Critical citizenship education in England and France: a comparative analysis

Abstract

The promotion of ‘critical citizenship’ has become a key objective of official school curricula around the world. Using an analytic framework developed by the authors, this paper identifies the diverse conceptions of critical citizenship that are promoted, by comparing the official school curricula for citizenship in England and France. The analysis goes beyond the dichotomous distinctions prevalent in comparisons of education in the two countries, especially those that focus on the contrasting degrees of centralisation–decentralisation, and suggests that there were significant differences in the goals promoted in their curricula with regard to four key dimensions: ideology, the collective, the individual and action. While these differences reflect historical, political, social, economic and cultural differences between the two nations, the analysis indicates a lack of symmetry across the levels of the curriculum, which contributed to the significant spaces that were found to exist which have the potential for teachers and students to creatively interpret how critical citizenship can be understood and implemented in the classroom.

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to all who provided comments and feedback on this article. This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/G018812/1).

Notes

A useful attempt by Burbules and Berk (1999, 55) to pin down the distinction between critical thinking and critical pedagogy is as follows: ‘Critical thinking's claim is, at heart, to teach how to think critically, not how to think politically; for critical pedagogy, this is a false distinction’. For more on this, see Johnson and Morris (2010).