What Kind of Citizen? What Kind of Democracy? Citizenship Education and the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence

Abstract

The Scottish Curriculum for Excellence lists ‘responsible citizenship’ as one of the four capacities which it envisages that all children and young people should develop. By understanding citizenship as a capacity and by seeing it as a concern that should permeate the whole curriculum, the Scottish approach to education for citizenship is distinctly different from approaches developed in many other countries around the world. This paper provides a critical analysis of key-documents in the development of the Scottish approach over the past decade. It argues that the Scottish approach is characterised by a focus on individuals and their capacities, by a broad conception of the domain of citizenship, and by an emphasis on activity and community. The analysis not only reveals something about the particular choices implied in the Scottish approach but also hints at some of the more problematic sides of education for citizenship in Scotland, most notably the risk that citizenship focuses too much on the social and too little on the political dimensions of what it means to be a citizen in a pluralist democracy.