Images and Models of Good Citizen of Nation-States

Since the beginning of the nation-state, there has been a typical concept of community whose core problem falls on the identity in citizenship education. Therefore, Civic and Citizenship Education (CCE) is always listed as a certain “member” of national curriculum. Within the different ideas, the connotations and models of concrete practices are completely different (see Table 2). In the authoritative-like democracies such as South Korea, Japan, and France etc., CCE is clearly controlled by the governments and most of their cultivation of identity focuses on the values of national ethics or collectivism. The same can be seen in the changing China which claims the new model of socialism with Chinese characteristics. The uniform national curriculum can be found in the school curriculum list. In the decentralized democracies such as USA, UK, and Germany etc., CCE is carried out according to the actual situations of those states, and their cultivation of identity tends to adopt the values of individualism. These countries don’t give specific advice or guides for teaching and learning. For example, Anderson et al. identified citizenship concepts among a sample of teachers in the United States (C. Anderson, P. G. Avery, P. V. Pederson, E. S. Smith, & J. L. Sullivan, 1997, pp. 333-64). Almost half believed students should be taught to be questioning citizens, about one-quarter focused on teaching from a culturally pluralistic perspective, and fewer than 15 percent stressed learning about government structures or obedience to law and patriotism. Whatever the big or small differences between both systems, social concerns or communitylike values have been identified as the main direction of CCE. But community does not solely mean obedience. We can find some evidence from another study of teachers in England by Davies, Gregory and Riley (Davies, 1999, pp. 435-459) which found that social concern and tolerance for diversity received the greatest support, with percentages comparable to those in the United States for government structure and obedience or patriotism. Prior in Australia also found that concerns for community or social justice and participation in school/community affairs were important to teachers (Prior, 1999, pp. 215-48). In Hong Kong SAR, Lee also found

Table 2. Models of national curriculum systems of CCE in eight countries

Source: Wang, Xiaofei. Comparative Citizenship Education: paradigms and reform(in Chinese). Guangzhou: Guangdong Education Press, 2015(to be published, the table here is revised), p. 310.

that teachers were more likely to endorse the community-socially concerned citizen and the informed citizen, but less likely to endorse the obedient citizen (Lee, 1999).

Judging from the systems of national curriculum, most democracies intend to accept the way of cross-curricular teaching. Some traditional authoritative countries like Japan, Korea, and China usually include specific subjects like civic education or national ethics education. Most of their models are suffering through changes now. This situation was inherited from the different ideas of curriculum and identity. On the other hand, it has also been influenced by such tendencies as accumulating international exchanges and immigrants, the diversification of social values, and globalization. Therefore, we can find varieties of curriculum in the EU. CCE covers a wide range of topics, including knowledge and understanding of political institutions and concepts, such as EU and I, civics, civic culture, life skills, law and society, history, politics, human rights, as well as newer topics covering social and community cohesion, diversity, the environment, communication, and global society. In a large number of countries, the national ICCS centers on the provision of civic and citizenship education by way of assemblies and special events, the classroom experience and ethos, or extra-curricular activities (Birzea, 2004, p. 20.). Although some countries don’t include the specific subjects or teaching periods, approximately one to two hours should be arranged each week for related topics (the mixed styles are always the common phenomenon). Let us look at the results of the investigation by IEA in 2009. The approaches of teaching and learning specify a specific subject, integrating relevant content into other subjects, and including content as a crosscurricular theme. Twenty-one of the 38 countries in ICCS included a specific subject concerned with civic and citizenship education in their curriculum.(IEA, 2010)