Contested spaces for democratic citizenship education

In the Netherlands a law on citizenship education was launched in 2006. It is the task of all schools to provide education that will facilitate integration of immigrants and will promote a stronger sense of social and cultural cohesion in society. The nature of this citizenship education is a key issue in achieving socially just and democratic schooling in an increasingly diverse society like the Netherlands.

From a national political perspective schooling is important for the enhancement of social and cultural integration and for producing a qualified workforce for enhancing the nation’s economy. Social theorists like Habermas and Biesta point to the growing influence of the economic and the political on the understanding of the aims of education, the work of teachers and the teaching and learning process inside the classroom. They see openings in a focus on the active development of emancipatory knowledge through processes of mutual communication, participation and personal identity formation.

However the ideal ethnically and socio-cultural mixed site to meet and communicate with each other is only available in a minority of the students’ schools. At the very top end of the schooling system there are the gymnasia where ‘native’ Dutch can live as if in a enclave and at the very bottom end are the schools for lower vocational training of which some have hardly any ‘indigenous’ students. In this state of segregation it is difficult for all students to escape the assimilation forces in society and the limitations of an exclusive elite culture or anti-school street culture to engage themselves in a more egalitarian youth culture.  

In these contexts, do teachers envision themselves as change agents? If so, what spaces do they find in their daily practices in citizenship education to confront the political and economic forces that work as closings to democratic ideals?