Education: Citizenship

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. I congratulate, and thank, him not only on securing this debate but on introducing it with such commitment and wisdom.

The noble Lord has spoken about a citizenship programme. I will talk about that in a moment, but I begin by talking about citizenship education as it exists in our schools and where I think it can be improved. I am delighted that the Government have made sure that citizenship education remains a compulsory national curriculum subject at key stages 3 and 4. I am also delighted that it continues to include such subjects as our parliamentary system of democracy, the making of laws, the evolution of constitutional monarchy and the way in which it functions, national, ethnic, religious and other identities and the variety of electoral systems through which people can be represented. This is greatly welcomed.

However, I am slightly uneasy about three areas. The first is what is being taught in the name of citizenship education, how it is taught and within what framework. I put these three together because they are closely related. It is very striking that citizenship education concentrates simply on providing information about institutions. It has very little to say about political ideologies: about conservatism, socialism, liberalism, fascism—the variety of spectra through which people have perceived and tried to organise political arrangements. It is very important that our students know what these ideas and ideologies stand for and how to arbitrate between them. That is my first area of concern.

My second concern is that we live in a multicultural society and that it is therefore important that its citizens are able to relate to each other and to form a cohesive community by developing what I call multicultural literacy or multicultural competence. By that, I mean the capacity to recognise and live with differences and to uncover the commonalities that underpin those differences. It is important to be able to relate to people across cultural boundaries and to be able to recognise them as one’s fellow humans and fellow citizens despite those differences. Multicultural literacy is absolutely vital if a society as diverse as ours is to be cohesive.

The third important thing that is badly needed is more directly connected with the way in which we teach. We teach via bits of information, relying on very fine books, such as those written by my dear friend the noble Lord, Lord Norton. I admire those books. However, it is important to take concrete issues and to show how different ideas and agencies play out within them. For example, if I were teaching politics to 16, 17 and 18 year-olds, I would consider it vital to take a real situation, such as the Holocaust, the partition of India or a situation of ethnic genocide, and to use this as an opportunity to see how different forces come to play so that people who have lived together as good neighbours—as brothers—and helped each other out in times of sickness and tragedy can change so suddenly, apparently overnight, to being at each other’s throats. How does this happen? What are the preconditions? If we do not understand these people, we demonise them, saying that they have all gone mad. Have they become fanatics overnight? In five minutes? That is impossible. There must be a culture or climate within which certain forces are already at work. These forces are kept under control in certain situations but may be released from control when the situation changes.

If we want our students to appreciate what it is to live politically, what political life is all about, we have to discuss not merely bodies of information but concrete issues. If we do not want to concentrate on big issues such as the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide—a fortnight or a month can be devoted to the study of those—another thing that can be done is to ask pupils to bring in headlines from newspapers about important issues that happen to interest them and, starting from there, help them to understand through a range of issues the day-to-day reality of what is going on in the world at large.

While all this is being taught, it is important to stress that citizenship is a lived reality and should be practised. The ethos and practices of the school must therefore reflect the principles that the school wants to impress on its pupils. Pupils can be involved in taking certain decisions within the school so that they can learn that citizenship does not begin once they leave school; it is practised within the school. Decisions are taken on delinquent children, all kinds of acts of indiscipline and managing the school. Pupils can also put forth their views on how the school’s resources should be allocated.

I turn now to the very important point made by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, on having a specific citizenship programme rather than just education. We must realise the following important point. Having lived here for almost 58 years, having arrived as a student, becoming a professor, and all the things that followed, I wonder why the great public institutions of which we were proud and which we cherished have one by one declined in their legitimacy and people have begun to lose faith in them. We used to be extremely proud of our police service. In India, the British police service was always held up as a model. Of course, it can still be held up in that way when compared to the Indians’. Nevertheless, there are problems. We used to be proud of our print journalism and the quality, variety and depth of our newspapers. We used to be proud of our Civil Service, and of the integrity of the NHS. As one looks at all the cover-ups and so on, one begins to ask what is going on. Citizenship should be understood not simply in terms of serving people but in terms of taking custody of our collective life. If there are qualities that we value, I should have thought that a citizenship programme would help to ensure that citizens take responsibility for their society and cultivate the virtues and competencies that are necessary to have the healthy society that we once had and that was the basis of our great reputation.