689Book reviews / International Journal of Educational Development 23 (2003) 679–705

within Australia. Affection for the OECD appearsto be in roughly inverse relationship to proximity.The British are often notoriously disrespectful andbluntly pragmatic, despite the large contributionmade by individuals to the OECD’s work. The hostFrance is often remarkably under-represented atOECD events. OECD offers a form of compen-sation for Australian remoteness from Europe. It isused to keep the country attuned to internationalleading edge trends – for better, for worse, as theauthors of this study might say. As the book shows,Australians give much to the Organisation, fromsenior bureaucrats to robust critics, and get muchin return.

There are rewarding analyses of the impact ofglobalisation on educational theory and practice,woven into a study of the history and evolving roleof the Organisation in developing, refining andtransmitting educational ideas and interpretingthem into practice. The text relies heavily, perhapstoo heavily, on semi-privileged and unavoidablyselective quotations from actors in the OECDstory. The problem is that the Organisation is athing of many parts. It leaves significant spaces inwhich its own professional staff, and the muchlarger network of consultants on whom it relies,can create new agendas and ask critical and innov-ative questions within a planning framework (five-year mandate periods) set from the politicalgovernance level. Within the education area, thereis a cluster of activities: the main Education pro-gramme, the Centre for Educational Research andInnovation (CERI), and IMHE which is concernedwith Institutional Management in Higher Edu-cation, each with its own accountability and lin-eage, influenced by different intellects and person-alities among its different staff, governing bodiesand consultants.

It is too simple to see this diverse system asserving the interests of global capital, even at ageneral, aggregated system level, but naı̈ve to denythe tensions and judgements that have to be madein the creation and execution of programmes andin the exercise of intellectual inquiry. Just to notethe range of issues addressed over recent years –the future of schools, learning cities and regions,e-learning, and now brain research, and knowledge

management – is to show that not everything iscorralled into a single ideological frame.1

This book is a valuable exploration of animportant subject – the role and influence of anintergovernmental organisation in developing,mediating and promoting policies, practices, andbehind them consensus-making ideologies betweennations. Like the OECD, the book is itself an arte-fact of interest in such an inquiry, both subject andobject of global development. To put it anotherway, much is in the eye of the beholder: the subjectis a tool and agent of global capitalism, or amediator, modifier of extreme tendencies. Theglass is half-full as well as half-empty.

Chris Duke,RMIT University, PO Box 187, Clifton Hill,

Victoria 3087, AustraliaE-mail address: chris.duke@rmit.edu.au

doi:10.1016/S0738-0593(03)00068-3

New Paradigms and Recurrent Paradoxes inEducation for Citizenship: An InternationalComparisonEdited by Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Judith Torney-Purta and John Scwille; Elsevier Science Ltd,Oxford, UK, 2002, ISBN 0-7623-0821-4, pp. 295,index, diagrams and tables, no price given.

Learning Democracy and Citizenship: Inter-national PerspectivesEdited by Michele Schweisfurth, Lynn Davies andClive Harber; Symposium Books, Oxford, UK,2002, ISBN 1-873927-29-0, pp. 304, index, noprice given.

Why is it, I wonder, that I put down these twoweighty and worthy volumes with somewhat

1 The recent volume celebrating the thirty yearcontribution of the retiring Head of CERI, Dr Jarl Bengtsson,is a good balance to the book here reviewed – seeInternational Perspectives in Lifelong Learning, FromRecurrent Education to the Learning Society, edited by DavidIstance, Hans Schuetze and Tom Schuller, all long-serviceOECD men as periodic staff and consultants (OpenUniversity Press 2002).

690 Book reviews / International Journal of Educational Development 23 (2003) 679–705

mixed feelings? Perhaps it is partly the sense thatquestions of what democracy means and why cit-izenship matters are, indeed, among the mostimportant issues of our time, coupled with the feel-ing that what we really need is not more researchprojects which collect, collate and disseminate yetmore data but rather the opportunity to try tounderstand what we already know. But it is also,I think, because I come from a tradition of adulteducation which has always been explicitly polit-ical and politicised in its treatment of citizenshipand democracy. This is somehow at odds with thetradition of comparative educational studies, whichseeks to compare and contrast systems andapproaches rather than to argue about principlesand purposes. Indeed, I sometimes suspect that allthe talk about citizenship may be a way of not talk-ing about politics and political choices. In thissense, it is in its very ubiquity that education forcitizenship may be in danger of functioning as adiversionary discourse which distracts our attentionfrom the real business of citizens. This effect is,apparently, known as ‘depolitico-ideologisation’ !

There is also, of course, the problem of contex-tuality - clearly recognised in several of these pap-ers. Globalisation makes it necessary and increas-ingly urgent to talk to each other across nationalboundaries about these things and to invent somekind of universal language in which it is possibleto do so. And yet this process makes it abundantlyclear how often the same words mean quite differ-ent things. My impression is that a good deal ofideological and conceptual groundwork still needsto be done before we can become clearer aboutwhat we agree and disagree about - and why thismatters. For instance, in terms of how the issuesare framed in these two books, there is a big differ-ence - both pedagogically and politically - between‘education for citizenship’ and ‘ learning democ-racy’ . Umbrella terms like ‘civic education’ simplycompound the problem. And I am not sure that anyof these formulations quite captures the kind ofactive citizenship and democratic dissent recentlydemonstrated when many thousands of youngpeople (most of them too young to be classed ascitizens proper) walked out of their schools andtook to the streets to protest against the British

government’s decision to go to war with Iraq - and,of course, to rescue its citizens for democracy.

So much for my reservations and caveats!New Paradigms and Recurrent Paradoxes in

Education for Citizenship: An International Com-parison is the result of a major comparative studyof school-based ‘civic education’ programmes intwenty-four countries. It draws on national casestudies compiled in the Civic Education Study ofthe US-based International Association for theEvaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA).There is a vast amount of detailed comparative dataand analysis here, probably more than is availablein any other single source, presented in the fairlydense and uncompromising style of an Americantextbook. For example, there is discussion ofcosmopolitan citizenship, teacher training and tea-chers’ attitudes, instructional approaches and cur-ricular strategies, young people’s alienation fromthe political process, national and cultural identity,minority rights and wrongs, the changing relation-ship between the state, civil society and the marketin the era of globalisation, and the need to developmore pluralistic and inclusive notions of what itmeans to be an active citizen in a democraticsociety. Perhaps two particular themes recur mostfrequently in this very varied case material: thepervasive gap between policy rhetoric and edu-cational reality, and the tensions between theimperative of political solidarity and the recog-nition of cultural diversity.

There is also quite a lot of consideration ofmethodological issues in comparative educationalstudies: for example, the problems and possibilitiesof combining quantitative and qualitativeapproaches, the use of case studies and the prosand cons of ‘ thin’ and ‘ thick’ accounts, and prob-lems of equivalence in terms of what is supposedlybeing compared. Personally, I found much of thisover-technical, if not arcane. On the other hand, itmay well be of interest to more specialist readers,such as academic comparativists, internationalresearchers and policy analysts, for whom I assumethis text is primarily intended.

The second book, Learning Democracy and Cit-izenship: International Perspectives, is certainlyless dense but more uneven in quality. The text ismade up of a selection of papers presented at the

691Book reviews / International Journal of Educational Development 23 (2003) 679–705

millennium year conference of the British Associ-ation for International and Comparative Education(BAICE), held at the University of Birmingham inSeptember 2000. It starts by confronting the ‘prac-tise what you preach’ problem with a section on‘Pupil and student voice’ - although I must confessthat I did not find what these particular pupils andstudents actually had to say as interesting orinformative as the more academic arguments aboutwhy it is important to listen to them. Some of thepapers seemed to be stretching the notion of ‘ learn-ing democracy and citizenship’ to its (admittedlyelastic) limits, and I had the feeling that more edi-torial discretion in selecting the contents couldhave been applied to good effect. However, thereare some fascinating accounts here: for example,the gendering of citizenship and its implications forcurriculum, the public and private dimensions ofcitizenship, the distinction between voice andrights, the place of the ‘other’ in national life,democratising research, the civic learning embed-ded in the teaching of music in schools in HongKong and Taiwan, and the re-writing of school his-tory textbooks in post-communist Russia. Whatcomes across is that there is a world of differencebetween education about, through and for cit-izenship. There is also an interesting final sectionof three papers on ‘Adult learning’ which some-how helps to make the underlying issues in whatprecedes it both clearer and (necessarily) morecomplicated.

I was particularly struck by Clive Harber’s paper‘Not quite the revolution: citizenship education inEngland’ , because it confronts head-on one of thecentral challenges for teaching citizenship andlearning democracy in schools. This concerns theproblem of consistency between curriculum andcontext, teacher intentions and student experience:

If citizenship education is about more thanbeing preached at about democracy, then pupilsmust learn how to behave democraticallythrough experience of democracy. This mustinvolve young people having some control overtheir lives at school, which includes some sayover what they learn, when and how. (p 230)

He goes on to demonstrate how, in reality, thepresent system of schooling in England is organ-ised - and has been deliberately re-organised anddisorganised - in ways which systematically con-tradict the rhetoric of learning democracy and acti-vating citizenship. This, it seems to me, is what isreally needed: rather more dialectical engagementwith the real contradictions of education for cit-izenship and rather less liberal muddle and chew-ing of the academic cud about ‘paradigms’ and‘paradoxes’ . In this respect, there is, indeed, a lotto learn - both positively and negatively - fromother countries. But this suggests a rather differentkind of comparative studies.

Ian Martin,University of Edinburgh, Higher and Community

Education, Edinburgh EH8 8AQ, UKE-mail address: ian.martin@ed.ac.uk

doi:10.1016/S0738-0593(03)00069-5

Youth, education and risk - facing the futurePeter Dwyer and Johanna Wyn; Routledge andFalmer 2001, London and New York, ISBN 04152577 86, 218 pages

Youth research is a prime field for the interdisci-plinary investigation of the manifestations andeffects of social change. Its actors are at the fron-tier of changes in the opportunity structures of thelabour market. Dwyer and Wyn’s book, based onmore than a decade’s research into the position ofyoung people finding their ways in the social land-scapes of late modernity, provides stimulating andsometimes provocative perspectives on the socialforces at work in their lives. Research and analysisin this field has a tendency either to over-empha-sise the continuities of deep-seated structuralinfluences or to over-emphasis the discontinuitiesand changes in young people’s lives. Gudmunds-son (2000)1 has argued that these positions tend to

1 Gudmundsson G, Whatever became of society?, NYRIS7th International Research Symposium, Helsinki, Finland,June 2000