Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
About a year ago I moved. In preparation for the move, I tried to sort through the accumulated material in my office only to discover that I am a hoarder. Who knew?
I discovered that I had more old
textbooks than some libraries. Among them was James McCaig’s
Studies in
Citizenship (1925), a book approved for student use in British Columbia according to the 1926-27 BC
Programme of Studies. It turns out you can find the book and the programme of study on the internet!
McCaig’s text is divided into three parts: “The Social Life of the Community,” “The Economic Life of the Community,” and “The Rights and Duties of Citizens. The first describes the contributions of family, school, church, and government to citizenship. The second gives quite a cogent and balanced account of economics and its impact on the community. The last section has three parts: what government owes to the citizen,” “what the citizen owes to government,” and “what the citizen owes himself.”
The text is – aside from the references to “our Anglo-Saxon forefathers,” “our Dominion,” and the use of the male pronoun – quite a comprehensive account of citizenship. According to the BC Programme of Studies, “Studies in Citizenship” was intended for students in Grade VIII. In as much as many students did not transition to secondary education in the 1920s, the text was an excellent primer for someone leaving school.
The mission of BC’s schools was then and until recently to equip students with the knowledge they need to take a full and active part in the economy and society and to understand their rights and obligations as citizens.
With this in mind, I was curious to see how ‘citizenship’ and ‘democracy’ were addressed in BC’s ‘new’ curriculum. The BC Ministry of Education has made this quite easy to do – a benefit to parents and teachers alike – using the search curriculum tool. The tool allows those who are interested to search the components of the curriculum (Big Ideas, Content, and Curricular Competency) by subjects (science, social studies, mathematics, etc.) and by grade level (K-12).
I selected all grades, subjects, and curriculum categories (Big Ideas, Content, and Curricula Competency) and searched for the term citizenship. I was surprised that there were few references to the term and the most frequent among those references was to digital citizenship (taking personal responsibility and behaving ethically and cautiously when using technology).
I repeated the search substituting democracy for citizenship. Nil, nothing, zilch – not a single reference to the concept. I tried again with democratic. Two references. Both were associated with Political Studies 12, a course taken by very few students.
Rights occurs more frequently than the democracy and citizenship. A big idea from student in kindergarten is that “rights, roles, and responsibilities shape our identity and help us build healthy relationships with others.” In Grade 1, the big idea is “our rights, roles, and responsibilities are important for building strong communities.” At the Grade 2 level the big idea is “individuals have rights and responsibilities as global citizens.” Global citizens? Really? If citizenship defines the relationship between a political state and its citizens, what is global citizenship? I do not enjoy the same rights or have the same responsibilities in France or Poland as I do in Canada.
Until recently, a significant gap in education has been the attention devoted to the indigenous inhabitants of Canada. I repeated my search using the term indigenous. There were more associations with that term than with citizenship, democracy, or rights. Indigenous people are conspicuously absent in McCaig’s treatment of citizenship in 1925.
When I mentioned this to a close friend, he asked, “how are students expected to learn about the rights denied to Indigenous people by successive governments, the broken promises and neglect at the hands of settler (Canadian) governments, and the aspiration of First Nations to have government to government relations with Canada and the provinces if students do not understand the concepts of democracy, citizenship, and rights?”
“They can’t,” I replied, “because someone took citizenship out of the curriculum along with democracy and rights.”
The omission of citizenship education is not an oversight. The ‘new’ BC curriculum reflects an atomistic view of individualistic learning. The primary responsibility of schools today is to cultivate the personal capital of the learner. The impetus for learning is the individual's goals and passions rather than any collective purpose. The collective enters the framework only if the individual learner expresses an interest in others. This explains why rights appear, but responsibilities do not.
A curriculum which intends to cultivate community and individuals cognizant of their and others' places in the community must provide a common experience and require that learners engage others, including people who do not share their passions or their values. The curriculum, like our society, must require the individual to consider and negotiate the tensions between self and others, between public and private spheres, and between conflicting ideas and values.