Contemporary western societies are becoming increasingly ethnically, religiously and politically diverse. Globalization, however it might be defined, means that various societies, and groups within societies, will increasingly interact. Thus the question of social integration takes on particular significance within any society or region. At the same time the economic and political goals of various societies seem to increasingly determine education policy and practice. It is our contention that social integration, an important good, is distorted when reduced to its political or economic dimensions.

Education in western societies is often understood as a key vehicle in the process of social integration. State-sponsored education is often explicitly legitimated by this purpose, where schools are charged with this integrating task under the rubric of developing citizens. The nature of citizenship education in schooling becomes a key area of debate about how to best achieve such integrality, especially in an increasingly diverse and plural society. Our paper addresses this issue. Using England as our main example, we will argue for a Habermasian understanding of social integration, a notion of citizenship that is equipped for participating in such integrative processes, and an idea of learning (and teaching) towards such citizenship that might be effective in realizing the goals of such processes.

Although there are numerous social theorists from which to draw a context for our understanding of citizenship and its education (e.g., Kymlicka & Norman, 1994; Nussbaum, 2002; Strike, 1998), we believe aspects of the social theory developed by Jürgen Habermas are the most illuminating. In particular, we wish to draw on two strands of his theory: his distinction in Theory of Communicative Action (1984) between (two) social systems and the lifeworld, including colonization, and his (earlier) distinction in Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) between three knowledge interests and rationalities. Footnote 1 Each strand will contribute to our understanding of the social purpose of schooling, the nature and role of citizenship, and the sort of model of effective teaching and learning that responsible citizenship education requires. We feel that a framework derived from Habermas’s social theory provides an excellent conceptual framework for thinking about citizenship education. We hold that it gives a good conceptual framework for a particular view of learning that might be effective for such citizenship. On that basis we can argue more effectively for how teachers might envision themselves as broad-based change agents, something we believe is vital for such citizenship education. And we will argue for a particular view of the teacher–student relationship and of learning in which it might be more effective to develop the skills and values enhancing democratic life required by our view of citizenship and its education.

Social integration and the colonization of education

Citizenship education is becoming increasingly important in our particular historical setting, early in the 21st century. Societies such as England’s or the US’s are increasing plural, with borders increasing porous with respect to communities and ideas. And not all social interactions are peaceful, as the events of September 2001 in New York and July 2005 in London amply demonstrate. And so concern for social peace, if not integration, becomes paramount.

Jürgen Habermas’s ideas on how societal integration might occur are illuminating for citizenship education. Therefore, tracing this idea in some depth will be fruitful for this discussion. Habermas argues that traditional societies at the onset were tightly integrated by means of religious worldviews. In his words, “worldviews function as a kind of drive belt that transforms the basic religious consensus into the energy of social solidarity...” (1987, 56). Their social cohesion—comprised of structures including social roles, group identities, interpretive patterns, norms—were stabilized not primarily by reason but by the practices and social organization that embodied the worldview. The totality of these roles, interactions, identities, interpretive patterns, norms constituted what Habermas calls the lifeworld (Habermas, 1984, 1989). He goes on to suggest that, although there has been much development and differentiation, the lifeworld nevertheless is a continuing and vital part of society. Cohen & Arato argue that, for Habermas, the lifeworld has three structural components: culture, society, and the personal. As culture, the lifeworld “refers to the reservoir of implicitly known traditions, the background assumptions that are embedded in language and culture and drawn upon by individuals in everyday life.” As society, it refers to the way people “coordinate their action through intersubjectively recognized norms,” acting as members of a solitary group; formally organized coordination of actions become institutions, organizations and associations. And at the personal level, “as individuals grow up within a cultural tradition and participate in group life, they internalize value orientations, acquire generalized action competencies, and develop individual and social identities” (Cohen & Arato, 1992, 427–428).

Although the pluralization of societies means that communication is increasingly required for social integrality, nevertheless each person and group still is situated in a lifeworld—that is, in implicitly known traditions and background assumptions, intersubjectively recognized norms, generalized competencies, identities, and so forth. Habermas states, “The structures of the lifeworld lay down the forms of intersubjectivity of possible understanding” (1987, 126). Interpreters and communicators belong to the lifeworld; the lifeworld is the site for conversation and argumentation. The lifeworld thus provides an important resource and horizon for citizens of that society as they work towards enhancing social integrality as well as possible barriers that might keep such solidarity from forming.

Habermas argues that as western societies differentiated over time, the contextualizing worldviews were increasing rationalized. Footnote 2 When such rationalizing occurred, the integration of society became increasingly a function of communication, namely, of discussion leading to mutual understanding and consensus formation, and less and less by a set of handed-down norms, practices, interpretive patterns, and the like, accepted unreflectively. Now, in the early 21st century, there seems little left of the traditional worldviews that had given, for example, England its socio-cultural cohesion in an earlier time. Yet, it seems inevitable that any well-functioning society requires some sort of cohesion if it is to function as a place for human flourishing for all its members. And so, we would argue, that more visible, deliberate and contested forms of social integrality will become increasingly important for societies such as those in England and the USA. And thus it will become more and more important to develop and maintain such integrality through communication, one seeking mutual understanding and consensus formation. For that to occur, citizens would need to have some facility in such conversation as well as an attitude that such communication would be important to the well-being of society.

Of course, societies can be integrated in more than one way, especially as they differentiate over time. Here another important part of Habermas’s social theory is helpful, namely, the relationship between social integration and the development of subsystems (1987, 150). Habermas argues that in the differentiation process, distinct spheres of social structures and institutions have emerged from the lifeworld, including specifically what Habermas calls social subsystems. In particular, he believes that in our modern capitalist, western societies, two such systems have developed, one economic and the other political: “in modern societies, economic and bureaucratic spheres emerge in which social relations are regulated only via money and power” (1987, 154). Although generally still anchored in the lifeworld, they have become increasingly autonomous as distinct systems, both from the lifeworld and from each other (Cohen & Arato, 1992, 426). These two also provide mechanisms for social integration, but use non-linguistic means. That is, they are increasingly unhooked from the lifeworld. The economic sub-system uses money as a currency of integration and the political-administrative subsystem uses power relations as its currency of integration. That is, their integrative mechanisms rely not on rational communication for mutual understanding but on various types of systems logic to achieve social integration.

Certainly the exchange system that money affords integrates society in a particular way by allowing innumerable exchanges of goods, services and labor within society. It does so by changing use value into exchange value, thereby transforming goods into commercial commodities. The cohesion this gives to society is “an intersystemic medium of interchange” (Habermas, 1987, 171). That is, the integration works through each person’s participation in the exchange of commodified goods and services via money, the steering mechanism of the system. Each member is a rationally self-interested calculating entrepreneur (1987, 308) and the exchanges a series of individual economic contracts.

Although perhaps less obvious, it is also clear that administrative, bureaucratic organization creates a kind of integration within society—for example, through accountability: information of all sorts is gathered and used to regulate society in increasingly comprehensive ways. This works, however, to the extent the subsystem gains some independence. According to Habermas, “organizations gain autonomy through a neutralizing demarcation from the symbolic structures of the lifeworld; they become peculiarly indifferent to culture, society, and personality” (1987, 307). As self-sustaining systems, bureaucracies disconnect themselves from cultural commitments, becoming increasingly independent from the cultural traditions and the resources Habermas associates with the lifeworld. Instead, the systems integration occurs through language-independent power relations in which social roles are automatized by the self-sustaining structures of the subsystem’s organization.

Participation in each of these two systems certainly is unavoidable. Clearly any institutionalized organization such as a school necessarily is part of each of these subsystems in some way or other. However, these subsystems afford only non-linguistic sorts of social integration; they do not provide the social integration achieved by working towards understanding and consensus built on mutuality and communication, something we (following Habermas) would suggest is vital for a flourishing society. We thus cannot reduce the possible integrating role for citizenship to effective participation in the economic and political subsystems of society. Something vital to social human flourishing would be missing. A citizen, in his or her participation in the processes of social integration, must participate in communicative action, and thus be situated within the lifeworld.

Habermas contends that the differentiating lifeworld also develops other types of social institutions, some of which specialize in reproducing traditions, solidarities, and identities. It is these that might well be the major sites for social integration through mutual understanding and consensus. As specialized institutions that reproduce traditions, solidarities and identities, they would provide invaluable resources for this sort of social integration, for as society pluralizes, it would increasingly require open discussion leading to mutual understanding and consensus formation in order to be effective in realizing social integration that is not facilitated through money or power. Cohen & Arato identify this group of social organizations as civil society, in which they mean to include “all of the institutions and associational forms that require communicative interaction for their reproduction and that rely on processes of social integration for coordinating action with their boundaries” (Cohen & Arato 1992, 429).

For newer members of a society to participate meaningfully and effectively in these sorts of integrating institutions, they would need resources, skills and knowledge that would prepare them for such participation. They would need, at least, to be able to participate effectively in the communicative interaction that Cohen and Arato suggest is vital. We would like to suggest that such participation is vital to citizenship. Citizenship centrally involves participation in civil society, as a way to maintain and enhance social integrality through mutual understanding and consensus. Effective citizenship would require learning how to participate (long term) in civil society. Such learning would particularly include continually developing the knowledge, understanding, skills, dispositions, values and attitudes required for communicative integrality.

Habermas argues that sometimes one or both of the social sub-systems might come to colonize the lifeworld (Habermas, 1984). In particular, such colonization might include the domination of institutions specializing in reproducing traditions, solidarities, and identities. In countries such as England and the US this seems to be, in fact, increasingly the case. For example, there is good evidence to suggest that the economic system increasingly dominates by colonizing social institutions that have historically specialized in reproducing traditions, solidarities, and identities—i.e., that are part of civil society. This means that the systems logic of the economic subsystem erodes the possibility of communicative rationality associated with those specialized institutions, a set of social practices that is essential to a well-integrated society. Economic exchange colonizes communicative rationality.

Colonization of institutions of civil society—social institutions specializing in reproducing traditions, solidarities, and identities—is a problem precisely because their essential role in society is to transmit and renew cultural knowledge through mutual understanding, serve social integration through coordinating action based on that mutual understanding, and facilitate the formation of personal identities through socialization (Habermas, 1984; Outhwaite, 1994). Although the political and economic systems themselves might rightly (each in its own way) integrate society in some way, the communicative action associated primarily with institutions of civil society has a crucial role to play in this regard, for it is the arena of consensus formation. Thus their colonization constrains the healthy, full-orbed integration of society by suppressing areas of civil society—and the lifeworld more generally—where consensus-dependent social integration is vital and really cannot be replaced without a vital loss. In particular, when symbolic reproduction is at stake, relying on the integrative functions of money (the integrative mechanism from the economic system) or bureaucratic power (the integrator from the political-administrative system) fails to achieve the integrative task requiring symbolic reproduction. There will be an essential loss of meaning and a cultural impoverishment of society wherever such colonization occurs. And thus, especially in the context of the pluralism of 21st century societies, something vital will have disappeared.

The specialized social institution we call formal education (schooling) is complex. By that we mean, first of all, that it shows strong influences of both societal sub-systems, economic and political. As a modern social institution it certainly cannot escape the organizational, administrative bureaucracy that gives it stability over time. Such bureaucratic structure would rightly support the educational efforts of teachers and students, regardless of what was taught or how it was learned. Thus schools rightly exhibit some self-sustaining systemic features such as lines of accountability, recording and tracking of progress, regularity of scheduling, quality assurance and so forth. Similarly, formal education cannot escape economic exchanges that frame its continued viability. Without being enmeshed in the economic subsystem in many ways, no modern school would be able to pay its teachers, maintain its buildings, or keep educational supplies on hand.

However, Habermas’s notion of colonization suggests that the impact of these two subsystems on education need not stop there. And, we would argue, it has not. In fact, both subsystems are increasingly influencing education in adverse ways.

For example, one way the economic system colonizes education is through changes in understanding about the purpose of education. Education is increasingly viewed as a vehicle for maintaining or enhancing the nation’s economy. Education’s dominant purpose then increasingly becomes thought of in terms of producing individuals capable of maintaining their own economic wellbeing and who will participate in the economy as workers and consumers. In turn, the players in educational institutions often think of the main aim of educational offerings as gaining credentials for the work force (Labaree, 1997). When this begins to dominate, when students view schools less for learning and more for credentialing, we would argue that schooling is being colonized by the economic. Teaching, learning and the curriculum are then themselves increasingly shaped by the model of economic exchange. Teachers teach to the test, students do the least amount of work for the most credentials, curriculum becomes dominated by ‘the practical’, and so forth.

But we would argue that this sort of emphasis is unfortunate and misguided. Although an important and desirable outcome of formal education is people who can contribute to and sustain healthy economic subsystems, we would agree with Habermas that formal education is a specialized institution within the lifeworld, as part of civil society, rather than a specialized institution of the economic sub-system. We would argue that communicative practice in Habermas’s sense is an essential, even a main goal of education. A central feature of schooling, we would suggest, is developing and reproducing traditions, solidarities, and identities that would provide the students resources for mutual understanding and consensus in an increasingly plural society. However, the preoccupation with credentialing is caught up in an opposite trend, showing an example of how education is being colonized by the economic.

The encroachment on education by the political sub-system has also been on the increase in western democracies. For example, in England, the government has intervened in the core business of schooling in response to Barber’s twin crises of standards and morality (Barber, 1996). In England the particular forms of these political interventions have included the Inspection Framework, a highly specific National Curriculum, and an assessment system dominated by high stakes summative testing.

This assessment framework is an important example of colonization of education by the political sub-system. In particular, the move towards high-stakes testing has bureaucratized not only the governance structure, but the practices of teachers in particular and schools personnel more generally. It has done so “through the bureaucratization of decisions, duties and rights, responsibilities and dependencies” (Habermas, 1987, 322) by redefining the “goals, relations and services, life-spaces and life-times” of school curriculum, teaching practices, and learning models, and uncoupling all of these from the lifeworld. This accountability move has profoundly reshaped the curriculum, the character of teaching and the nature of learning by markedly narrowing what constitutes knowledge, teaching and learning. The effect of this increase in testing and accountability has been disempowering for both teacher and student, thereby distorting both the learning and teaching process while narrowing the curriculum. When schools begin to teach towards the high-stakes test, they eliminate other aspects of the curriculum to make room for the sort of knowledge these require. When accountability increasingly dominates like this, we would argue, schooling is increasingly colonized by the administrative-bureaucratic sub-system.

The effect of such colonization is becoming evident in terms of its negative effects on both teaching and learning. A recent systematic review of evidence of the impact of summative assessment and testing on pupils’ motivation for learning (Harlen & Deakin Crick, 2002) provided powerful evidence that the current focus on high-stakes summative assessment of learning outcomes has a negative effect on pupils’ motivation for learning. It fosters a performance orientation, rather than a task orientation, in part because it encourages teaching styles which emphasize transmission of knowledge and disenfranchises active and creative learning and teaching styles. The review suggests it has constrained the curriculum, narrowed down teaching, depressed teacher morale and professionalism, and negatively affected student learning. Although we suspect that none of this is good for teaching and learning more generally, we conclude that it is especially hard on citizenship education, since the latter centrally requires more of students and teachers than just the transmission of impersonal knowledge for immediate assessment. Instead, its effects might best be felt years later or outside of school in the community, in terms of society’s lack of integrality because of a decrease of mutual understanding caused by the colonization of citizenship education in particular.

The very discourse about school reflects this colonization. Education is increasingly described in terms of accountability, focusing on measurable outcomes in terms of instrumentally-construed knowledge and skills. The curriculum, teaching and learning are all taking on the language of bureaucratic relationships. The discourse describing schools increasingly are expressed in the language of organizational, formal regulations and imperatives, which might collectively be called a ‘discourse of accountability’.

As a result, the central role of education as a specialized institution within civil society gets reduced if not lost. Perhaps because education’s core mission can’t be bought by money or coerced by power (Outhwaite, 1994, 117), schooling instead gets increasingly colonized. But then, the possibility of developing an effective citizenry that can engage in processes of social integration, is reduced, if not entirely lost. Colonization of schooling reduces the conceptual space for teaching towards and learning for becoming citizens in this sense.

Knowledge interests and lifelong learning for citizenship

We have been arguing that social institutions such as education—and particularly organizations called schools—belong to a cluster of organizations and associations specializing in developing and reproducing traditions, solidarities, and identities, something we earlier identified as civil society. We are suggesting that there is a natural relation between viewing schools as part of civil society and their role in educating effective and responsible citizens. But then, to be effective, schools as social institutions ought to be as free as possible from the colonizing forces of the economic and political-administrative social sub-systems, if they are to be effective as civil institutions carrying out their purpose of citizenship education.

To have this occur, it is our contention that citizenship education—in particular, the teaching, learning, and curriculum associated with such schooling—requires knowledge bases marked by what Habermas calls hermeneutical and emancipatory rather than merely instrument interests. This would include (but not be limited to) working with students to understand, reproduce and evaluate traditions, solidarities, and identities. But for that to occur not only must the curriculum include this, we must have models of teaching and learning that might effectively foster such education.

This idea derives from Habermas’s understanding of the connection between human interests and knowledge. In Knowledge and Human Interests Habermas identifies three interests—instrumental, hermeneutic and emancipatory—each of which he identifies with a type of knowledge (Habermas, 1968). The first interest he associates with the knowledge generated by natural and analytic sciences such as physics and mathematics. This is the technical interest of prediction and control of objectified processes, i.e., instrumental action. In personal lives this interest might show up through an individual’s adaptation to the external conditions of life. And in social life this interest might take the form of permanent productive forces and consumptive patterns structured into society.

The second interest Habermas associates with the knowledge developed by the human disciplines such as history or the social sciences. This is the practical interest of intersubjective understanding associated with life in the context of the human social world. This interest might show up at the personal level in terms of initiation into the language and other communication systems of one’s society. And at the social level this interest might well be embodied in the cultural resources a society draws on to interpret itself.

Finally, the third interest Habermas associates with the knowledge generated by what he calls the critical sciences. This is the emancipatory interest of becoming free from the seemingly natural (but actually constructed) constraints of ideologies, worldviews and value systems. Individually this interest might show itself in terms of constructing an identity not totally shaped by the current social patterns, interpretations, and roles. And socially, this interest might well be embodied in the legitimations a society accepts or questions. Although the first two sets of knowledge and concomitant interests are fairly well-established by Habermas, his claim for emancipatory knowledge and interests seem more of a promissory note than a well-developed reality (Outhwaite, 1994, 28). Although later he moves away from this three-part analysis, the hermeneutic and emancipatory motives in his later work remain crucial features, as interpretive and critical moments of communicative action (Outhwaite, 1994, 33).

We think that Habermas’s distinction between the different knowledge interests is important for understanding the sort of knowledge bases and discourses we believe to be crucial for responsible citizenship, and thus, for citizenship education, especially one distributed across the curriculum, as, say, it is mandated in England. Although it is likely that the disciplines themselves do not exhibit as neat and tidy a distinction between knowledge interests as Habermas’s theory might suggest, nevertheless his notion of various knowledge-interests can still be used effectively to understand the tension in education between the narrower and broader views outlined earlier. One way to think of education’s one-sided, reductionistic understanding of knowledge is to view it as an over-reliance on knowledge dominated by instrumental interest. Such knowledge is modeled as strategic means-ends thinking and is focused on gaining mastery or control. This model also sheds light on the sort of knowledge that is taught for and assessed by high-stakes testing. Habermas suggests that knowledge associated with the natural sciences might rightly be modeled this way (although much philosophy of science today, including feminist and hermeneutic versions, would rightly contest this). More generally, we would suggest that much of what is offered in schools in preparation for high-stakes testing fits with this model of knowledge, namely, knowledge as information—including facts and theories—that is impersonal and decontextual, able to be learned by memorization and other forms of strategic reasoning. This sort of knowledge requires little self-understanding or personal investment other than time and attention.

Some of this in any curriculum is, of course, legitimate. However, problems arise when all knowledge is modeled in this manner, where instrumental reason dominates the other forms of rationality within the curriculum. This is especially so if we remember that sometimes citizenship education is distributed across the curriculum, as it is in England. We would like to suggest that the sort of knowledge crucial to a broad notion of citizenship requires also the other two knowledge interests—hermeneutical and emancipatory. On the one hand, we would like to suggest that successful participation in society by a citizen requires intersubjective understanding of life in the context of the human social world. As such, it would require the citizen to be initiated into the language and other interpersonal communication systems of society. And it would require the citizen to be able to explicitly draw on the cultural resources a society uses to interpret itself.

On the other hand, we would also like to suggest that effective participation in democratic life by a citizen requires an emancipatory moment, one in which being a citizen means being able to come free from (some of) the constraints of his or her own ideologies, worldviews and value systems that might hinder personal and social human flourishing. This would mean that to be an effective citizen, a person’s identity is able to resist being totally shaped by debilitating social patterns, interpretations, and roles. And it might show up in terms of being able to question the legitimations a society generally accepts. However, to develop those broad knowledge bases, an effective citizen would need knowledge shaped by hermeneutic and emancipatory interests. This, in turn, would require (we will argue later) a model of learning and teaching different from one shaped exclusively by what Habermas calls the instrumental interest.

We believe that this suggests, in turn, that the relation between students and teacher has to reach beyond the bureaucratically and economically dominated exchanges that are encouraged in the accountability movement. Hermeneutic and emancipatory knowledge-interests both require and foster relationships between teachers and students that are not primarily bureaucratic or economic. These knowledge–interests use relationships characterized by dialogue, and in particular by listening to and respecting self and the other, thereby creating what we will call a discourse of care. Footnote 3 We argue that this is vital to equip students to participate as effective citizens in civil society, thereby being more effective in helping work towards social coherence through mutual understanding. If education is a specialized institution in civil society whose task includes teaching students to maintain and enhance social integrality through mutual understanding, schooling itself must avoid the reductive force of the various forms of colonization.

As we indicated earlier, it is particularly important that citizenship education be as free as possible from such colonizing forces. At first glance it might seem right to characterize citizenship as precisely that social role that should be integrated by the medium of the political subsystem, i.e., power. However, it is our contention that citizenship is about communicative action. And so, educating citizens is likely to be most effective when it itself embodies communicative rationality, which we believe must include knowledge bases marked by hermeneutic and emancipatory interests.

Within England, and to some extent the four nations of the UK, the Crick report (1998) provides the current framework for citizenship education. Crick et al. define citizenship education as including three distinct strands: moral and social responsibility; community involvement; and political literacy. For example, although the programmes of study for England’s National Curriculum for Citizenship appear to focus more on political literacy, many of the outcomes are in the domain of personal development, such as developing the skills of enquiry and communication or developing skills of participation and community action (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, 1999). Citizenship is thus linked in these documents to the whole school’s ethos and organization, including values education and the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils. Whilst much discretion is left to individual schools, it is clearly expected that citizenship education will appear not only in discrete curriculum time, but also across the whole curriculum and in extra curricular activities, and be related to the school’s particular vision and values.

Citizenship education, as construed by the Crick report, ought to lead towards understanding of and active involvement in social structures, institutions, organizations and associations that make up civil society rather than limiting citizenship involvement to specific tasks such as voting in elections or being a productive worker. This means that, on the one hand, citizenship education centrally involves the hermeneutic interest of initiation into society’s communication systems, including coming to mutual understandings of the cultural traditions by which the society interprets itself. And on the other hand, citizenship education centrally involves the emancipatory interest of constructing identities not totally shaped by the current social patterns, interpretations, and roles. It would thus include learning how to critically evaluate and to personally and collectively challenge current legitimations of society. In particular, if responsible participation in civil society itself requires communicative action, it would seem imperative that educating for citizenship would require modeling the very mechanisms of working towards mutual understanding of cultural resources, including solidarity through stabilization of group identities and harmonizing individual biographies with collective forms of life.

Two recent systematic reviews of research from around the world concerning the impact of citizenship education on the core tasks of schooling provides substantial evidence that if schools are to take the ‘communicative action’ aspect of education seriously then there are significant implications for policy and practice, and in particular a need to move towards learning and teaching which is set within a discourse of care (Deakin Crick, 2005). The findings of this research point towards the importance for effective citizenship education as defined by the Crick report, namely, education that uses transformative, dialogical and participatory pedagogies and which focus on the quality of dialogue and discourse, student voice, contextual knowledge and relevance to students’ lives and narratives. These approaches lead to positive interpersonal relationships, trust and participation within a values-rich school environment in which engagement with real social issues is fostered. The findings also suggest that this approach may challenge existing power relations in schools when students become co-creators of knowledge, rather than passive imbibers. In short, the findings suggest that citizenship education is more effective when hermeneutic and emancipatory interests take the lead in teaching and learning.

We believe that a transformative, dialogical and participatory approach to learning and teaching best suited for the possibility of developing responsible citizens can be framed within a Habermasian understanding of society. This framework situates education in a particular social location so that we can argue for a particular conception of citizenship education, one that has a more central place in education than it currently seems to have, especially in terms of education’s current dominant models of teaching. In England, for example, citizenship education is a relatively recent and low key initiative compared with the major policy focus on raising the standards of achievement for all pupils within the reforms of the last 30 years. The latter has been implemented in England through a focus on external accountability, driven by target setting—all framed by an emphasis on performativity (Broadfoot, 1998). We would suggest that this trend has not been kind to the sort of teaching we think is vital to educating for citizenship. Instead, emphasizing performativity has skewed teaching towards a ‘stand and deliver’ or ‘transfer of skills and knowledge’ model, one we have characterized above as informed by instrumental rationality.

We stated earlier that for citizenship education to be successful, the colonizing effect needs to be minimized. One way for this is to have models of teaching associated with a discourse of care gain some ascendancy in schools. More strongly, schools in general and teaching in particular need to be organized in ways that model a discourse of care. Policy makers need to reduce the narrowing, colonizing impact of the discourse of accountability on the curriculum and on teaching methods and need to encourage professional development that emphasizes learning goals and learner-centred teaching approaches—pedagogies more consistent with the central goals of citizenship education. That is, they need to make room for approaches to teaching and learning, including assessment practices, which are commensurate with that second discourse.

It is the contention of this paper that a discourse of care requires reconsideration of the nature of teaching and learning in schools, something based in a particular relationship between teachers and learners. In the background resonates the Habermasian perspective that not only is (much of being) a good citizen best understood in the context of the lifeworld but also that educating such a citizen is also best understood in lifeworld terms. Furthermore, this suggests a certain model of teaching for citizenship. Of course, such modeling is not done in a vacuum, for approaches to citizenship education have been studied and catalogued. McGettrick (2001) suggests that there are three broad approaches to citizenship education in England: a curriculum approach, where the focus is on the content to be taught within discrete curriculum time; an ethos approach, where the focus is on the organization and ethos of the whole school; and a transformative-professional approach, where the emphasis is on developing teachers as agents of change within their communities.

Although in this paper we do not argue against the first two per se, it is our contention that, within a Habermasian framework, teaching and learning adequate for citizenship education ought to be situated broadly within a transformative professional approach. That approach engages in an education that not only meets, say, England’s legislative requirements for citizenship, but also provides a platform for deliberation and resistance to the distortions and faults of society, something we believe is central to citizenship. We envision an approach that can more adequately equip learners with the power to transform not only themselves but also society towards more just and equitable structures and practices. And that requires an educational approach in which teachers are able to envision themselves as change agents within their school communities. We wish to situate those pedagogical ideas in an adequate social and interpersonal-relations theory, one that will provide the proper context and background for our understanding of both the idea of citizenship and the teaching and learning proper to educating for such citizenship.

Viewing teachers as transformative change agents within their school communities requires a participatory and relational model of learning. Such learning needs to effectively prepare students for life-long communicative action. This would require learning to involve knowledge marked primarily by hermeneutical and emancipatory interests. The goals of learning particular sets of interpretative patterns, generalising competencies and harmonising personal biographies with collective forms of life require more than the transmission of facts and the accumulation of information. In effective citizenship education, learners need to be engaged meaningfully in real-life learning, including being able to critique their own biographies and collective stories and develop (and commit) to personally chosen values and life trajectories as persons-in-community. In other words they need to be strengthened in their ability to engage profitably with complex uncertainties and opportunities; they need to be supported in developing the dispositions, capabilities and qualities that will endure beyond formal school, both in the community immediately and over the span of their life-time. This would require, for example, motivation beyond that of successful performance on high-stakes tests or even the acquisition of credentials.

In other words, we are arguing that citizenship education is centrally about the formation of lifelong learners. By this we mean people who are able to engage meaningfully in civil society over a life time, committed to personal and collective learning for the purpose of communicative action that might lead to societal human flourishing. The skills, attitudes and competencies of what has come to be called life-long learning, we argue, are important for acquiring the knowledge base marked by hermeneutical knowledge-interests since central to life-long learning is intersubjective understanding in the context of the social world. The skills, attitudes and competencies of life-long learning are also important for acquiring the knowledge base marked by emancipatory knowledge-interests, since life-long learning is concerned with the self actualization of individuals within the context of interpersonal and social relations. The very structure of lifelong learning seems to be in harmony with communicative action, something that is missing from the more immediate, short term learning strategies usually associated with instrumental knowledge-interests. And so we would like to sketch out the features of life-long learning, drawing on a few empirical studies as we do.

There is a growing body of knowledge about the characteristics of an effective lifelong learner. And there is growing evidence from around the world that these essential psycho-social qualities can be nurtured directly through appropriate learning relationships and through the development of what is coming to be called learning cultures. Smith & Spurling (1999) argue that lifelong learning refers to learning that takes place throughout the lifespan. Although they include the main types and classes of learning, in both informal and formal educational settings, they highlight the self-directed character of lifelong learning. Lifelong learning is relatively continuous, with a broad momentum that is maintained throughout life. It is intentional on the part of the individual or the organization and is expressed in some form of personal or organizational strategy, formally or informally, which may be re-appraised over time. The literature suggests that lifelong learners are likely to live by four basic principles: personal commitment to learning, social commitment to learning, respect for others’ learning and respect for truth. We believe that the four basic principles are important ingredients for developing the hermeneutical and emancipatory components of communicative action. At minimum, mutual understanding and critical social action centrally involve a continued commitment to learning, respect for both others and respect for truth.

There is also a growing body of knowledge about the components and characteristics of effective lifelong learning. Deakin Crick, Broadfoot, & Claxton (2002a, b) articulate seven dimensions of what is coming to be called learning power. These are key human qualities essential for the development of lifelong learning and the creation of learner-centred cultures. Deakin Crick et al. suggest that a person’s learning power is best described as a complex mix of dispositions, lived experiences, social relations, values, attitudes and beliefs that coalesce to shape the nature of an individual’s engagement with any particular learning opportunity. The seven dimensions of learning power important for lifelong learning are as follows. First, effective learners know that learning itself is learnable and have a sense of growth and commitment to change as learners over time and within personal and collective narratives—this dimension can be called the growth orientation. Second, not satisfied with superficiality, effective learners like to get beneath the surface of things, and to ask the question why—this dimension can be called critical curiousity. Third, effective learners are also on the lookout for links between what they are learning and what they already know. They focus on what matters to them and their world, connecting their own stories with the wider stories of their culture—this can be called meaning making. Fourth, effective learners like a challenge and are willing to persevere through difficulty and confusion—this dimension can be called resilience. Fifth, effective learners are creative in their thinking, using their imagination and taking risks to look at things in different ways—this is the creative dimension. Sixth, effective learners have positive learning relationships at home and at school from which and through which they are able to learn and grow since they are not isolated while not totally dependent on others—we call this the relational dimension. And seventh, effective learners are aware of their own learning processes, their feelings and their capabilities in relation to their own learning journey and they use this awareness to develop and nurture their own learning—this dimension can be called strategic awareness. Together, these seven dimensions of learning power are of vital importance for lifelong learning. We would argue that these dimensions of learning power are vital for the learning central to citizenship education, for they form the basis for the learning centred in hermeneutic and emancipatory knowledge-interests.

These dimensions are themselves learnable, and thus also can be diminished in impoverished educational settings. Deakin Crick et al. (2002a, b) showed that as pupils become older their capacity for effective learning often decreases, while their dependency and fragility as learners increases. In particular, the dimension of creativity was one which decreased most significantly. We would speculate that over the course of many students’ schooling, the dominant models of teaching and learning in which they were engaged did not—deliberately or even indirectly—either model or encourage the seven dimensions of learning power. Certainly, educational institutions colonized by economic and administrative subsystems, as evidenced by a discourse of accountability, might well ignore many of these dimension of learning power in the quest for adequate performances on high-stakes testing. However, such a narrowing is not inevitable and a student does not need to experience a decrease in the seven dimensions. Instead, the opposite can also happen. Deakin Crick et al. give evidence that teachers can use teaching practices that stimulate and nurture the seven learning dimensions of learning power (Deakin Crick et al., 2002a, b). They argue that significant positive changes in developing the dimensions of learning power are possible where teachers deliberately focus on these dimensions. Students can improve their learning power, and thus develop into more effective lifelong learners, if teachers introduce practices into their classrooms that stimulate and nourish them (Deakin Crick et al., 2005).

When schools put learners and learning at the heart of what they do—that is, when they become learner-centred—then they typically begin move from models of teaching and learning that centre on the transmission of impersonal knowledge to ones that focuses on the quality, processes and values of learning located in relationships and personal and collective stories. We think that the seven dimensions of learning power collectively form an effective way to deliberately foster the development of knowledge marked by hermeneutical and emancipatory interests important for citizenship without resorting to a transmission model of teaching and learning. But this will not be very effective in the classroom if the school as a whole does not give teachers the room to do so (Deakin Crick, Coates, Taylor, & Ritchie, 2004a, b).

Building learning power into classroom requires the school itself to foster articulations of professional visions and values commensurate with this, namely, a commitment to schooling which focuses on learning itself, rather than on performance or outcomes alone (Deakin Crick et al., 2002a, b). This more learner-centred vision allows for a discourse of care to emerge more clearly, a shift from the discourse of accountability. A focus on developing learning power in students actually models teachers as creators of learning communities. At the same time, it significantly re-empowers teachers to be guardians of their professional vision rather than mere technicians implementing externally mandated policies and procedures. This professional vision, shared within the school as a community, offers a locus for a teacher’s own professional development as a lifelong learner. As such, this can itself be viewed as an emancipatory opportunity for teachers to emerge as transformative agents within schools. A teacher’s focus on becoming learner-centred, with the central aim of nurturing learning power, are key aspects of a discourse of care. To be able to teach students to develop communicative action, teachers themselves must feel empowered to enact communicative action in their own professional lives, in schools (Deakin Crick et al., 2004a, b).

More particularly, to move beyond a mere transfer of information, teaching for citizenship education must be embodied in the classroom as positive interpersonal relationships between learner and teacher as well as among the learners themselves. This means that teachers and students must learn to trust, affirm and challenge each other, something that requires a setting as free as possible from the colonizations by the social subsystems. For example, educating for credentialing and for high-stakes testing undermine trust between students, and does not foster the space for warmth, affirmation and challenge required for developing effective citizens. Trust is developed in relations where, rather than working individualistically or competing with each other, each person puts the good of the other before the interests of the self (Joldersma, 2002). Only in the context of such affirmations is it possible for members of the group to challenge each other as they strive to understand what is true and right for self and society. And trust is fostered best when participants feel they are known and valued by the rest of those in the group.

This points to the importance of modeling in effective citizenship education. Teaching that focuses purely on delivery of information for immediate accountability fails to recognize the hidden curriculum that is constituted through modeling to the students the very values, attitudes, competencies and actions that one is encouraging them to develop. Students’ experiential knowledge of trust, affirmation and challenge provided by teachers and the school as a community, are essential ingredients for nurturing effective lifelong learners. This is crucial for becoming an active citizen, one who can trust others while affirming and challenging them in the context of developing mutual understanding in communicative action. Although a complex phenomenon, especially in societies where role-models come from across the strata and sectors of society, such modeling certainly is educative. And thus teachers, and the school as a community, function as models for students.

Citizens who are engaged in struggling towards mutual understanding will come to recognize the importance of quality dialogue. That is, the give and take for listening and speaking that constitute conversations can best occur in settings where all parties are valued. Thus, for formal schooling fostering citizenship, learning to listen and speak is important. Listening means allowing what the other says to break through one’s own preconceptions and prejudgments. And speaking involves risking one’s own ideas by offering them to the group as a potential way to interpret truth or right action. Quality conversation is a dialogue in which each participant risks changing one’s mind or attitudes in the process of working towards mutual understanding. In this way, the conversation itself becomes unpredictable in advance. Teaching which focuses on citizenship will need to create the space required for quality conversation—a communicative pedagogy (Biesta, 1995). Because conversation is the give and take of listening and speaking, it cannot be done effectively without a language within which to communicate. Thus for learning to be effective, teaching for citizenship must stress the importance of using language with which learning experiences can be named and owned by learners. Without this, there would be little movement towards the sorts of deliberately hermeneutic and emancipatory interests that are important for effective citizenship education.

This points to the importance of learners owning and taking control of their own learning. Certainly without a language to name one’s own experiences, communicative action would be derailed. But without, more generally, learners feeling that they have ownership of what it is they are learning about, not only in terms of a personal stake but also in terms of co-directing its flow and agenda, there will be little feeling of ownership. Yet, for students involved in learning knowledge marked by hermeneutic and emancipatory interests, personal ownership is vital. And so, effective pedagogy must deliberately foster this aspect of learning. A central part of this is the importance of learners articulating their own stories, both personal and collective. They need to come to understand how their personal identities and biographies fit into the collective identities and social narratives. This requires paying attention to the metaphors education uses for learning.

What the above themes point us to is the importance of developing specific strategies and processes which will stimulate these learning dimensions, including the sequencing of the knowledge presented to learners. In general, it requires a rhythm and sequence reminiscent of the Vygotskian notion of perezhivanie which has to do with the lived experience of the learner which is in the past, but also shapes the future, located as it is in the zone of proximal development of the present learning situation. It moves beyond a focus on either cognition or affect to suggest a more dynamic and socially-situated notion of learning.

These themes suggest that teaching appropriate for citizenship education will involve deliberately fostering the several dimensions of learning power. An effective citizen needs to have the hermeneutic interests of continued growth and a desire for making meaning, i.e., of continued commitment to develop over time and within personal and collective narratives as he or she interacts with others and as society itself develops, connecting their own stories with the wider stories of their culture. Teaching for citizenship must deliberately work on this. The learning dimensions of growth, critical curiosity, resilience, and creativity collectively help a learner get beneath the surface of social practices, attitudes and legitimations. These help the learner to question why and to develop a willingness to persevere through difficulty and controversy. They jointly foster an ability in the learner to use his or her imagination to look at things in different ways. Collectively these are constitutive of the emancipatory interest. Teaching for citizenship must deliberately work to raise emancipatory interests to consciousness. We would suggest that many of the dimensions of learning power jointly empower the learner to bring these to awareness. By supporting students’ strategic awareness of their own learning processes and incorporating these dimensions in their teaching practices, teachers will be able to nurture the power needed for the communicative action of citizenship.

These dimensions of learning power function rather like a mirror for the formal curriculum, and are relevant differentially whatever the content of learning. This does not mean that the focus of teaching is only on the processes of learning at the expense of the content of learning. Rather, the focus will also be on an integration of the knowledge, skills and understandings of the curriculum with the values, dispositions, attitudes and qualities necessary for effective lifelong learning. It is learning for meaning making, namely, learning which takes into account the worldviews, values and personal experiences and aspirations which the learner brings to their learning. It is learning which is centrally located within a pedagogic relationship where trust, affirmation and challenge are central features. And this is, we believe, vital to fostering active citizenship in civil society.

Conclusion

What we have outlined here is a vision of teaching and learning which primarily involves emancipatory and hermeneutical interests. In the process we have argued that schools need to shift from a discourse of accountability to a discourse of care in order to make room for effective teaching towards an appropriate citizenship. Current teaching practices associated with the discourse of accountability tend to dampen the very learning process required for an effective citizenship education. However, with appropriate teacher–student relationships, effective learning dispositions can be instilled, ones that take the student beyond the classroom and school—the increased learning power of effective life-long learning strategies. But such appropriate teaching practices only are effective in a relation between teacher and students that involves trust, affirmation and challenge, i.e., one not dominated (colonized) by the two societal subsystems.

We also argued that if schools are to discharge their task of citizenship education, they require a conception of the social location of schools different from that provided by the discourse of accountability. Habermas’s social theory gives us a framework that locates school as an organization in civil society. His theory of colonization gives us an argument for why schools at present are dominated by the discourse of accountability. This analysis creates the right conditions for a call to reorient schools towards a discourse of care. This creates the space required to develop an effective teaching for citizenship, one that fosters the several dimensions of learning power needed to develop lifelong learners.

In the background hovers the idea that hermeneutic and emancipatory interests are conducive for integrating society by facilitating living together with and for others. The hermeneutic interest of mutual understanding involves centrally the attempt to understand a way of living together that might foster looking out for the well-being of others in society (Hendley, 2000). At a personal level it might mean initiation into the cultural resources and language that would enhance life first of all for others. And at a social level such interests could be viewed as understanding and participating in cultural traditions that are inscribed in responsible action towards others. Bringing together learning power with Habermas also means that emancipatory interests can be framed as the call to transform the constraints of any ideology that would limit action to self-interest. At a personal level, emancipatory interests would then come to mean understanding one’s own identity not primarily in terms of accumulating money or gaining power but as obligation and responsibility towards neighbours and strangers. At a social level, emancipatory interests might then involve questioning the legitimation of the lifeworld’s colonization by money and power, where these developments seem to exclude the altruism of responsibility for the others in society. This intersubjectivity gives learning power a focus on the hermeneutic and emancipatory interests required for communicative action, with the possibility of thinking that goodness consists in recognizing that the other counts more than myself (Hendley, 2000). On this reading, robust citizenship would embody communicative action that resists colonization of the lifeworld by creating room for a civil society in which responsibility for others could flourish, fostering a life-enhancing society in the context of the 21st century plurality that exists. Effective teaching for citizenship would both model these dimensions of intersubjectivity and aim towards developing them in students, the young citizens of society.