Children of Party-State]. Új Mandátum, Budapest.

The approval in 1978 of the Spanish constitution is considered the closure of the tense negotiations which permitted the birth of the democratic monarchy we know today. Article 27, dealing with education was especially controversial and as result the different democratic governments passed seven comprehensive educational reforms; some aspiring to strengthen an egalitarian model of public education while others favored the freedom of parents to choose private schools, mainly catholic, supported by public funds. Both models have provoked wide social protest along the years. The social contestation against the progressive and egalitarian reforms was championed by associations of Catholic families and teachers who saw in education legislation, not only a violation of the principle of freedom by limiting the system of private subsidized schools, but also the implementation of a plural ideology that endangered the Catholic identity communal values. This paper strives to analyze the relationship between these Catholic associations and the state from 1978 until 2006. During this period, they had to adapt to the loss of their privileged status under the dictatorship, readjust to the new political setup and finally adopt a frontal opposition to many of the educational policies advanced by the government. In their struggle they have challenged the state’s concept of citizenship as it has been articulated in the educational laws and the civic education curriculum associated with it. Looking at the associations’ publications both in the press and inner circles, as well as interviews with leading figures, we trace the way they have been negotiating their notion of citizenship vis a vi the state, paying special attention to their opposition to citizenship education and the mechanisms they have used to prevent its implementation by the state.

González, P. M. (2022). La educación concertada en España: origen y recorrido histórico. Historia de la Educación, 41, 405-425. Muñoz Ramírez, A. (2016). ¿Qué ha sido de Educación para la Ciudadanía con el Partido Popular? Foro de Educación, 14(20), 105-128. https://doi.org/10.14516/fde.2016.014.020.007 Prats, E. (2012). ¿Educación cívica o educación para la ciudadanía? Lo que acontece en Europa. En J. C. González Faraco et al. Identidades culturales y educación en la sociedad mundial. Servicio de Publicaciones, Universidad de Huelva. Sánchez Agusti, M., & Miguel Revilla, D. (2020). Citizenship education or civic education? A controversial issue in Spain. Journal of Social Science Education: JSSE, 19(1), 154-171. Vázquez Ramil, R., & Porto Ucha, Ángel S. (2020). Temas transversales, ciudadanía y educación en valores: de la LOGSE (1990) a la LOMLOE (2020). Innovación Educativa, 30, 113-125. https://doi.org/10.15304/ie.30.7092

Many voluntary associations during the interwar years, promoted international understanding among children and adults alike in the hope of avoiding another global war. The League of Unions in Britain was one of these. It lobbied the government to advocate for the newly founded League of Nations, whilst also seeking to convince and educate a wider public, promoting a ‘world citizenship’ that crossed national boundaries. Children and young people were a key constituency for the LNU’s promotional efforts as they would be the ones to take its agenda forward in the future. To create world citizenship among this younger generation, the LNU argued that “new knowledge” alone was insufficient; a “change of feeling and purpose” was also required. The LNU sought to change hearts as well as minds. Recognising this potentially troubles analyses of citizenship that focus on knowledge and dispassionate discussion as a basis for political action in national and international contexts (e.g. Habermas 1989, Case 2018), but chimes with recent analyses both of internationalism (e.g. Scaglia 2019) and citizenship in a range of broader contexts (e.g. Kingston et al. 2017) which emphasise affective dimensions. Relevant emotions include feelings of sympathy and empathy, optimism and anticipation, and also fear. This paper builds on previous scholarship on the LNU, education, and the young (e.g. Wright 2020, McCarthy 2011), to focus in on the emotional components of the LNU’s world citizenship as envisaged for and experienced by the young. Drawing on selected exemplars from the LNU’s publications and records, teaching periodicals, and accounts by members of its junior branches, it explores ways in which emotions were incorporated within the ways that world citizenship was envisaged for and described by the young internationalists who encountered the LNU.

H. Case (2018) The Age of Questions. Princeton: Princeton University Press. J. Habermas (1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Thomas Burger, Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press [trans from German, orig. published 62] R. Kingston et al. (2017) Emotions, Community, and Citizenship: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. League of Nations Union (1927) Declaration Concerning the Schools of Britain and the Peace of the World. London: LNU. H. McCarthy (2011) The British People and the League of Nations. Manchester: Manchester University Press I. Scaglia (2019) The Emotions of Internationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press S. Wright (2020) 'Creating Liberal-Internationalist World Citizens: League of Nations Union Junior Branches in English Secondary Schools, 1919-1939', Paedagogica Historica, 56:3, 321-40.

Education systems are “sorting machines” (Domina et al. 2017). By defining and ranking categories of teaching and learning, and sorting individuals into these categories, educational structures contribute to shaping the identity and stratification of modern citizenries. Unsurprisingly, then, the reform of educational structures ranges among the fundamental components of agendas aimed at re-structuring Western European societies after 1945 (Heidenheimer 1997). While reforms were usually contentious and specific outcomes vary, experts, as well as left and centre-right parties agreed that at least some standardisation and de-stratification was necessary for education systems to foster more equal and liberal societies (Furuta 2020). But what about those who disagreed with this vision of society? Do fundamentally different visions of the citizenry also come with different preferences for educational structures? This paper investigates the relationship between visions of the citizenry and educational preferences by focusing on a thus-far often overlooked educational actor: far-right movements. Using qualitative content analysis on an extensive collection of archival documents, we systematically relate the views on educational structures expressed Western European far-right parties as well as by influential German, Italian, and French far-right intellectuals and activists since 1945 with their ideals of society and citizenship. By focusing on the nexus between educational and social structures as seen by one of the most vocal opponents of the post-WII liberal consensus, this paper promises to theoretically refine both our understanding of the relationship between education and citizenship, and of the far right as an educational actor.

Domina, T., Penner, A., and Penner, E. (2017). Categorial Inequality: Schools as Sorting Machines. Annual Review of Sociology 43, 311–30. Furuta, J. (2020). Liberal individualism and the globalization of education as a human right: the worldwide decline of early tracking 1960-2010. Sociology of Education, 93(1), 1–19. Heidenheimer, A. J. (1997). Disparate Ladders. London: Routledge.