A long existing compulsive curriculum of ideological and political education is employed by the Chinese government to promote citizenship education among Chinese university students. This article builds on the findings of a mixed-methods research that examined the role of ideological and political education on university students' civic…

This piece is an academic reflection on personal experiences of the education system through the critical lens of anti-oppressive and multicultural education. The author divides the page into academic discourse and personal experience, reflecting the boundaries between anecdotal evidence and academic discourse. Suggestions and observations are…

This research was prompted by the developing political discourse proposing the teaching of Britishness and British values in the context of the United Kingdom. This discourse will be reviewed in the first part of the article, in the context of previous work which has sought to assess how Britishness and related concepts might be promoted through…

In everyday language, whether a school is described as "public" or not is determined by the way it is funded and by who is allowed to attend it. Ideally however, a public school should also be defined and evaluated by its unique goal--to renew a public by providing the young with the skills, dispositions, and perspectives required to…

The author presents evidence of "glaring gaps in U.S. students' civic knowledge, motivation, and interest." From the inception of the United States through the mid-20th century, he writes, civic education was at the center of U.S. schooling. Since then, however, there has been a decline in civics instruction, fueled by increasing…

Public institutions of higher education are charged with "preparing the next generation of informed, engaged citizens for our democracy" (American Association of State Colleges and Universities [AASCU] 2003, 1). Many institutions have fulfilled this mandate by becoming educational partners with Debate Watch, a program of the Commission on…

In this article, Thea Renda Abu El-Haj draws on qualitative research conducted with Palestinian American high school students to explore school as a key site for nation building. By focusing on their teachers' talk and practice, she examines how U.S. nationalism and national identities are produced through everyday racialized and gendered…

How do researchers and practitioners understand and interrogate education reform when it is heralded as the solution to many problems, not all of which are educational? As importantly, how can applied educational researchers delve "beneath the skin" of "given" problems to solve or report, and suggest a range of explanations? In…

This article focuses on Enquiring Minds, a three-year curriculum development project funded by Microsoft as part of its Partners in Learning programme and run by Futurelab. The article suggests that the project is best understood as an example of a new type of "curriculum entrepreneurialism" that is impatient with the traditional…

Bernie Ronan's "The Civic Spectrum: How Students Become Engaged Citizens" comes at a critical time in the effort to strengthen the role of higher education in a democracy. In the last 20 years, higher education institutions have begun to pay a great deal of attention to the civic engagement of college students. By now, nearly every campus around…

This paper considers the social significance and interaction between sport and the allied themes of citizenship, civic identity and social control in contemporary Britain. It is set against a backdrop of an emerging cosmopolitanism and politics of difference and is posed in response to renewed interest in notions of "Britishness",…

Towards the end of the 19th century there was a revival of the struggle for democracy throughout the world. The formation of Australia as a federation embodied this commitment, a commitment subsequently abandoned. The impetus for public education in Australia came from its commitment to democracy, inspired by the British Idealists. If the people…

In this response to the article by Madeleine Arnot, Halleli Pinson, and Mano Candappa the author explores three issues that are key to the current refugee and education regimes in Britain. She addresses the association between the British state and the children living within its dominion, the role of education in contemporary British statecraft…

This case study examined how Singapore adolescents from different socio-economic, academic, and racial backgrounds positioned themselves as citizens within a highly-regulated, centralized educational context. Through interviews, classroom observations, and the author investigated students' conceptions of citizenship and their perspectives of the…

There are six oversized boxes in the New York Historical Society that contain the remains of the Public School Society (PSS), New York City's first experiment with publicly-funded education. They are filled with the detritus of the Society's nearly fifty years: recommendations for prospective teachers from their clergymen, student certificates of…