European Educational Research Journal最新文献

Citizens need to be educated. However, both understandings of citizenship and the education required to disseminate them are inherently contested. After presenting an analytical framework that allows for a conceptually grounded analysis of such contestation, this introduction draws on the papers included in the special issue to identify three axes that have structured the debate around citizenship education in modern Europe: the roles of the state, of place, and of conflict versus consensus. In conclusion, we present the papers included in this special issue and consider their value in both showcasing the diversity of understandings of citizenship in contemporary Europe, as well as the issues that this diversity raises for education research.

This paper explores the rationales of citizenship that underlie the development of economic education. To achieve this, it analyses the activities of a globally active private interest group, the International Thrift Institute (ITI), focusing on three selected historical periods characterized by crises and change. The analysis shows that the education of economic citizens is a history of juxtapositions of underlying conflicts wrapped in a constant need for consensus to stabilize changing political systems. During crises, the ITI championed different, and conflicting, rationales of economic citizenship. These range from the idea of economic education as an experience-based activity that strengthens individuals' emotional reflexes in dealing with money, thereby promoting social cohesion, to the idea of economic education as a transformative intervention that creates economic citizens as customers of institutionalized saving services. The paper argues that economic education, given its normative goals, should not be reduced by private interest groups to legitimise and stabilise their agenda. Education for economic citizenship must remain controversial to raise questions about the economy. These are issues that cannot be addressed through individual consumer behaviour, but rather through political action. Economic citizens need to recognise political agency, collective deliberation and structural conditions.

Educational structures do not only have pedagogical implications; by defining and ranking categories of teaching and learning, and by assigning individuals to these categories, they also contribute to shaping the identity and stratification of citizenries. It is this latter dimension that is often mobilised in the political debate on structures. Existing literature in sociology and politics shows that the main parties in post-World War II Europe have typically invoked liberal citizenship norms based on solidarity, autonomy and pluralism in this debate to appeal to both domestic electorates and international audiences. But what about those who disagree with liberal and egalitarian understandings of citizenship? This paper examines one such movement: the post-1945 Western European far right. Applying rigorous content analysis to an extensive original database of archival documents, we show that extreme and radical right parties and intellectual organisations largely advocate highly stratified education systems and justify this preference with social-order based citizenship norms - but we also find rhetorical variation. While existing theories of liberal-democratic education politics can serve to understand some of this variation, more specific theorising may be needed for educational research to develop a finer-grained understanding of the rhetorical and positional choices of actors who reject liberal-democratic principles.