A Note on Stockden - Pluralism, Corporatism, Educating Citizens

The main point of the article is to explain the threat that corporatism poses in its emphasis on providing students with employable skills for the job market – at the exclusion of what ought to be a primary responsibility for the democratic state, the provision of citizenship education. A limited view of democracy now prevails, one that is primarily about the pursuit of individual interests with other like-minded people, the author argues.  What is needed in response is a renewed emphasis on liberal education as a preparation for citizenship. If youth are not prepared through their education to value and participate in democracy in a broader sense, the democratic state will suffer a crisis of legitimacy and continue to weaken.

For supporting details, Stockden notes that business interests and special interests have at various times pushed to make education primarily about producing workers with the skills needed for the economy. There have been periods of stronger and weaker business influence on education. A 25 year period from 1905 marked a high point for business influence on schools in the U.S. (In Canada this period also saw a lot of interest and activism around vocational education). Ultimately, the progressive forces prevailed, and by the 1930s, citizenship education in the U.S. was on more solid footing. But Stockden says the forces of corporatism have recently become much stronger. Neoliberalism and managerialism have made their way into education, putting outcomes-based learning centre-stage, eroding the flexibility of teachers to teach reflective citizenship and encouraging society to view curriculum as akin to “delivery of a business service”(81). Students use education to pursue their economic self-interest; what more could be expected of education? – so argues the neoliberal view. Stockden provides a provocative discussion of inequalities and meritocracy. Drawing from Guttman, he argues that the “logic” of the current system would appear to suggest that only members of the meritocracy will be prepared to receive an education for citizenship, with the rest “encouraged to be passive in political affairs (87). All of this brings to mind the classic study which compared citizenship learning in an elite school and an urban school in New Jersey, which was alluded to in class a few weeks ago.

The strength of the article is in providing a good historical overview of writers who have tackled the tensions in citizenship: Saul, Dahl, Held, Barber, White, Taylor, Lasch, Guttman and many others.  The author shows in important ways that tolerance for groups that are different from one’s own is not sufficient as a core concept in citizenship education, because of the obvious power imbalance that exists among the groups. Equality and justice have to be seen as core objectives in teaching citizenship, Stockden writes.

The author also gives a useful explanation of the tension between the need to give students an apprenticeship in learning how to be free, while at the same time giving them a base of understanding to be “good citizens.” The effort is unavoidably programmatic; it is not a free-for-all where we can invite students to discover and stumble upon the right citizenship virtues all on their own. This is of course one of the key paradoxes for citizenship education in democratic states: just like chemistry or French grammar, it apparently has to be “delivered” to students. And yet citizenship is different from other subjects, surely! A key difference is that optimal citizenship outlook and practices are intended to have life-long applicability in a broad sense (e.g., how to be in society) that make them entirely unlike other content areas.

In terms of weaknesses in the article, the author seems to write as though we are just today beginning to see more value in the traditions of resistance to the dominant paradigms in education scholarship when in fact these traditions of resistance are well established, because there have long been a need for them. Stockden might therefore have referred to people like Henry Giroux, or for that matter, bell hooks (Teaching to Transgress) or even Rousseau much earlier in the article.  Moreover, the “approaches” for teaching that the author jams into the concluding paragraphs of the article – drawing them straight from Gardener, Boix-Mansella, Schwab, and Nussbaum while not adding much in the way of his own ideas – are in my mind much too broad to be useful in the discussion of the need to prepare students for citizenship.