Citizenship - A contribution by Andrew Chandler

We are not short of definitions of the term itself. Today it has a statuesque quality, redolent with the hues lent by solid exposition in the world of Classical antiquity and, for some of us at least, developed in particular ways by Christian history. One thinks at once of Paul clutching his Roman citizenship in the Acts of the Apostles; then, if vaguely, of Augustine’s City of God. The appeal to debate Citizenship certainly does not lack solid ground. If anything, it is hard to think what to add.

Sometimes the dictionary definition of a word, replete in its worthy abstraction and implication of universalism, signifies less to us than understandings that are more personal and haphazard. There is now a sense in the air that Citizenship, and the business of being a Citizen, is automatically a good thing. But any readers of the Scarlet Pimpernel will assure you that when people calling themselves Citizens turn up they are really a very hard-bitten, disagreeable lot altogether, and not at all the amiable sophisticates who gathered in the company of Sir Percy to uphold noble principles not at all as Citizens (the very thought!) but as subjects of their king. And even a cursory glance through the pages of A Tale of Two Cities would have been enough to confirm these early suspicions. Have we forgotten what a thoroughly bad press the word got in our own society only two hundred years ago?

If literature offers a more promising, but more quixotic, idea of citizenship, one might be found in Oliver Goldsmith’s now largely neglected book, The Citizen of the World. Goldsmith, like his book, is seldom heard of these days and it is worth looking again at the story of his life – such a jumbled, headlong, wayward progress across the face of Ireland and England and then the continent of Europe that it makes the eager Western student chasing off for a ‘gap year’ look nothing so much like a child enjoying a brief traipse around the corner to the local sweet shop. If I warm to the idea of being a citizen of the world it is, I suppose, with the life of the errant Goldsmith in mind. What, after all, are we called to be citizens of? To be a citizen of the world might suggest not merely a state of tourism, but a condition of inhabitancy, and not of one society but many. In a context like the George Bell Institute I am more than ever conscious that the national perspective is not enough. What happens in Bangladesh or Nigeria should affect fundamentally our understanding of what it must mean to be a British citizen.

Actually, this was not really what Goldsmith himself had in mind when he wrote his book at all. In The Citizen of the World, he sought to explore a device – not quite new, for it was more the creation of Montesquieu in his Persian Letters (and Voltaire would do something comparable in L’Ingenu) – of using the exotic to shed a new and sharp light of criticism on everyday conventions which got away with holding sway not because they appealed to the powers of reason (for they did quite the opposite) but simply because they had come to be customary, assumed and unchallenged. This is something that might be explored creatively in the context of this present discussion. It might also be offered as a rather defensive self-justification. In the company of professional school teachers, I should not for a moment pass off personal polemic as some kind of wisdom which grows from some very recognizable kind of expertise. But perhaps there is some room for an innocent who comes from the outside of that increasingly intricate world to murmur something obvious but strangely obscured by the priorities and preoccupations which govern a particular context.

Whatever claims – and disclaimers - are made for the raison d’etre of Citizenship education, it is impossible not to think that it is being launched in an age of social doubt. We are worried, and fearful, about how the coming generation is turning out. This is in the context in which we are asking: what are the demands of Citizenship? What might this come to mean in the context of our schools? Some authorities – and the debate is gathering authorities rather rapidly - lean towards a model which might be called an introduction to civil society. How do we understand its corporate forms and patterns of behaviour? How do we find our own way through it? This might well look like a model of social conformity – no bad thing, at least so one hopes. Then, on the other hand, appears a different approach, which the later eighteenth century might have called the Reformation of Manners. This accommodates a plethora of new anxieties about the kind of future citizens we are presently producing in the classroom. It is not simply a matter of encouraging people to vote, or to turn up for jury service. It is a question of how to make them more amenable, mores sociable, more responsible. How do we convert them from people who might spit at us on the bus to people who might actually give up their seats for us?