Learning for Democracy
The 'levelling spirit' of democracy commits us to egalitarian principles that are best protected when people have a basic understanding of how political processes function and affect them, both in order to critique democracy and correct its malfunctions. However, significant knowledge gaps about parliamentary process and governance currently limit the extent to which people of all ages can engage in politics, with both a capital and small 'p', in a meaningful way. At the same time, the British people have never been asked so frequently to take decisions, with monumental consequences, about the way we should be governed and the very constitution of our political system. Time-poor citizens around the world are also operating in an information- and opinion-rich environment that can supplement preferences and judgements about politics (indeed most aspects of the modern social world) with surface-level facades of hyperbolic rhetoric. Such a view of politics, a concept of 'thin' democracy, functions on the outcomes of what Daniel Kahneman calls intuitive 'fast' thinking in his best seller of 2011. If we want a sustainable model of democracy for the C21st, then I believe that we need to draw on the importance of 'slow' thinking as an educational process to hone critical capacities and attitudes, to inform justice-oriented and engaged participation, and to [re-]introduce a sense of optimism and public agency to liberal democracy.
Recent research…
Education for Democracy: Twenty Years of Citizenship Education
Funded by the Speaking Citizens Project
This research project ran in 2021 on behalf of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Political Literacy and in collaboration with Shout Out UK and the Speaking Citizens project at the University of Sussex. Drawing on survey data from more than 3000 teachers working in 1970 English secondary schools, this project provided the most comprehensive assessment of democratic education in schools since the Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study in the 2000s. Data collected from teachers was used to delve into (a) the quantity of existing provision (both citizenship education lessons and wider political learning activities) and (b) the quality of provision vis-a-vis teaching practice and staff preparedness. The project also utilised an original representative survey of parents in England to tease out the relevance and implications of thorny questions and concerns about impartiality in the classroom as well as existing appetite or support for democratic education among a key cohort of voters.
The findings of this project were launched on national political literacy day (4th November). The project report can be read here. You can also learn more about some of the context to this work in a short video recorded for the UK’s Festival of Debate: