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Political Liberalism and Citizenship Education:
Towards Curriculum Reform
John Halliday
a
a
Faculty of Education, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, G13 1PP, UK E-mail:
Version of record first published: 05 Jul 2010.
To cite this article: John Halliday (1999): Political Liberalism and Citizenship Education: Towards Curriculum Reform,
British Journal of Educational Studies, 47:1, 43-55
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POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND CITIZENSHIP
EDUCATION: TOWARDS CURRICULUM REFORM
by JOHN HALLIDAY, Faculty of Education, University of Strathclyde
ABSTRACT: This paper is concerned with Rawlss (1993) account of
an overlapping consensus and recent proposals to introduce citizenship
education in parts of the UK. It is argued that both Rawls and the
proposals mistake the significance and nature of such a consensus.
Partly as a result of this mistake the proposals are insufficiently radi-
cal.
Keywords: citizenship education, political liberalism
1. INTRODUCTION
Interest in citizenship and values education in the UK has been
heightened by the recent work of Tate and Talbot (1997) and Crick
of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA 1998). In its
initial report to the Secretary of State for Education and
Employment, the committee chaired by Crick makes some essential
recommendations, the principal among these being that
citizenship education [should] be a statutory entitlement in the
curriculum . . . established by setting out specific learning
outcomes. . . . The learning outcomes should be tight so that stan-
dards and objectivity can be inspected. . . . They should take no
more than five per cent of curriculum time across the key stages.
This time can be distributed as blocks, modules, as part of exist-
ing tutorial time or general studies time, or as a regular weekly
period. (QCA 1998: 7).
Thus all students and pupils should become good citizens by achiev-
ing learning outcomes specifically concerned with citizenship within
a national statutory curriculum.
This renewed emphasis on citizenship has been widely welcomed.
For nearly two decades emphasis in the UKs curriculum policy has
been placed on the individual acquisition of skills and knowledge
that appear to be easily assessable and instrumentally valuable in the
BRITISH JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES, ISSN 00071005
VOL. 47, NO. 1, MARCH 1999, PP 4355
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OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
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quests for economic prosperity and educational accountability.
Policy has been little concerned with those social and political
concepts that enable participation in a liberal democracy and that
help to determine the ends to which economic prosperity should be
directed. It is hoped that through programmes of citizenship educa-
tion students might come not only to gain better understanding of
themselves and their roles within existing society but more impor-
tantly to enable them to contribute to the development of that soci-
ety. It is hoped, too, that such programmes might help to reduce the
numbers of disaffected, sometimes violent and disruptive students
that are excluded from school and from what is referred to as the
learning society.
According to the initial report of the group chaired by Crick
(QCA 1998) a citizenship curriculum will empower all students to
participate in society effectively as active, informed, critical and
responsible citizens (QCA 1998: 6). This is an ambitious aim for
what amounts to a supplement to an existing curriculum structure,
which has left many students alienated the outsiders as Macrae et
al describe them
For these young people the academic side at school has at best left
them cold and at worst, been a damaging, humiliating experience
from which they have escaped at the earliest opportunity (Macrae
et al 1997: 502)
In contrast students who Macrae et al (1997: 507) describe as
embedded readily accept the acquisition of nationally accredited
knowledge, values and skills and prepare to use them under their
autonomous control in the future. It is not at all obvious that
students of the former type will become more like students of the
latter type through the introduction of a citizenship curriculum
alone. There is a danger, to which this paper draws attention, that
programmes of citizenship education within existing school and
national curriculum frameworks might not achieve the kind of
fundamental change in the political culture of this country (QCA
1998: 4) that the Crick committee advocates.
It is argued that there are two main problems with the proposals
made by the committee. First, the use of the language of entitlement
and empowerment masks the problem of which parts of the existing
curriculum structure are to be jettisoned to make way for the imple-
mentation of the proposals. Crick himself acknowledges that such
language is less harsh than what amounts to compulsory participa-
tion in certain sorts of activities (Crick 1998: 16). There is a danger
however that without guidance to the contrary, it will be precisely
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those activities that actually enable inclusive participation in a
liberal democracy through rigorous engagement with public modes
of reasoning that will be jettisoned. In their place lessons in values
education may be designed to inculcate a shared sense of social and
moral responsibility (QCA 1998) which is one of the strands of the
Crick committees proposals.
The second problem follows on from the first and is concerned
with the nature of the National Curriculum itself. It is argued that
what empowers people is not so much an enforced supplement to a
tightly prescribed curriculum that privileges certain forms of reason-
ing over others and that disenfranchises too many students. Rather
a more flexible structure makes room for teachers and students to
engage with some degree of rigour in a wider range of practices that
connect with students prior and concurrent interests. There are
many modes of public reasoning that enable people to resolve
conflicts of value, recognise constraints of power and know when
and how to try to influence the direction of the society of which they
are members.
These problems arise partly out of the Crick committees inter-
pretation of the idea that citizenship education implies developing
values (QCA 1998: 15). This idea prompts the question of which
values should be developed and the committee finds an answer in
the work of the National Forum for Values in Education and the
Community. (QCA 1998: 15). This forum comprised 150 people of
differing backgrounds who set out a list of values that were common
to all of them. Later through a MORI pole approximately 95% of
1500 people consulted agreed with the values outlines in the Forum
statement. (Tate and Talbot 1997: 3)
Talbot is a member of the Crick committee and the Forum state-
ment provides for her, a simple and empirically justifiable answer to
the question of which values should be instilled in the young (Tate
and Talbot 1997: 1). Tate and Talbot believe that they are often
misinterpreted as suggesting that the common values identified by
the Forum and only these values should be taught in schools. Rather
they insist that rational disagreement about values is only possible if
there are some values to which every person of goodwill will agree
(Tate and Talbot 1997: 3, original emphasis).
Quite apart from the possibility of circularity in this insistence it
is worth noting, as Mulhall recently does, that the degree of passion-
ate controversy already provoked in debates about the work of the
National Forum suggests
that any hope of establishing such a consensus at any practical
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level of concrete detail is unrealistic in the extreme. (Mulhall
1998: 162)
Fairly obviously there are many different views of what constitutes a
good life and some of these views conflict. People may readily agree
on a list of what appear to be obviously good and general values such
as tolerance and human dignity until those values contradict their
own deeply held personal and particular beliefs about abortion,
animal rights and the distribution of material resources for exam-
ple. Mulhall suggests with the author that Rawlss (1993) work can
usefully shed some light on the nature of what could comprise an
overlapping consensus within a liberal democracy.
2. POLITICAL LIBERALISM
In his 1993 publication Rawls attempts to distinguish political from
comprehensive liberalism. He recognises that a modern democratic
society is characterised by many incompatible yet reasonable
doctrines about what constitutes a good life. This recognition gives
rise to the question that he (1993: xviii) is concerned to answer and
that is central to the debate about citizenship education.
How is it possible that [free and equal citizens] deeply opposed
through reasonable comprehensive doctrines may live together
and all affirm the political conception of a constitutional regime?
(my amendment in brackets)
Rawls (1993) answer to this question is to argue that questions
about what is truly good can be avoided in political discourse provid-
ing that there is a sufficient overlapping consensus of reasonable
doctrines that are based on the moral principle of justice as fairness
to which all citizens subscribe and to which the state can appeal in
order to justify its coercive power. Thus citizens are bound to
disagree about what is truly good, but they may nevertheless share
certain doctrines that enable them to coexist peacefully. The Forum
statement of what constitutes a consensus of values seems to be a
paradigmatic example of the content of an overlapping consensus.
A Rawlsian and indeed a QCA citizenship curriculum ought to
give priority, therefore, to the inculcation of political values such as
tolerance and compromise over any comprehensive values held by
individuals. That is because those comprehensive values will always
be rejected as unreasonable by those who do not share them. Hence
such a citizenship curriculum should convey and inculcate
just those virtues and capacities required for taking on the rights
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and responsibilities of citizenship . . . in ways that abstain as far as
possible from embodying or implying judgements about the rela-
tive worth of the competing comprehensive doctrines to which
citizens might commit themselves (Mulhall 1998: 165).
As Mulhall points out, however, the problem with such a curriculum
is that many reasonable people who would agree on the priority of
political values in most circumstances would nevertheless want to
make exceptions for certain deeply held beliefs to which they might
hope to persuade others to accept. In order to distinguish the
reasonable from the unreasonable Rawls has to appeal to the
comprehensive value of reason that is embodied within his version
of political liberalism. Hence the distinction between political and
comprehensive liberalism begins to dissolve. The conclusion
Mulhall draws is that it cannot be assumed
that a conception of citizenship to which all can happily assent is
either available in the public political culture or the only concept
suitable for the task in hand (Mulhall 1998: 174).
3. MODUS VIVENDI OR CONSENSUS?
Rawls distinguishes an overlapping consensus from a modus vivendi
(Rawls 1993: 147). The former is based on universal acceptance of
the moral value of justice as fairness whereas the latter is merely an
arrangement of convenience between two or more parties fulfilling
their own different interests without regard for values of an intrinsic
kind. Just as the distinction between comprehensive and political
values cannot be tightly maintained, so too the distinction between
an overlapping consensus and a modus vivendi cannot be tightly
maintained either.
As Ackerman points out (1989: 17) a modus vivendi
may be the best liberals can realistically hope for under one or
another extreme set of conditions where allowing the serious
political consideration of the power that comes from property or
whatever will tear the place apart, and lead only to the destruction
of a polity that might otherwise have generated productive politi-
cal dialogue on other issues.
Only in the extreme cases of riots on the streets might politicians
be tempted to tamper with a modus vivendi and attempt to examine
in detail the meaning of justice as fairness. That is why it is tempting
to add citizenship education to an existing curricular structure
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rather than to rethink the whole idea of a political education which
might encourage radical changes in curricular structure, school
hierarchies, unequal property rights, access to opportunities and so
on.
However, it cannot be assumed that tampering is always better
than radical re-thinking. It is not clear whether greater justice or
stability results from working within an existing mode or attempting
to overthrow that mode. That is a further reason why the distinctions
between political and comprehensive liberalism, modus vivendi and
overlapping consensus cannot be tightly maintained. Where a
particular group appears to negate a preferred comprehensive
value, it might be perfectly reasonable for an individual holding that
value to try to overthrow the group. It might also be perfectly
reasonable for others to try to hold on to it. The dilemma is similar
to the one that Kuhn (1970) describes between normal and revolu-
tionary science. As Habermas (1971) reminds us in these times,
politics become increasingly conservative and differences presented
increasingly as if they were technical in nature. If Habermas is
correct then it looks as if the value of justice will most often be
trumped by the value of stability. Rawls retreat from comprehensive
to political liberalism may be seen to be his best hope that political
philosophy has to defend reasonable faith in the possibility of a just
constitutional regime (Rawls 1993: 172). However, a further retreat
may yet be necessary.
4. REINTERPRETING AN OVERLAPPING CONSENSUS
Suppose that thinking about citizenship was not concerned with
trying to work out and communicate a common set of values.
Suppose that such thinking was more concerned with the resolution
of disputes locally and in contexts in which their resolution makes a
difference. Suppose that a good life is conceived not so much as one
that is dominated by what appear to be big issues such as the forma-
tion of moral codes and the ways in which such codes are applied to
a range of circumstances. Suppose, rather, that emphasis is placed
on the local resolution of differences when resolution is necessary
and the private attempt to convince others of the wisdom of holding
certain comprehensive beliefs when people care both about those
beliefs and about the very people they are trying to convince. In
short, suppose that emphasis in proposals for citizenship education
was placed on engaging everyone in at least some of those public
practices that enable people to resolve conflicts in contexts in which
the resolution has a point for them.
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Suppose the notion of an overlapping consensus is reinterpreted
as a family resemblance type of notion. In Philosophical Investigations
6567, Wittgenstein (1953) explains how there is nothing in
common between uses of the same word or group of words, but that
there is a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-
crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of
detail. He characterises these similarities as family resemblances;
for the various resemblances between members of a family: build,
features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and
criss-cross in the same way. Suppose that an overlapping consensus
of doctrines is interpreted in a similar way to the one described by
Wittgenstein for concepts. According to this interpretation of an
overlapping consensus, consensus is much more localised and tran-
sitory than Rawls, Tate, Talbot, Crick and others suppose. Indeed,
the consensus consists not so much in doctrines as on beliefs about
what ought to be done in particular circumstances.
On the face of it such a reinterpretation suggests a limited role for
citizenship education. If all that could be said to unite the members
of society is a series of localised agreements with no explicit values
uniting them, then it is hard to see how the state could justify any
attempt tightly to legislate about any kind of values education. It is
interesting to note that the communitarian thinker MacIntyre seems
now to accept that the nation state is not and cannot be the locus
of community (MacIntyre 1994: 303). Rather the locus of commu-
nity has to be a relatively small scale and local form of political asso-
ciation (ibid: 302).
5. CONVERSATIONAL RESTRAINT
The picture that is suggested here is a series of localised transitory
agreements sharing no one thing in common but a series of family
resemblances between different agreements made by neighbours
and groups of neighbours in contingent association with one
another. Such resemblances overlap one another. Let us complicate
the picture still further by imagining that no one is a member of just
one group but that everyone is a member of a number of groups.
On such a picture, conflicts between groups and individuals are
accepted as a normal part of ordinary life. In most cases it is neither
useful nor possible to appeal explicitly to what might have been
learnt as common ground between all members of society because
there is no such common ground, merely shifting sands of agree-
ments to which appeal can be made on a transitory basis.
Ackerman illustrates the notion of conversational restraint with
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the aid of a Venn diagram. He supposes society to be made up of
many groups. P1, P2, P3 . . . Pn represent the set of moral proposi-
tions the members of each group affirm in conversation between
themselves. L is the area of overlap between the propositions
affirmed by particular groups that members of those groups might
use to settle disagreement between them. For most purposes,
conversation should be restrained to the search for L, what might be
called following Lakatos (1978), touchstone. In the case of scien-
tific theory preference, Lakatos suggests that the proponents of two
rival theories must establish some common ground or touchstone
by which the rival theories are to be judged before judging can
commence. Similarly for Ackerman, neighbours need to establish
some common grounds between them before any conflict can be
settled. They do not of course have to settle differences over their
religious beliefs or the justice of unequal distribution of property.
Nor do they have to agree on touchstones for all time. Rather they
have to be able to take part in a wide variety of public practices so
that they maximise their opportunities to secure touchstone with
their neighbours at particular times.
It is not that thick, general and somewhat vague statements of
value such as those contained in the Forum statement are entirely
useless. Such statements may serve a variety of purposes such as the
starting point for productive argument or a rallying cry to what is
believed to be desirable. The mistake is to imagine that such state-
ments are necessarily more important than any other kind of state-
ment. Certainly there are occasions when people need to talk about
their deepest moral disagreements or about injustices that are
strongly felt. For example Coombs (1997: 186) worries that, through
taking account of the diversity of moral traditions represented in
school populations, educators will attempt to carry out moral educa-
tion by engaging students in conversational restraint. For
Coombs this would be an impoverished form of moral education.
Conversational restraint is not a principle to be applied at all times
however. A responsible citizen can neither cut herself off from polit-
ical practice, nor from explorations of her private morality in
conversation with others. Responsibility of this kind can be encour-
aged in schools and other contexts without imagining that funda-
mental moral concerns need to be to the fore in all contexts or that
school provides the only or main context for fundamental moral
deliberation.
There is no need, for example, to try to force students publicly to
recount their innermost thoughts their domestic arrangements, or to
listen to contrived classroom debates about abortion, environmental
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degradation, animal rights or unequal distribution of property with-
out ever having acquired the fundamental knowledge about biology,
philosophy, or politics that bring some rigour to such debates. That
is not to suggest that any member of the Crick committee would
countenance such debates. It is however to suggest that the move
from tightly prescribed outcomes to tightly prescribed activities
designed to achieve those outcomes is all too easy to make in a
climate that favours immediate and obvious measures of account-
ability.
What some members of the Crick Committee might counte-
nance, however, is the attempt by individual schools to emulate the
National Forum for Values in Education and the Community by
setting out a statement of their common values. Such a statement
may then be used to establish what is and what is not acceptable
behaviour within the school. However, there are two main dangers
with such an attempt. First, schools are not noticeably democratic
institutions and it is not clear that their statements of values and
more importantly their interpretations of those statements can avoid
reflecting that fact about their governance. Hence, students only
learn about democratic values through their absence in practice.
Second, as Smith (1997) points out, there is an essential indetermi-
nacy about moral life which implies neither moral objectivism nor
relativism but confidence to make room for the development of
moral judgement. The idea that institutionally sanctioned state-
ments of general values can guide individual behaviour is danger-
ously wrong.
According to this reinterpreted account of political liberalism,
the possibility of a citizenship education rests not so much on talk
about moral principles or principles of justice. The search is not for
a sort of super-set of moral principles LM that can applied across all
practices P (1-n). Rather it is to accept that practices contain their
own set of moral principles and to try to maximise social and politi-
cal capital (Rawls 1993: 157) so that people are inclined to listen to
the views of those with whom they disagree, to tolerate those views
and sometimes to accept them even though they conflict with self
interest. The more that people have genuine opportunities to
understand and solve differences with strangers, the more social and
political capital is accumulated within a community. The more
people know about the practices in which others engage, the more
likely it is that conflicts can be settled without recourse to legal and
bureaucratic procedures. They come to see their common human-
ity without recourse to what could be a debilitating attempt to
resolve what is common to all of them.
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While Rawls uses the device of the original position to try to strip
away all those life experiences that make disagreements so impor-
tant in the first place, Ackerman rejects this device. For Ackerman
the original position is a hopeless attempt to get a view from no-
where that must be a view from somewhere, however well disguised.
Similarly Ackerman rejects Habermass device of an ideal consensus
as an attempt to provide a roughly similar vantage point. Both
attempts are subject to similar objections which Neurath (1932)
summarises through the analogy of a boat. There are no neutral
foundations that can be used to adjudicate between different views
of what is good. Rather there are occasional glimpses of what might
have been or is good and bad that arise when people bleed, show
characteristic reactions to pain and joy and so on. These glimpses
anchor what might otherwise be a floating web of propositions.
Apart from these glimpses, talking to one another is all that people
have to help them to determine what they ought to do.
This account suggests some reasons for initiating more radical
curriculum reform than that which appears to be suggested by the
Crick committee. The present curriculum does not encourage those
students who are neither adept nor inclined to deliberate in the
ways favoured by it. Their immersion in other kinds of social prac-
tices outside school does not prepare them well for participation in
a limited number of practices in which the use of the pen is domi-
nant. The point is that there are many practices through which
people can locate touchstone to enable them to join in conversa-
tions with others to determine what they ought to do. Politically and
educationally these can be just as important as those practices that
guide utterances in the current components of the national curricu-
lum.
6. TOWARDS CURRICULUM REFORM
One difficulty that arises from having too inflexible a national
curriculum is that it works against those teachers who seek to engage
students educationally by making connections between the students
immediate interests and those areas of study that could expand
those interests in productive ways. Another difficulty that arises from
having a national curriculum that is dominated by propositional
knowledge is that it privileges certain practices without warrant. In
his 1993 publication, Hirst acknowledges the primacy of know-how
over propositional knowledge. He sees propositional knowledge as
developments within the contexts of practice . . . and generalisa-
tions concerning successful and unsuccessful practices rather than
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disinterested truths (Hirst 1993: 193). In other words appropriate
use of terms such as know and knowledge is part and parcel of
many practices and not essential determinants of those practices.
According to MacIntyre (1981: 187), a practice is
any coherent and complex form of socially established co-opera-
tive human activity through which goods internal to that form of
activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those stan-
dards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially defin-
itive of, that form of activity.
If it is accepted that there are a multitude of practices into which
students can be inducted and that through such induction, students
learn to distinguish between internal and external goods in the way
that MacIntyre (1981: 188) describes, then a practical induction is
necessarily a moral education. This argument provides grounds for
a curriculum, designed to encourage citizenship, to be concerned
minimally with engaging all students in sufficient depth in at least
one practice so that they come to distinguish those values that are
intrinsic to the successful development of the practice from those
that arise instrumentally out of the practice. Without an ability to
make such a distinction, all conflicts must be resolved by resorting
to power of one sort or another.
More than that, a curriculum for citizenship should be concerned
to maximise opportunities to find touchstones by inducting
students into as many practices as possible so that they come to
acquire those many forms of reasoning that enable participation in
a democratic form of life. Referring back to the Venn diagram, prac-
tices overlap each other to varying degrees and there are good polit-
ical as well as educational reasons to encourage people to take part
in those practices that have the greatest degree of overlap practices
that are morally, cognitively and instrumentally rich.
There are good reasons then for favouring physics as a curriculum
subject to petrol pump attending even though the latter might
appear to be more immediately useful. Legal studies not only over-
laps with a wide range of practices but such studies are also immedi-
ately useful. Rightly the Crick committee stresses the importance of
such studies. The committee is right, too, to argue the case for polit-
ical studies. Such studies overlap with a wide range of other practices
and it seems indefensible that they should not be systematically
taught in schools and colleges. Technologies of various kinds are
interesting, they overlap with many practices, and they are immedi-
ately useful. British curricula and the committee pay little attention
to such studies, however, despite their potential for encouraging
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people to take part in educational and political conversations.
Practices such as joinery and building have internal goods, are well
established, widespread and interesting. An induction into these
practices can be as thorough as an induction into any other practice.
Schools and colleges might not be the best sites for these types of
induction to take place however which has implications for the
current interest in work-place and lifelong learning.
A central problem with the introduction of any new reformula-
tion of practices such as citizenship is that these reformulations lack
a tradition through which ways of distinguishing good from bad are
established. A similar argument might be employed against discrete
courses in the reformulations of health education or social and
personal development. These courses tend to become abstractions
of practice that lack the rigour that comes from working with estab-
lished standards of goodness within traditional practices. They only
have a home, and often only a temporary home at that, within
educational institutions.
A further problem for the Crick committee arises out of its advocacy
of the use of learning outcomes to encourage a form of values educa-
tion. The very formulation of outcomes works against the values
themselves and favours a behavioural manifestation of those values in
the supposed interests of standards and objectivity. Moreover, a highly
prescriptive national curriculum tends to privilege a kind of superficial
pastiche of practices in which external goods dominate. That is
because legislative prescriptions attempt to make goods, which are
internal to a practice, explict. Such a curriculum also diverts attention
away from those diverse practices in which people engage outwith
school and from which they develop a sense of themselves and their
local community. The citizenship committee is right too to stress the
importance of engagement in community and social activities outside
school. Where the committee goes wrong, according to the arguments
advanced in this paper, is in its lack of criticality towards existing curric-
ular structures in the UK, its lack of guidance about what should be
dropped from the national curriculum to make way for the entirely
laudable proposals it makes concerned with community, legal and
political education, and its assumptions about the nature and extent of
an overlapping consensus.
7. REFERENCES
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Correspondence
John Halliday
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow G13 1PP
UK
Email: j.s.halliday@strath.ac.uk
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