teaching democracy - sense publishers

T R A N S G R E S S I O N S - C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S A N D E D U C A T I O N

Teaching DemocracyCitizenship Education as Critical PedagogyEmery J. Hyslop-MargisonUniversity of New Brunswick

and

James ThayerUniversity of Illinois

As we move forward well into the 21st century most citizens around the globe seemingly accept the rudiments of a democratic citizenship. And yet in spite of this broad acceptance, a clear articulation of what democratic citizenship entails remains somewhat elusive. In this book, Hyslop-Margison and Thayer achieve two critically important objectives in response to this problem. First, they successfully articulate the threat to democracy posed by current citizenship education programs that adopt a largely instrumental framework fostering passivity and compliance by protecting the established parameters of neo-liberal social design. Second, they show a way out of this anti-democratic trap by illustrating how critical theory, with its marvelous ability to provide trenchant critiques of capitalism and turn those critiques into concrete political action, provides the ideal pedagogical approach to educate our students effectively as future democratic citizens. The authors critique the conditions of modern democratic citizenship and distinguish a robust, or thick, version of citizenship based on citizen agency and participation in the construction of social reality from contemporary models that undermine citizen engagement. They contend that it is only through critical theory and the political agency it inspires that meaningful democratic change can and must occur. Hence, the role of education in their view is not merely to prepare students for a new economic reality, but to prepare them instead to shape that reality in more progressive and socially just ways. This book eloquently argues that the citizenship mission of schools ought to teach students what is possible rather than simply objectifying them as human capital being prepared for the inevitable impact of the policies determined by others.

T R A N S G R E S S I O N S - C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S A N D E D U C A T I O N

Teaching Democracy

Emery J. H

yslop-Margison and Jam

es Thayer

S e n s e P u b l i s h e r s T C S E 4 2

Teaching DemocracyCitizenship Education as Critical Pedagogy

Emery J. Hyslop-Margison and James Thayer

S e n s e P u b l i s h e r s

Teaching Democracy

Teaching Democracy Citizenship Education as Critical Pedagogy Emery J. Hyslop-Margison University of New Brunswick Fredericton, Canada James Thayer University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign

SENSE PUBLISHERS ROTTERDAM/BOSTON/TAIPEI

A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-90-8790-793-8 (paperback) ISBN 978-90-8790-794-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-8790-795-2 (e-book) Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands http://www.sensepublishers.com Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved © 2009 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

Dedicated to the memory of Joe L. Kincheloe

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AUTHORS

Emery Hyslop-Margison is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada. He is past Canada Research Chair in Democratic Learning at Concordia University in Montreal. Dr. Hyslop-Margison has published extensively in such areas as neo-liberalism and career education, philosophy of education, citizenship and critical theory. His recent book, Scientism and Education: Empirical Research as Neo-liberal Ideology, received the Critics’ Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association.

James Thayer is a doctoral student at the University of Illinois in Urbana/ Champaign. He holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the Uni-versity of Toronto and a master’s degree in education from the University of New Brunswick.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication.....................................................................................................v

Authors ...................................................................................................... vii

Preface ........................................................................................................ xi

Acknowledgements................................................................................... xiii

Introduction ................................................................................................xv

Chapter 1.......................................................................................................1

Chapter 2.....................................................................................................31

Chapter 3.....................................................................................................57

Chapter 4.....................................................................................................81

Chapter 5.....................................................................................................97

References ................................................................................................123

Index .........................................................................................................129

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PREFACE

As we completed this text, one sponsored and supported by Joe Kincheloe, we received the sad news that our dear friend and colleague passed away suddenly in Jamaica. Hence, it is with heavy hearts but dedicated spirits that we finish this book.

I first met Joe in 2005 while I was Canada Research Chair in democratic learning at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He had recently accepted a Canada Research Chair in critical studies at McGill University. At the time, I was organizing a regular colloquium series in the depart-ment of education at Concordia and invited Joe to come speak about his work to faculty and students with the expectation he would decline my offer due to the extraordinary demands on his own time. Of course I was wrong. Not only did he accept my invitation to speak but took the neces-sary time to answer all questions about his work from those who joined us on that particularly frosty winter afternoon.

Perhaps the character quality that struck me most about Joe Kincheloe was an absolute absence of hubris in spite of the tremendous academic suc-cess he enjoyed. Indeed, he was the most down-to-earth academic I’ve known in my almost decade of work in the field. His gentle Tennessee drawl added a deeply personal touch to a keen intellect driven compul-sively toward social justice concerns. Joe was a refreshing personality in a field that is far too often marked by individuals possessing an egoistic and inflated sense of self-importance.

Joe was exceptionally supportive of my scholarship and I was honored to have the opportunity to get to know him over the past couple of years. His life and work serve as an example to all of those in academics who believe their scholarship to be more important than career trophies and proletariat production. Joe Kincheloe made a difference to me, to his profession and, most importantly, to the world he cared so much about. Thank you Joe. I will never forget the personal kindness and generosity you showed to me and all of those you encountered. We celebrate you, your work and your life, and we dedicate this modest offering to your beloved memory.

Emery J. Hyslop-Margison

University of New Brunswick December 22, 2008

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, we acknowledge and thank the late Joe Kincheloe for his generous support of our scholarship. We also wish to thank Judith A. Margison, and Christopher Lyons for their invaluable assistance in pre-paring the final drafts of this manuscript. We acknowledge the support received from the Spencer Foundation whose financial contribution to our work enabled the completion of this book. We thank the Faculty of Education at the University of New Bruns-wick for supporting our research and scholarship. Finally, we offer our un-equivocal appreciation to Michel Lokhorst, our editor at Sense Publishing for his support, patience and technical expertise in completing this book.

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INTRODUCTION

These are extremely tenuous times for modern democratic states and for democracy more generally as the international community has drifted dan-gerously towards a monolithic vision of the socially possible. Even in the face of impending neo-liberal capitalist collapse, the primary focus remains on saving a dying economic paradigm. Indeed, the lack of any alternative vision is presently demonstrated by international attempts to save a collaps-ing global economic system. We articulate this threat not to be mere scare-mongers or pessimists, but rather in the face of what we perceive as genuine and far reaching threats to thick democracy. These threats may have been mitigated by the recent victory of President Barack Obama in the United States (only time will tell), but they remain real as the neo-liberal corporate social and economic agendas struggle to survive by drawing on public funds and ballooning national deficits. What emerges from this col-lapse is largely dependent on the strength of democratic movements to move the world toward peace and social justice.

Democracy, even in its most ideal form and applied with the best of inten-tions, is not without its potential shortcomings, but for all its imperfections, as Winston Churchill suggested, it is the best political system available. It often entails many disappointments and yet can bring us to euphoria during its most successful moments, including the recent election of the first African American president. For all of its potential foibles, thick democ-racy, and we emphasize the concept of “thick,” affords the most fundamen-tal and wide-ranging safeguards against authoritarian abuses of political power and privilege. Thick and thin democracies are not opposite ends of a continuum, but rather entirely different ways of viewing democracy and democratic citizenship. We revisit this distinction throughout the text. Thick democracy may be far messier and unpredictable than a corporate oligarchy administered to protect the interests and wealth of a few, but it is also the political system most likely to produce some measure of hope and social justice.

The ideological manipulation that citizens confront in contemporary corporate dominated societies adds additional anxiety to the current state of democratic life. Neo-liberal ideology is present in a range of forms from what we watch on the daily news to the type of curriculum schools offer our children. Our children are bombarded with daily ideological messages designed to convince them that self-worth and social status are dependent on appearance, purchasing power and conspicuous consumption. We are

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measured by what we own rather than who we are as people. Perhaps the most important role of civic education is to highlight the misplaced emphasis such a message conveys to our youth.

Ideology is very often a subtle and osmotic form of indoctrination but it remains a powerful tool that shapes our thinking nonetheless. The model of citizenship we teach in our schools is apt to have a profound impact on how students view their future role in structuring and administrating society. Programs that portray citizens as loyal followers who vote every four years will, by definition, generate weak citizens unwilling to confront and trans-form a system undermining their meaningful political participation. We are interested in challenging such programs and, in their place, we will pro-pose a model of citizenship education, borrowing heavily on critical theory insights, that both informs and empowers future citizens to participate actively in social design and reconstruction. As educators concerned with the welfare of our students and our society, we are compelled to develop a citizenship model that wrestles power from the corrupt corporate interests currently destroying our environment, perpetuating deepening poverty, and turning more and more workers around the planet into little more than a form of disposable slave labor. The attack on labor is unrelenting since even in the face of the auto-sector bailout, it is labor, some of the few remaining manufacturing workers in North America who are actually paid a livable wage, who are being blamed for auto industry troubles.

In the current historical epoch of corporate driven neo-liberalism where assumptions about vulgar capitalism remain largely unchallenged by the prevailing global discourse, the need to entertain, discuss and invoke alter-native social and economic visions has never been greater. We are confi-dent that a thick concept of democracy first constructed on a foundation of critical theory precepts and then properly implemented throughout public education can help us achieve that outcome. There are two major challenges we confront to achieve this objective. Initially, such a program must be thoughtfully conceptualized and developed and, second, it must be fully implemented. We hope to achieve the first objective in the context of this book and we will work actively as committed professionals politically and resolutely to achieve the second aim.

Thick democracy requires more than the simple right to vote at a desig-nated place and an assigned time, but instead demands an informed, engaged and participatory citizenry willing to move society in new and innovative directions. A citizen practicing thick democracy understands all human interaction at a far deeper ontological level, and appreciates that schools are first and foremost political institutions. He or she is prepared to challenge

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abuses of authority whenever and wherever they are encountered to move society toward fairer and more equalitarian policy formation.

In stark contrast to this thick vision of democratic participation, the prevailing educational agenda prepares our children for a predetermined “social reality” that excludes students as future citizens from meaningful political participation. The ahistorical social reality discourse advanced by neo-liberal education programs entails the implicit assumption that socie-ties are somehow constructed in the absence of political and economic human decision-making, or that society is a reality shaped by actions other than those of citizens. Obviously, this vision is not one consistent even with the minimal requirements of democracy. We have not arrived at this trou-bling place in our collective history, one marked by devastating climate change, economic collapse, and growing levels of poverty, by any force other than our agency, or perhaps the lack thereof, and the political machi-nations of those hegemonic forces around us. Hence, it is only through agency and the political acts it inspires that meaningful democratic change can and must occur. Our role in education is not to prepare students for a new economic reality designed by others, but to prepare them to shape social reality in more progressive and socially just sorts of ways. Our citizenship mission ought to teach students what is possible rather than objectifying them as human capital being prepared for the inevitable impact of policies implemented to protect the interests of the economic elite.

Although the majority of threats to democracy seem globally situated, that is, the dominant worldview and threat posed by Milton Friedman style neo-liberal economics that currently grip every country from Canada to China, these same threats are manifested at the micro level in virtually every classroom within industrialized countries. From kindergarten to higher education, the educational focus is increasingly placed on the responsibility of schools to prepare students as workers to accept passively the labor market and consumption ravages of our time. Employment stability, decent remuneration and the attending emotional security they provide are largely a thing of the past for many contemporary workers. This deepening decay in general working conditions is accompanied by the virtual devastation of the global environment where threats of climate change go virtually un-heeded except for the occasional political rhetorical foray into the subject.

The labor movement, once a fundamental bulwark of western democracy as a crucial moral force toward creating a more equalitarian or “just soci-ety” as past Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Eliot Trudeau put it, is now weakened by a combination of anti-labor legislation, ideological condem-nation and declining membership as high paying manufacturing jobs are lost to developing countries to exploit cheap sources of labor and virtually

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non-existent environmental legislation. This situation has created the perfect storm for capitalist exploitation of workers and, yet, this critically important discussion is entirely absent from the citizenship education documents we reviewed for this text. As the neo-liberal economy continues to nosedive, workers around the world are paying an extraordinary price in terms of lost jobs and further marginalization from the political decision-making process.

In this book, then, we seek to achieve two critically important objectives. First, we want to articulate the threat to democracy posed by current citi-zenship education approaches that adopt a largely instrumental framework fostering passivity, compliance and protect the established parameters of social design. Second, we wish to show a way out of this anti-democratic trap by illustrating how critical theory, with its marvelous ability to provide trenchant critiques of capitalism and turn those critiques into concrete politi-cal action, provides the ideal pedagogical approach to appropriately educate our students as future democratic citizens.

As we move forward well into the 21st century most citizens around the globe seemingly accept the rudiments of democratic citizenship. And yet in spite of this broad acceptance, a clear articulation of what democratic citi-zenship entails remains elusive. Democracy in neo-liberalism has become itself primarily an ideological concept to justify military actions taken for far less noble reasons. In Iraq, for example, the U.S. Government has inten-tionally confused democracy with holding contrived elections, while satis-fying an insatiable demand for crude oil and ensuring U.S. corporate control over its production and sale, all of this occurring at the expense of thousands of lives and billions of public dollars. Ironically, even the now defunct Soviet Union had regular elections to determine who would sit in the Politburo. Elections may afford a necessary condition for democracy but they do not in any way, shape or form, provide a sufficient condition for creating a democratic society and our students should not be duped into believing they do. In this text, then, we explore the conditions of modern democratic citizenship and distinguish a robust, or thick, version of citizen-ship based on citizen agency and participation in the construction of social reality from contemporary approaches that undermine such engagement.

In Chapter 1 we identify the considerable current threats to democratic citizenship posed by the monolithic and globally pervasive ideology of neo-liberalism. This political, economic and social perspective presently dictates virtually all aspects of our contemporary social experience within western democracies. It erodes public spaces within our universities and limits academic and public debate about potential alternative social visions by setting itself up as either the best of all possible worlds or, more often, as the only world possible. As we will illustrate throughout the forthcoming

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pages, the naturalization of neo-liberalism is a highly effective ideological strategy designed to mute opposition against the dominant hegemonic forces that dictate the parameters of contemporary democratic debate. It is difficult, if indeed not impossible, to make democratic choices when citizens are unable to imagine possible social, economic and political alter-natives. We will reveal how neo-liberal education programs have appro-priated many of the tools of critical discourse and turned them into instruments of exploitation.

In Chapter 2 we begin to articulate a vision of what teaching for meaning-ful democratic citizenship actually requires by reviewing a range of existing international conceptions and policies related to the field. We suggest that preparing students for some predetermined social reality beset with numer-ous problems and difficulties is not only anti-democratic but both anti-educational and morally reprehensible. It is, in effect, shirking our social responsibilities as educators by permitting the wholesale erosion of our own professional autonomy and political agency as well as that of our students. It is not hyperbole to suggest this erosion is accelerating at an alarming rate with thick democratic citizenship the corresponding victim.

In Chapters 3 and 4 we argue that critical pedagogy, with its trenchant critique of global capitalism and the deleterious democratic implications it entails, affords the most hopeful model of education we have at our dis-posal to turn the present neo-liberal agenda around. We employ the work of various eminent critical scholars to reveal how our education system gener-ally and how we as teachers more specifically can generate the necessary praxis to restore the democratic rights of students, workers and all citizens, not simply the corporate elites, to participate fully in the organization and restructuring of democratic societies.

Finally, in Chapter 5 we explore how democratic citizenship is currently understood and implemented in various Canadian curriculum policy docu-ments. Although all domestic jurisdictions seemingly consider citizenship education a hot topic in public schooling their understanding of citizenship and how it is manifested in curriculum development differs considerably. These policy documents, and the citizenship models and imperatives they contain, will also be compared against the model of thick or robust democ-ratic citizenship developed throughout the text. We will also offer some practical suggestions to begin the long journey toward the thick model of democratic citizenship we support.

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CHAPTER 1

NEO-LIBERALISM AND DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP

INTRODUCTION

In response to dwindling participation among young voters in formal political processes, the academic and state interest in citizenship education has escalated rapidly during the past couple of decades (Sears & Hyslop-Margison, 2007). In the most recent Canadian federal election less than 60% of the eligible electorate bothered to cast ballots. This widespread apathy and alienation is predictable in a social system that depicts meaning-ful social change as impossible. However, governments of industrialized countries appear genuinely concerned with this declining interest in formal political processes in spite of a socio-economic structure that offers citizens very little in the way actual political alternatives. Why are governments so concerned with this precipitous decline?

We mentioned earlier that electoral processes provide a necessary condi-tion for democratic societies, but they also create the illusion of democratic legitimacy. A significant portion of the general population must participate in these elections to afford them any real credibility, lest the entire system declines into disrepute. An election where less than fifty percent of the electorate actually participates may create a crisis of confidence in the entire political process, something that even neo-liberal controlled governments seek to avoid. One need only recall the old adage about the troubling possi-bility of holding an election and nobody bothers to show up. Obviously, then, this is something democratic governments wish to avoid or the basic legitimacy of their mandate to govern will be seriously jeopardized.

Most of the corresponding citizenship programs developed as a result of increased government attention to this issue portray a “good” citizen as someone who possesses certain propositional knowledge, often including rather banal historical facts about national history and electoral/legislative processes, and applies this information in a certain prescribed fashion. Such a citizen might be involved in community service, obeys legal dictates and feels compelled to cast a ballot when civic duty affords the opportunity to do so. One of us was recently involved in a citizenship task force in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. The ideas advanced as a result

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of this participation included emphasizing a set of intellectual virtues consistent with thick democracy. The ideas were entirely rejected by the Minister of Education in New Brunswick.

An engaged democratic citizen does more than cast a ballot every four years during a formal election. Participatory citizens are constantly engaged in public debate, they participate in their community by volunteering or engaging in various forms of political activism. Being a democratic citizen is a full time endeavor that involves seeking new knowledge and reflecting on that knowledge again and again. The idea of a democratic citizen cannot be neatly separated from our occupational lives. As workers we contribute to the general welfare of our communities and in an increasingly intercon-nected world, we must be productive and satisfied workers as well as effec-tive citizens. Citizens must be willing to help identify the highest standards of job excellence regardless of the vocational field, and they must seek to achieve and maintain these standards. A good citizen is also an effective, dedicated and efficient worker who understands his or her fundamental right to form and join labor unions and create change in workplace conditions.

In the following pages we argue that a passive understanding of citizen-ship, such as that represented in the majority of contemporary curriculum policies and documents, merely contributes to the growing sense of alien-ation experienced by many young voters within industrialized nations. These instrumental citizenship policies and programs, almost exclusively focus on the technical application of so-called citizenship “skills,” encourage students to make restricted choices within inherited or prescribed political para-meters, rather than promoting a critical evaluation of the prevailing struc-tural conditions designed to promote hegemonic neo-liberal precepts. The consequence of this instrumental approach to citizenship education is that students understandably believe the political choices before them actually offer no real choice at all. Why vote when voting makes absolutely no difference in generating meaningful social change?

Contrary to this socially reproductive model of citizenship education, a citizenship education based on critical pedagogy considers society and citizenship as dynamic, fluid and contestable constructs where fundamental social change is both imaginable and practically possible. Within this richer and deeper understanding of citizenship, formal political processes are only one form of possible political participation, transformation and resistance. Critical pedagogy also provides students with the conceptual machinery to understand and evaluate contemporary neo-liberal frameworks, a necessary condition for “thick” democratic citizenship. The concepts and ideas emerg-ing from critical pedagogy that offer promising tools for social investiga-tion include Marx’s base/superstructure model and the notion of false


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consciousness, Gramsci’s concepts of ideology, the organic intellectual and hegemony, Bourdieu’s habitus, Freire’s pedagogical objective of conscien-tization and the concept of false generosity, and Habermas’s theories of the life world and communicative discourse. Democratic citizenship, from this perspective, then, is not measured by the ability to live instrumentally and vote within a predetermined social framework, but instead by a predisposi-tion to question, challenge and, when necessary, transform the existing social and political hegemonic structures in radical sorts of ways.

THE NEO-LIBERAL THREAT TO CRITICAL CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION

Neo-liberalism has dramatically shifted the context of contemporary society by dismantling the public mechanisms that previously protected individuals from the ravages of unfettered capitalism. The widespread dismantling of a meaningful social safety net that began in earnest during the 1970s has continued unabated to the point where government services for the economi-cally disadvantaged are now virtually non-existent. In a neo-liberal context, ideologically painted as the best of all possible worlds – a portrait worthy of the satiric challenges launched by Voltaire’s Candide as an attack on Liebniz’s defence of theism – a Darwinian, survival of the fittest social vision prevails. This vision is dominated by a “blame the victim” culture where those individuals suffering from neo-liberal economic policies are portrayed as the authors of their own demise. These unfortunate victims are frequently depicted as lacking the necessary skills to tap into the returns of neo-liberalism, lazy and uneducated, or Luddites unwilling to master the technologies necessary for contemporary economic success. The fault or blame is never situated in the social structure but always in the individual or individuals dispossessed from the advertised bounty of neo-liberal eco-nomic opportunities. Given current circumstances, such a vision of neo-liberalism is, of course, a far more difficult sell.

Freire’s (1970) concept of false generosity is also relevant in understand-ing the emphasis on individual assistance rather than addressing the systemic causes of individual suffering. False generosity has the effect of propping up the existing social and economic structure that is causing the individual problem while creating the illusion that something helpful is being done. Unless such help is accompanied by education that exposes the structural causes of individual human suffering, Freire actually argues that an act of violence is committed by withholding such information even when token help is being offered to alleviate individual hardship on a short term basis.

Within the sphere of education, public schools and universities have been profoundly influenced by neo-liberal policies and ideology, as these institutions become more and more focused on human capital development

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and far less on trenchant critical inquiry into economic, social and political conditions. Once portrayed, at least ideally and in theory, as an untouchable bastion of intellectual freedom and the foundation of democratic societies, universities face ever increasing pressure to conform to the dictates of neo-liberal regimes and a corporate hegemony that places profit over people and credential building over education. In Canada, for example, there is a major shift toward turning colleges and e-learning universities dedicated to training and the trades into bona fide universities. Credentials generate competition between workers for limited employment opportunities but unlike education they do not pose any threat to the prevailing social struc-ture by disposing students toward social critique. In the process and in order to protect the status quo, all critical political dissent is either eliminated or marginalized.

In response to this threat to thick democratic citizenship, then, we con-tend that critically minded educators genuinely concerned with authentic democracy must mount a concerted resistance to the contemporary attack on democratic learning practices and principles. Throughout the following chapters we propose that meaningful democratic dialogue requires reveal-ing neo-liberal ideologies to students and reclaiming educational concepts such as lifelong learning, critical thinking and literacy as primary democ-ratic, as opposed to human capital, learning practices. Meaningful citizen-ship education begins not simply with the propositional content we teach our students, but through the fundamental messages we convey vis-à-vis the very organization and delivery mode of classroom material and dis-cussion design. The task before us as educators is a daunting yet critically important one if we are to restore the health of our democracy.

The hegemonic discourse suggests that neo-liberal logic is irrefutable and its principles are therefore naturalized to citizens within industrialized nations through a variety of fashions including education. The discourse is pervasive and influences all aspects of contemporary lived experience. Market logic is expressed ideologically through various mechanisms and validated as “common sense” by powerful institutions such as the Inter-national Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In Canada, the market economy discourse is espoused by a variety of federal and provincial poli-ticians who utter the rhetoric of inexhaustible economic growth and pros-perity as if capitalism is within striking distance of creating universal and equitable wealth.

Perhaps the most famous common sense advocate in a Canadian context, Mike Harris, the former neo-liberal premier of Ontario, rose to political power in 1995 by asking citizens to join him in a “Common Sense Revolution”


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premised on significant cuts in four areas: taxes; government spending; barriers to job creation (including workmen’s compensation premiums and progressive labor legislation); and the size of government (Hyslop-Margison & Sears, 2006). In essence, all of these imperatives were consistent with the more callous social milieu emerging from the burgeoning neo-liberal economic policies of the period designed to promote corporate interests while undermining the voice and working conditions of labor.

One of the foremost experts in the field of ideology and how it influences social thinking, Terry Eagleton (1991), argues that making problematic and contestable assumptions, such as those promoted by neo-liberal policies, part of common sense thinking is a familiar and often very effective ideo-logical strategy. The naturalization of neo-liberalism has made references to other forms of social and economic organization far more difficult. When something is portrayed as common sense thinking, the implication is that those who reject the attending policies lack common sense and, hence, their opinions and perspectives are correspondingly and more easily undermined, marginalized or entirely dismissed. Those resisting common sense measures are, of course, portrayed as unreasonable or lacking reason.

As the past premier of Ontario, Harris was especially effective in trans-forming the educational agenda from a more holistic curriculum approach to one focused almost exclusively on human capital development. For exam-ple, employing a cost/benefit analysis structure designed to enhance busi-ness profits, he threatened to link all university funding directly to the job placement success of students in respective subject areas. Of course, this policy placed such subjects as the classics, philosophy and history, disci-plines where students actually develop the critical acumen required for achieving thick democracy, in serious and on-going jeopardy. Indeed, these programs continue to face a concerted attack from neo-liberal forces in most industrialized nations. In our Canadian province of New Brunswick, Premier Shawn Graham indicated during a recent television interview that post-secondary funding would support only those disciplines that provided students with marketable and explicit employability skills. Again, such policies represent a direct attack on the humanities and other disciplines that form the foundation of thick democratic thinking. It is especially troub-ling and dangerous that in a period of acute neo-liberal economic decline, government is still willing to link education directly with the needs of the market place.

The value of public education, then, within a neo-liberal context is increasingly assessed in human capital rather than democratic or humanis-tic terms. Currently in the Province of New Brunswick, the government is threatening to transform various universities into polytechnics with a focus

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on producing students with technical skills and employing instrumental learning practices that cater to the perceived needs of local industry captains. Human capital theory, on which such reforms are based and again consis-tent with the neo-liberal ideological tactic of structural naturalization through advancing instrumental forms of learning, views education as a mechanism whereby students can acquire the technical skills necessary for labor market success. Schools and universities are correspondingly regarded as social institutions whose primary, if not singular purpose, is preparing learners to assume their appropriate places in a pre-existing labor market and structural context. There is no discussion in these programs about leading, transforming or invoking new political, social and economic agendas. They depict a predetermined world to students – not a democratic one.

Human capital theory is part of the common sense ideological agenda because it begins with seemingly reasonable assumptions, or trivial truisms, by suggesting that workers are more productive when they receive training, and this training translates into higher wages for the worker, increased profits for business, and supposedly creates a more productive and affluent society. Although popular with neo-liberal policy developers in education, the presuppositions supporting human capital education are problematic when considered from a more critical and humanistic perspective. For example, human capital theory, depicted as a form of meritocracy, poten-tially misrepresents labor market realities to students by exaggerating the role of worker skill and/or ability in determining employment outcomes. Within this social environment, labor market and economic underachieve-ment are portrayed as individual failings rather than structural ones. This renders such programs ideological as well as technical in their generated outcomes. In the process, students are manipulated and prepared as cogs to fit in the neo-liberal labor market machinery. Contrary to human capital assumptions, vocational outcomes and opportunities, as well as the eco-nomic return they generate, are determined of course by a complex inter-action between various subjective, political and economic forces acting in concert with individual capacity and educational achievement (Hyslop-Margison, 2005).

An education entirely focused on preparing human capital for existing or projected labor market conditions is ideological and undemocratic since it undermines student consideration of possibly transforming current condi-tions. Hence, human capital education as manifested within Mike Harris and Advantage New Brunswick style policies – we have much more to say about the later below – threatens the traditional social, moral and democ-ratic objectives of schooling by viewing students as passive objects being prepared for the inevitable effects of globalization. Human capital theory


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promotes the view that worker skill acquisition rather than structural adjust-ment is the solution to various economic and labor market problems.

The naturalization of neo-liberal ideology is widely evident in a range of contemporary curricula, both within and beyond citizenship education, that typically describe present circumstances to students in terms that suggest either their inevitability or desirability. This naturalization of social and eco-nomic conditions constructed through acts of human agency represents another common ideological tactic. Neo-liberal ideology removes the eco-nomic sphere from moral or social discussion by portraying these latter realms of discourse as dependent on the former. In other words, all other spheres of life, including education, are correspondingly designed to address the needs of the marketplace and any interference with market logic, unless it affords some obvious corporate advantage such as the recent public bailout of various financial institutions in the U.S., becomes unthinkable let alone possible.

But how does the implied removal of citizens from meaningful political participation influence our existential need for agency and our desire to act within and upon the world? Habermas (1996) suggests that we are witness-ing the complete invasion of what he describes as the life world by the creation of false consumer needs and the rapid decline of pubic spaces. The life world for Habermas consists of those fundamental human experiences and interactions that generate a sense of inner peace or individual well-being, and provide the necessary community space, such as liberal learning institutions, for democratic discussion. The result of the destruction of the life world not only creates widespread depression and anxiety among the general public, but also increased emotional and intellectual sedation in the form of ubiquitous tranquilizer, alcohol and other drug use, or a turn toward religious escapism. The only way to survive such deep existential alienation is through decreasing awareness, increasingly precipitated by an explosion in tranquilizer use that numbs our experiences within a troubling reality created by contemporary neo-liberal circumstances. The current eco-nomic crisis, a direct result of neo-liberal greed and consumer excess, has escalated these anxiety levels even further. Indeed, we are not far removed, if we are removed at all, from the Soma style public sedation Aldous Huxley wonderfully portrayed in his seminal novel Brave New World.

As we mentioned above, public education in areas beyond citizenship preparation has not escaped the privatization of interests and control consist-ent with neo-liberal policies as evidenced by the growth of the school choice movement in the U.S. Proponents of neo-liberalism adopt an unbridled faith in competition and micro level accountability as the means to correct all possible social and economic ills, and contend that schools and teachers

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should be held responsible for student academic fortunes through the development of standardized testing. As an ideological mechanism, of course, these tests effectively mask the structural causes of academic underachievement and unemployment by viewing educational problems as individual failures. With complete disregard for resource inequity, economic disparity and other structural impediments to academic achievement and attainment, the belief is adopted by school choice advocates that schools could be improved by creating a parallel school system to compete with the public variety. What has actually developed among charter schools is the tendency simply to parallel the same advantages and disadvantages de-pending on the socio-economic conditions of a school’s location. Charter schools located in poor urban areas suffer the same difficulties and out-comes as public schools in these locations. This result was entirely predict-able based on more than fifty years of empirical research in the sociology of education. The primary factor influencing academic achievement and attainment is the social economic status of the students.

In spite of their traditional role as the gatekeepers of intellectual freedom, universities, as we suggested earlier, have not escaped the drift toward human capital preparation and other instrumental demands of the market-place. Faced with huge public financing reductions, universities are scram-bling to gain favor with private industry and governments dominated by corporate influence, and the monies such favor brings. They are increas-ingly focused on technical training rather than on creating informed, critical and engaged democratic citizens. At Concordia University, for example, students are marketed under the slogan “real education for the real world,” a mantra that effectively reduces learning to social efficiency precepts by implying there is a real social world beyond that envisioned and con-structed by human agency and decision-making. There is never a mention of “education for democratic change”. Most universities across North America have witnessed significant cuts to faculty positions and departments within the Arts and Humanities. In the U.S., a significant number of research chairs are also entirely corporate sponsored with the attending obligation to direct research agendas toward studies that pay corporate dividends (Giroux, 2004). More and more research grants in Canada, necessary to supplement dwindling university resources, are similarly directed by private corpora-tions. Dr. Henry Giroux, one of the foremost scholars in contemporary critical pedagogy, presently holds the Global Television Chair at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Even critical pedagogy, then, is increas-ingly marketed as a commodity within the university, something to be utilized to sell as a “product” or “credential” rather than a force for funda-mental social change. As faculty, we are far less concerned, it seems, with


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the intellectual discussions necessary to provoke structural transformation and preoccupied instead with product marketability, career building and capitalist notions of professional and personal success.

Increasingly, universities view the relationship between faculty and students within a business model framework with the latter often described and/or treated as clients or customers rather than junior members of a scholarly community with certain rights and responsibilities to help shape community life. A recent article appearing in a University of Toronto publication extolled that institution’s new focus on students as “customers” who deserved “good service” as a smart move not for delivering quality education but for nurturing long term alumni loyalty – and, of course, con-tributions. Many academics appreciate that some of the very best faculty are not interested in making students comfortable, as in the corporate cus-tomer service sense, but rather shaking the very epistemological foundation on which they stand. Indeed, this is what a quality critical education is entirely about – the challenge of helping students see and understand the world in new and different ways. These insights often generate consider-able discomfort among students (Sears & Hyslop-Margison, 2007).

The widespread commodification of education apparent in course evalua-tion surveys, corporate sponsored research chairs and the customer service discourse emanating from higher education not only appears in marketing campaigns directed at students, parents and alumni, but is also visible through an increasing focus on universities as providers of commodities (under the guise of credentials) rather than supplying citizens with a critical and pre-paratory citizenship education. A critical learning experience ought to prepare students for all areas of private and public life and not simply focus exclusively on vocational experience. Credentializing trumps education and students understand very well that learning in a meaningful sense is far less important than grades and diplomas. Almost forty years ago social critic Ivan Illich warned that Western educational institutions had substituted credentialing for educating, an observation obviously far more salient within the contemporary post-secondary education milieu (Sears & Hyslop-Margison, 2007).

The reduced public funding for universities, brought about by neo-liberal policies grounded in human capital assumptions, creates intense competi-tion between faculty for available private and public grants. The ability to attract funding into the university is now typically viewed in many cases as a fundamental tenure requirement and a measure of one’s academic status. The focus of faculty on the often menial and redundant clerical labor asso-ciated with grant writing distracts academics from grappling with the various social challenges and institutional threats we mentioned above or with

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challenging the neo-liberal ideological agenda more generally. The research funded by major granting organizations, including those in the public realm, often poses little challenge to the neo-liberal structure because it either neglects society as a primary unit of analysis or manifestly embraces prevailing human capital objectives. The majority of “successful” research grants are far more frequently grounded in the idea of social and economic utility than in fostering thick democratic citizenship.

As a result of this trend, and a general shift toward technical and instru-ment subject areas, the remaining space for the critical debate essential for thick democracy within our universities is rapidly shrinking. The idea that a university experience is about intellectual growth, social debate and democ-ratic dialogue has been largely usurped by the neo-liberal objectives of cus-tomer service and consumer satisfaction, credentializing, technical training and instrumental learning. In the current university milieu, faculty members are often reduced from their role of social critic and public intellectual to that of entrepreneurial researcher or even mere clerical proletariat labor. One colleague describes other faculty members in our unit ironically but accurately as “staff ”.

The phrase, public intellectual, was originally developed by historian Russell Jacoby (1999) to distinguish between politically active academics and academics as institutionalized scholars. In The End of Utopia, Jacoby mourns the departure of contemporary academia away from the ideals com-mitted to moral and social progress and toward a market driven technical rationality. Gramsci (1971) distinguishes between traditional and organic intellectuals to elucidate the role of academics as public intellectuals to provoke social reconstruction. Traditional intellectuals typically view them-selves as apolitical, autonomous and independent, qualities intended to create the illusion of objectivity. Although traditional intellectuals may appear politically independent, Gramsci argues they actually are politically con-servative because they reproduce social inequality through their inaction. In his Notebooks Gramsci (1971) encourages the working class to develop its own organic intellectuals to counteract conservative ideologues such as William F. Buckley: “The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in verbal eloquence but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, permanent persuader, and not just simple orator” (p. 10). Such participation is the basis of thick democratic citizenship.

In The Last Good Job in America, sociologist Stanley Aronowitz (2001) traces the career of C. Wright Mills to highlight the personal qualities that characterize a public intellectual: “Mills exemplified a vanishing breed in American life: the radical intellectual who is not safely ensconced in the academy” (p. 239). Mills was highly contemptuous of the idea that


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academic scholarship and research is somehow “obliged to purge herself of social and political commitment” (p. 239). Rather than hiding behind declarations of metholodological neutrality, the archetypical and fraudulent mantra of the social sciences, he openly advocated freedom and emancipa-tion as primary political goals, and worked to establish the political founda-tion for a radically democratic society.

A public k-12 and university education system designed to respond to the needs of the market place predictably appears radically different from one focused on preparing students for the responsibilities of democratic citizenship. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation in the U.S., for example, fails to include even a single reference to either democracy or democratic citizenship, a rather revealing aspect of what it means to be “not left behind” within a neo-liberal framework. The NCLB Act also advances neo-liberal assumptions through its advocacy of instrumental research prac-tices that ensure learning programs are based on empirical research draw-ing solely on observation and experiment. By focusing on scientism as the acceptable paradigm of evaluation the social structure of opportunity as a unit of research analysis, the target of critical theory, is undermined, as is the structural change such research might precipitate (Hyslop-Margison & Naseem, 2007).

Throughout a variety of mechanisms, neo-liberal culture is naturalized to students in public and higher education as an unchangeable social reality rather than critiqued as an ideological movement imposed by special corpo-rate interests on citizens of industrialized democratic societies. Outside the strictures of the global market, education in the neo-liberal order conveys to students there are simply no longer any meaningful choices or decisions to be made. Throughout contemporary career education curricula in par-ticular, and in a variety of ideologically manipulative ways, students are expected to prepare for an uncertain occupational future and are discur-sively convinced that such conditions are beyond the scope of their own political agency. Pedagogical practices, once the tools of critical investiga-tion and social critique such as critical thinking, lifelong learning and liter-acy have been almost entirely appropriated by the neo-liberal shift toward instrumental instruction. As a result, schools fail to prepare students as democratic citizens who possess the necessary understanding and disposi-tions to decide politically between various social possibilities. In many cases, students are not provided with even a glimmer of hope that other social structures beyond those offered by neo-liberalism are possible. Instead, students are portrayed as mere objects in history and inculcated with a consumer-driven worldview devoid of imagination, hope or alternative social visions. They are conditioned through a range of ideological mechanisms

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to view themselves as drones being prepared for a world controlled and constructed by others.

NEO-LIBERALISM AND CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION: THE APPROPRIATION OF CRITICAL DISCOURSE

Inside and outside of education, these are exceptionally difficult times for democracy and for meaningful democratic citizenship. Although many western industrialized nations such as the United States and Canada describe themselves as “democratic” and hold the requisite formal elec-tions, the contemporary threats posed to authentic or thick democratic citizenship by neo-liberal policies and practices are considerable. Barack Obama’s victory in the recent U.S. presidential election is cause for great optimism but numerous threats remain to the thick democratic citizenship model we support. These threats emerge from a social, economic and politi-cal context where corporate power and influence virtually dictate all aspects of our lives.

One current and immediate example of this troubling ideological trend involves the post secondary institution where one of us is currently employed, the University of New Brunswick. This university presently faces on-going threats from a provincial government pursuing a “self sufficiency” agenda that includes political interference in university governance. The learning focus would correspondingly shift, of course, from the critical and liberal arts education so essential to democratic citizenship toward one centered on preparing human capital for local industry. This shift, if successful, poses a grave threat to democracy in a Canadian province where virtually all media outlets are already owned by the same corporate forces – the Irving group of companies – driving this narrow and instrumental educational agenda.

At the forefront of institutions that protect our democratic way of life are administratively independent and intellectually free universities whose primary mission is the unencumbered and sometimes politically contro-versial pursuit of knowledge and truth. Thomas Jefferson, a great American champion of universities described the democratic importance of univer-sities in the following fashion:

What object of our lives can we propose so important [as establishing a university]? What interest of our own which ought not to be post-poned to this? Health, time, labor – on what in the single life which nature has given us, can these be better bestowed than on this immortal boon to our country? The exertions and the mortifications are tempo-rary; the benefit eternal. (1831, p. 540)


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Unfortunately, many individuals within our neo-liberal society have lost Jefferson’s perspective on the role of universities in democratic societies. They no longer consider questioning the assumptions of social, economic and work organization a necessary condition or requirement of meaningful democratic citizenship. For these individuals, a group largely comprised of industry captains, government officials and economic policy makers, or those individuals who uncritically accept their policy fiats, all of the impor-tant decisions about society have been made by powerful others and are therefore irreversible and/or presented to be in the public interest. The only remaining role for the rest of us, whether we are pipefitters, plumbers, students or academics, is responding, entirely passively of course, to the technical and labor market demands of industry. Our only role is comply-ing with the hegemonic will of corporate and political power seeking to enhance their wealth and influence at our democratic expense. Indeed, we are witnessing the systematic destruction of democracy defined as govern-ment of the people, by the people and for the people.

In our neo-liberal era, all authentic democratic learning, or education that encourages meaningful and engaged political participation of citizens in public policy discussions and development and the praxis that follows, is under constant siege as the labor market, the government and their corpo-rate directors now define what counts as “quality” education. Advantage New Brunswick, the program that initially placed the University of New Brunswick and all institutions of higher education in the province under siege, represents yet another example of this anti-democratic perspective since it proposes dismantling significant portions of New Brunswick’s university system, especially programs designed to keep questions about contemporary social and economic organization at the forefront of political debates. The measure of academic design success, according to provincial Premier Shawn Graham, is the number of students attending various programs and subject areas.

The essential democratic role of the traditional university includes provid-ing space and opportunity for the critique of public policy decisions and the corresponding ideological agendas that drive them. Within a social and political milieu where the university’s mission in this area is undermined, democracy is threatened because public debate and the scope of accepted circulating ideas are narrowed to predetermined assumptions and objectives that comply with a monolithic, and in this case, corporate point of view. Success, as defined by Advantage New Brunswick, is consistent with the neoliberal vision of education: a human capital enterprise designed solely to meet corporate and labor market needs. The existential aspirations

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of students and citizens are ignored in favor of shaping them to fill the plethora of low paying, poor benefit jobs consistent with neo-liberal labor market demands. In the neo-liberal race to the bottom, it is a slightly veiled attempt at restoring the slave labor conditions that dominated the 19th century Industrial Revolution.

The proposed transformation of the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, the province’s largest city, major port and industrial centre, into a polytechnic or college is most openly rationalized by the government report on the basis of meeting short term local corporate needs. The Irving group of companies, founded by now deceased industrial magnate K.C. Irving and currently operated by his array of sons and grandsons, holds tremendous economic sway over not only Saint John but over the entire Province of New Brunswick. They are presently the 2nd wealthiest family in Canada with a net worth of close to 8 billion dollars. The government listens attentively to their demands, no matter how regressive or outra-geous, and public policy is typically shaped accordingly. The Irvings also control virtually the entire media and communications industry in the province including the three major daily papers in Saint John, Fredericton and Moncton and therefore impact dramatically on the ebb and flow of any government’s political fortunes:

Saint John’s emerging focus as an energy centre means that the poly-technic would be a natural extension of joint programming that would offer an enormous strategic advantage to the region and energy sec-tors. This would include technical, technological, and degree pro-grams all related to energy, and offered not only in a single institution, but in an integrated fashion that facilitated synergy in research, teach-ing and learning. (Miner & L’Ecuyer, 2007)

Aside from legitimately questioning the rationality of fossil fuel exploi-tation at a time when our entire planet stands in grave peril because of esca-lating carbon dioxide emissions, the democratic learning, consistent with a genuine university education, is usurped by training objectives to satisfy the needs of local industry operated by the Irvings who, similar to all oil companies, seek to drain every last cent of profit from the world’s remain-ing oil reserves.

The central point here is that certain private sector interests in New Brunswick are clearly directing provincial education policy in the region. The local trend toward corporate agendas driving higher education reflects an international shift that began in the late 1970s. The current corporate domination of society consistent with neo-liberal ideology seeks to estab-lish the market, in this case the extremely wealthy and influential Irving


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group of companies, as the sole patron of educational reform. What is good for the Irvings or corporations generally, then, must be in the wider public interest. This is only one example within a far broader and more troubling pattern of corporate domination within democratic societies and the prob-lematic thinking behind the dismantling of democratic learning objectives in public school curricula and post-secondary education.

Within a neo-liberal context, the trend toward corporate responsiveness in education is highly ideological. By ensuring that the goals of the market become the goals of education, students are simultaneously indoctrinated into a monolithic worldview devoid of alternative structural visions. As we noted previously in this chapter, successful ideologies – and neo-liberalism certainly falls into that category – typically seek to make their assumptions natural and self-evident by embedding them into “common sense” or every-day thinking. Under the guise that higher education in a global economy must be restructured to meet the needs of industry, then, universities under the direction of governments as complicit corporate allies, are actually limit-ing alternative social visions based on more humanistic and democratic assumptions about what constitutes a quality education and an acceptable society. Democracies are only meaningful when genuine options are of-fered to citizens both at the conceptual and practical level. The role of uni-versities in identifying and discussing such options is being widely obviated by neo-liberal interference.

Suffice to say that “accountability,” a common catchword these days for everyone outside of politicians and corporate leaders, is a dominant and prevailing theme throughout Advantage New Brunswick. We are told by the report’s authors, one of whom (Rick Miner) is the national president of the Canadian Polytechnic Association, that, “the post-secondary system must be held to rigorous account” so that “students and employers can be confident that what institutions say they are doing is actually done and so that the quality of the outcomes is of the highest order” (Miner & L’Ecuyer, 2007, n.p.). Consistent with the report’s paternalistic approach – neo-liberalism is itself inevitably paternalistic and reprehensibly arrogant – decision-making power for determining these outcomes would lie beyond the bounds of institutional democracy. The political authors of the report suggest that, “decision-making authority would rest firmly in the hands of an appointed board and [the university] president” (n.p.).

Such a narrow and centralized form of university governance represents an ominous threat to the democratic principles of academic freedom and collegial governance on which our traditional university administrative model is founded. To quote the Canadian Association of University Teach-ers (CAUT): “Academic freedom requires that academic staff play a major

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role in the governance of the institution. Academic freedom means that academic staff must play the predominant role in determining curriculum, assessment standards, and other academic matters” (CAUT, 2008, n.p.). The commission’s report, if accepted, would therefore significantly under-mine the role of faculty in university governance at a time when more and more matters of academic governance already fall under the jurisdiction of the university’s managerial class. In the final analysis, it amounts to yet another nail in the coffin of thick democratic citizenship and the role of higher education in helping achieve this objective.

In its analysis of the report, the CAUT suggested the document leaves the public with a false impression that post-secondary education programs, when linked directly to the needs of the labor market, will function as a means to address systemic unemployment and income disparity in New Brunswick. The province has rates of poverty and unemployment, in spite of the Irving’s long-term influence (New Brunswick is sometimes referred to by locals as the largest company town in the world) that far exceed the national average. Indeed, the track record of linking education to labor market prognostications is a notoriously poor one, but even if we accept the report’s rhetoric about planning for a so-called knowledge economy, we are compelled to ask what actual labor market projections are suggesting about current job trends?

The current labor market conditions are not promising for workers. Wal-Mart, the unquestioned master of big box retail outlets, is now the number one employer in both the U.S. and Canada. Further, a recent Industry Canada report established by the Prime Minister’s Advisory Council on Science and Technology found no evidence of a skill shortage among Canadians and a recent version of Job Futures published by Human Resources Development Canada predicts that Canadian employment growth will remain in the comparatively low-skilled service sector for the foresee-able future. The domestic situation mimics that in the U.S. where the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates the vast majority of job creation remains in low skilled and poorly paid retail and cashier occupations. A recent Statistics Canada report indicates that 90% of Canadian wealth is controlled by 6% of the population. Do these trends constitute a so-called “knowledge economy” with increased economic advantage for all? Quite clearly, there is an obvious mismatch between the knowledge economy rhetoric espoused by governments and actual labor market trends (Hyslop-Margison & Welsh, 2003).

Advantage New Brunswick’s claim that its proposed educational reforms will enhance the province’s international competitiveness fails to recognize that success or failure in the global economy is primarily determined by


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cheap sources of labor and inadequate environmental regulations, not the education or skill level of available workers. The proposed restructuring of higher education in New Brunswick may produce a subdued and ideologi-cally compliant workforce, but it will have virtually no impact on alleviat-ing the contemporary labor market difficulties and poverty confronted by citizens, or the profound economic disparity in the province.

The following, then, is a summary of Advantage New Brunswick’s most serious implications for democracy and democratic citizenship:

1) The idea of a university as a fundamental institution designed to pro-mote and protect democratic ideals is replaced by a human capital model with educational priorities and agendas increasingly shaped by private sector and corporate labor market requirements.

2) The academic freedom of all university faculty members is challenged by a proposed governance model based on external accountability and administrative fiat that reduces the role of faculty to token represen-tation.

3) Citizens of one of New Brunswick’s largest metropolitan and poorest areas will be denied the opportunity to send their children to a local university. For some students, certainly those that come from economi-cally disadvantaged backgrounds, this undoubtedly means denying them access to a university education entirely.

4) Polytechnics and universities are expected to pursue practical objec-tives that satisfy labor market needs in the so-called knowledge based economy. However, present and foreseeable employment growth in the labor market is primarily in the low paying service and retail sectors. There is a clear misrepresentation of available employment opportuni-ties for citizens.

In sum, then, what should we extrapolate from this comprehensive challenge to post-secondary education in the Canadian province of New Brunswick that reflects wider trends in post-secondary education? The authors of the report suggest that, “There is no escaping the world we now live in,” a claim only contingently true in cases where participatory democratic decision-making is removed from the realm of public policy formation. Indeed, this is a deeply troubling and intellectually superficial statement from any democratically elected government. This same trend is reflected in various government intrusions into university governance both throughout Canada and internationally.1

As Jefferson understood so well, universities are institutions of primary importance within democratic societies. The proposed range of neo-liberal

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educational reforms offered in the report discussed above undermines both the democratic principles and structures of higher education in New Brunswick. The marketplace and competition exalted in Advantage New Brunswick inevitably create a world of winners and losers where success is entirely measured by corporate or personal profit rather than wider levels of social and community wellbeing. There is little to no interest in democracy or community welfare, but only in enhancing individual wealth and, most importantly, corporate profits.

We are not witnessing a paradigmatic or initial shift in thinking about education in this devastating political strike against higher education, but simply another, more advanced phase of the neo-liberal attack on education as a fundamental requirement of meaningful democratic societies. In the absence of counter-hegemonic forces, a dominant propaganda strategy has emerged, embraced in part by the high level administration of a great many universities that presents market economy principles, practices and require-ments as the inevitable framework for social and educational reconstruc-tion. Sadly, this is the milieu in which contemporary public and higher education occurs, a milieu that threatens the existence of one of the few public spaces remaining to engage in thick democratic dialogue.

Again, the example we elaborate upon above is only one instance of many throughout the U.S. and Canada where neo-liberal assumptions, rather than authentic democratic decision-making, are the driving force not only behind education but social organization as well. One obvious reason that younger citizens are staying away from formal political participation is because they realize their input is simply unimportant given the limited choices available to them. They understand that decisions about social organization are determined in the complete absence of their political input. Students receive this message daily from the curriculum content they encoun-ter in the classroom. Contrary to this instrumental schooling approach, democracy in any meaningful or authentic sense requires far more than holding elections every four years and citizens casting ballots in formal elections. The waning interest in formal citizenship participation is certainly not without good cause since many people, both young and mature, are clearly jaded by political options that seemingly exclude genuine alter-natives to the status quo. Where are the democratic options that create fundamental choices between competing social visions? We have clearly lost our democratic way.

Neo-liberalism threatens authentic, or “thick,” democracy in a number of important ways. An education system that provides individuals with the knowledge, understanding and dispositions to envision and decide between genuine political options is the foundation of a democratic society. In the


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absence of such an education system, as Jefferson understood, there can be a democracy merely in name but not in practice. The assault on critical forms of education, at all levels, is the most disconcerting threat to democ-racy because it is through this type of education that citizens become aware of alternative social models and ideas that challenge the prevailing hege-mony. Education provides students as future citizens with the critical insight to challenge prevailing ideologies that seek to manipulate and control their ideas. In the next section of this chapter, we discuss the various ways that neo-liberalism impacts deleteriously on the preparation of students to assume meaningful roles in a thick democratic context.

CURRICULAR SHIFTS IN A NEO-LIBERAL CONTEXT

The predominant trend in curriculum development during the neo-liberal period, beginning with the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) cross curricular competencies in (1977), has been an attempt to ensure all education programs, especially at the secondary and post secondary levels, are responsive to labor market needs and dictates. This not only includes programs aimed at career preparation – although these programs often represent the worst violation of democratic principles – but curricula within the fields of literacy and, as we later illustrate, even within citizenship education itself. There also has been widespread appropriation of critical education concepts such as critical thinking and lifelong learning by neo-liberal education that reduces such practices to instrumental forms of learning that, as a result of their uncritical approaches, leave the social structure of opportunity as a unit of student analysis entirely untouched.

One area of neo-liberal curricular change, then, is found in the focus of various literacy programs. Literacy in neo-liberalism is typically reduced to a mere technical exercise to decode and assimilate provided information. Sweeping education reforms over the past two decades in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom have been characterized by an instrumental approach to literacy that emphasizes the need to improve the literacy “skills” of students for future employment rather than foster critical responses to text (Hyslop-Margison & Pinto, 2007). When portrayed in this fashion, literacy is reduced to a technical capacity that involves the instrumental understanding and application of externally provided infor-mation. Rather than affording learners the capacity to find their way free of ideological domination, functional literacy approaches are designed to control and direct human consciousness to protect the status quo. The edu-cation programs connected to neo-liberal education reforms overwhelmingly advance a functional conception of literacy designed to prepare students for the labor market challenges consistent with neo-liberal economics. There is

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a complete absence of discourse suggesting that literacy is a manipulative and coercive force as well as a potentially informative and emancipating one.

Clearly, the ability to read, write, and comprehend text is, at least on one level, practically beneficial to students. With enhanced levels of literacy, individuals are seemingly better able to satisfy their basic daily needs such as earning an income, reading newspapers or magazines, purchasing goods and services, or commuting on public transportation. Functionally literate individuals are able to complete employment and loan applications, read schedules, and follow the directives of employers. On the face of it, then, functional literacy appears a practically beneficial capacity that inevitably enhances the quality of life for all learners. It follows the common sense ideological approach we outlined previously in this chapter. Functional literacy instruction assumes that an effective education prepares students to satisfy the economic, social, and vocational requirements of some pre-ordained social and labor market context. In the Ontario secondary English Curriculum, for example, literacy is primarily defined as acquiring the reading, writing, and communication skills necessary for employment in the contemporary labor market:

To participate fully in the society and workplace of the twenty-first century, today’s students will need to be able to use language skill-fully, confidently, and flexibly. Students need literacy skills to enable them to receive and comprehend ideas and information, to inquire further into areas of interest and study, to express themselves clearly, and to demonstrate their learning. (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2005a, n.p.)

Rather than critiquing the textual information they encounter as required within a democratic learning format that prepares students for a thick model of citizenship, learners within this context are expected to adopt a far more passive role by simply “receiving and comprehending ideas and information.” In democratic approaches to literacy, written and oral text is contestable, and students examine the information based on its source and consider whose interests it serves. In the absence of such criticism, the role of learners becomes a politically compliant or passive one where they assimi-late the textual messages provided by some external source or authority.

The broad appeal of functional literacy constructs that respond directly to labor market demands is their ability to promote higher levels of student participation within the parameters of an existing social framework. Knoblauch and Brannon (1993) explain the seemingly innocuous rationale supporting the functional literacy approach: “The possession of skills per-ceived as necessary by particular persons and groups to fulfill their own


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self-determined objectives as family and community members, citizens, consumers, job holders, and members of social, religious, or other asso-ciations of their choosing” (p. 77). However, from an ideological perspec-tive functional literacy also insulates the social structure from critique by naturalizing the established social, economic, and political context. For example, there is no suggestion in the Ontario English or other functional literacy curricula that students might choose to challenge the curricular assumptions supporting the ideas they “receive and comprehend” or any recognition that learners possess the agency and democratic capacity to transform those assumptions and the society they create.

When narrative is presented to students in this fashion it implies that the world is an entity inevitably and entirely shaped by the ideas and actions of others who possess “special” knowledge, understanding, power and influ-ence. The role of students as future citizens is correspondingly reduced to shaping their own existential aspirations and interests to comport with those of industry and the neo-liberal paradigm more generally. Such an approach to education is profoundly undemocratic since it denies students the opportunity to critique the structural circumstances they confront. Thick democratic choice, the type required for genuine and meaningful demo-cratic citizenship, is removed from the realm of possible decision-making. Instead, the ideological implications of functional literacy convey a socially reproductive political perspective to students about the relationship between citizens and the construction of social reality, and between workers, employ-ers, and potential labor market change.

The concept of lifelong learning is another area where curricular impera-tives focus almost entirely on simply satisfying labor market requirements (Hyslop-Margison & Naseem, 2007). Consistent with the neo-liberal assump-tions propelling reform in education (Hyslop-Margison & Welsh, 2003) many organizations influencing contemporary education policy development advance a human capital construct of lifelong learning designed to address unstable labor market conditions. Indeed, the construct within and beyond citizenship education is not really “lifelong learning” per se, but instead a conditioned willingness to accept occupational instability passively while assuming personal responsibility for occupational retraining. One offshoot of neo-liberal policies is that contemporary labor market conditions generally include recurrent occupational displacement and instability that combine to undermine the job security of workers. The following rationale is broadly applied to support the contemporary human capital model of lifelong learn-ing throughout citizenship education:

When it became clear that the world of work was changing rapidly and that students needed new skills in order to integrate this new labor

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market, staff began seeking advice around the design of a new approach to career education. Students would develop flexible and practical life skills to prepare themselves for a future work reality unlikely to include financial security and employee benefits as standard offerings. Students would be better equipped to handle new work related challenges such as temporary work systems and constant change. Students would have well-established lifelong networking and mentor relationships. (Evers, Rush & Berdrow, 1998, p. 181–182)

Although the human capital discourse adopted in this narrative considers learning a lifelong process, its emphasis on employability skills, instru-mental reasoning and technical competence undermines the entire idea of education as a vehicle to promote intellectual growth, critical understanding and participatory democratic citizenship.

The human capital construct of lifelong learning is designed to ensure that students, as future workers, passively accept as human objects rather than participating subjects the occupational uncertainty they will inevitably confront in the new global economic order. There is no mention of students as citizens leading, transforming or directing within this discourse. For example, the World Bank Group (2004), one of many international and multilateral agencies supporting the interests of multi-national corporations, endorses the following concept of lifelong learning:

In the 21st century, workers need to be lifelong learners, adapting continuously to changed opportunities and to the labor market demands of the knowledge economy. Lifelong learning is more than education and training beyond formal schooling. A comprehensive programme of lifelong-learning education for dynamic economies, within the con-text of the overall development framework of each country, encom-passes all levels. (n.p.)

From this perspective, lifelong learning involves the constant upgrading of skills to ensure workers remain responsive to contemporary labor market dynamics. However, the instrumental reasoning required to achieve this externally imposed objective is inconsistent with the critical rationality central to thick democratic citizenship. By interfering with the learner’s understanding that humans are political and historical agents of social change, the human capital view of lifelong learning violates the funda-mental tenets of democratic learning. Whereas a democratic concept of lifelong learning encourages the intellectual, social, ethical and political engagement of students as democratic agents of change throughout their life course, the neo-liberal position epitomized by the World Bank depicts


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lifelong learning as a set of technical skills and competencies that reduce the role of students to passive social adjustment.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) offers a model of lifelong learning strikingly similar to that proposed by the World Bank. The interaction between various neo-liberal agencies ensures this type of ideological continuity. Taylor and Henry (2000) correctly observe that, ‘Education as an activity within the OECD has been broadly legiti-mated on the basis of its contribution to economic growth’ (p. 488). The organization has been actively involved in education for almost thirty years and, although there are some competing views within its purview, OECD policy statements uniformly support human capital precepts. The OECD’s policy work in education is almost entirely predicated on human capital assumptions that portray lifelong learning, not as the pursuit of the critical understanding necessary for thick citizenship, but rather as a labor market survival strategy for workers:

Many individuals will find that the skills they acquired during their initial education will no longer last them a lifetime. Instead of making one key transition from education to work, they are more likely to find that life has become a seamless process of education, training and work. (OECD, 1996, p. 6)

Consistent with the use of this discourse described above, the OECD’s narrow vision of lifelong learning contradicts the principles of democratic learning (Hyslop-Margison & Graham, 2003) by implying that occupa-tional instability is inevitable, and that the role of workers is simply that of meeting labor market demands. Similar to the view of education reflected in Advantage New Brunswick, then, this construct of lifelong learning once again reduces the learner to passive social adaptation rather than promot-ing the potential praxis, a central component of critical theory, that also comprises a necessary condition of democratic citizenship.

The macro level human capital discourse or rhetoric on lifelong learning espoused by organizations such as the World Bank and the OECD are reflec-ted at the micro level in various education programs. These programs are important in relation to citizenship education since the latter, we contend, involves the entire educational experience of learners rather than something that occurs within the confines of a single course. The future citizenship dis-positions of students will be affected by the sum of their educational experiences and not by simply what occurs within the confines of a single subject area.

Many international career education programs expect students to acquire the ‘employability skill’ of lifelong learning as part of a labor market

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preparation strategy. In the U.S. under the heading of Managing Change, for example, Indiana’s secondary level Business Services and Technology Program encourages students, ‘to understand the need and/or value of lifelong learning as it relates to career success’ (Indiana Department of Education, 2000, n.p.). In Canada, British Columbia’s Business Education (British Columbia Ministry of Education, 1998) similarly describes life-long learning as a student adaptation strategy to cope with unstable labor market conditions:

The rapid rate of technological change affects families, workplaces, communities, and environment. For example, individuals frequently change jobs to adapt to changing working conditions. In such a world, students need to be increasingly entrepreneurial and flexible. Business Education and Economics prepare students for this new reality [empha-sis added] by fostering the concept of lifelong learning. (n.p.)

On the international front, curriculum reform in secondary level educa-tion reveals a similar emphasis on lifelong learning as passive adaptation to structural change. For example, Western Australia’s Work Studies reflects this trend:

It is well recognized by community interest groups that the world of work is undergoing rapid adjustment to wider social and economic changes in Australian society. Our ability to adapt to capitalize upon these changes is considered by opinion leaders to be vital to the main-tenance of national, social and economic well-being. (Curriculum Council of Western Australia, 2001, n.p.)

This narrow and instrumental discourse on lifelong learning is interna-tional in scope and reflective of an education system that holds thick democracy and meaningful participatory citizenship in tacit contempt. By blurring the distinction between the constructed nature of society and natural reality, and ignoring Searle’s (1995) crucial distinction between brute facts and social facts, this discourse of “worker adaptation” conveys to students that their role is simply preparing for a predetermined social and economic future rather than engaging with and/or democratically transforming the structural landscape they confront. Programs that convey this message to students are both anti-educational and, in a most fundamental way, anti-democratic.

Many education programs, then, respond to contemporary labor market conditions by reducing lifelong learning to a discursive apparatus that directs students toward self-administered labor market adjustment. Barrow and Keeney (2000) are correct when they observe that lifelong learning in


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public education has become little more than a rallying cry for industry to help answer the question: “Given the pace of technological change, the new information age and the globalization of trade, how can we be assured that we are producing competent and qualified workers who are prepared to meet the reality of the new economic order” (p. 191).

The most damaging aspect of the human capital discourse on lifelong learning involves the imperative that students must inevitably “prepare themselves for a future work reality unlikely to include financial security and employee benefits as standard offerings” (Evers, Rush & Berdrow, 1998, p. 181). This educationally troubling and anti-democratic rationale pre-supposes that learners and workers as citizens in a democracy are unable to influence the conditions affecting their vocational lives or society more generally. Lifelong learning is correspondingly reduced to the acquisition of technical capacities and dispositions that encourage learners to accept personal responsibility for occupational retraining in the face of labor market instability. Students are simultaneously indoctrinated into accept-ing a particular worldview that disregards their role as democratic citizens and agents of social change. This naturalizing of social reality, as Terry Eagleton (1991) correctly points out, sends powerful ideological messages to students about the value and possibility of their future political partici-pation. Neo-liberalism is portrayed not only as the best of all possible worlds but as the only world possible.

The human capital discourse on lifelong learning views education as an activity exclusively connected to economic productivity with the labor market consequences of globalization generally ignored. For example, Kim (2002) observes that,

In the process of economic globalization, employability is expected to depend on continually mastering new skills. Responsibility for constant learning is now increasingly taken by individuals and the private sector. Lifelong learning, it is often argued, is necessary for the individual and for nations to survive, and there are growing opportunities for individuals to achieve lifelong learning. It is less frequently argued that there are potentially social chasms in this new world full of the warm rhetoric of lifelong learning. (p. 148)

Lifelong learning, then, becomes a necessary educational condition for achieving neo-liberal production and ideological objectives rather than a democratic disposition toward exploring new possibilities and alternatives. Consistent with neo-liberal ideology, the human capital approach to life-long learning considers democratic societies as technically managed and market driven systems in which only a select few are schooled as political

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agents and leaders, while the general population is expected simply to become productive workers. Alternatively, as we shall explain later in the text, critical theory understands lifelong learning and all education as a transformative activity at both the individual and social levels. Education is understood as mediation between individual transformation through en-hanced understanding of the relationship between individual and social dynamics, and thick democratic citizenship. Lifelong learning strives to create a critical democracy that is widely participatory, transformative, focused on equality and where human capital is understood more appro-priately as social democratic capital (Hyslop-Margison & Naseem, 2007).

Within the contemporary schooling context, virtually all education and educational concepts have been appropriated to comport with neo-liberal thinking. Even the most critically oriented practices have been reduced to instrumental learning practices. Although respecting student rationality is frequently defended in educational discourse there is often little attention devoted to its various interpretations, and their respective pedagogical and political implications. Rationality most generally refers to the abstract employment of reason, but the application of reason may be either instru-mental or foundational/critical in its approach.

Technical, or instrumental, rationality denotes a series of actions organ-ized to achieve some predetermined goals or objectives. In other words, if the predetermined objective is “x”, technical rationality charts the various steps leading to the realization of “x”. Within education, for example, criti-cal thinking conceived as technical rationality refers to means/end reason-ing that pursues human capital and business objectives with the maximum possible efficiency. The goal is not to engage students in foundational critique about possible social transformation, a fundamental right and necessity of democratic societies, but to afford learners additional technical abilities to apply instrumentally within pre-existing labor market condi-tions. Critical thinking has become another conceptual front in the war on democratic citizenship education.

A critical thinking approach consistent with foundational rationality and critical theory, on the other hand, is not restricted to enhancing practi-cal efficiency within predetermined human capital education frameworks. As a pedagogical approach, critical theory is interested in exploring the entire social, economic, and political context of the problem or issue under investigation. Unlike technical rationality, critical thinking that practices foundational rationality is not merely managerial expertise focused on achieving predetermined objectives, but seeks to evaluate objectives in light of possible social alternatives and visions, and respects the moral impera-tives of engaged participation within a democratic society. These imperatives


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include the right of students and citizens to envision and invoke change within the labor market and elsewhere in society through democratic means. For students to act upon these means, however, requires an understanding of the ideological forces that shape their ideas and behavior. This under-standing is best fostered through a citizenship education based on critical theory precepts (Hyslop-Margison & Armstrong, 2004).

Although critical thinking is a concept initially derived from critical theory (Hyslop-Margison, 2000), the practice has been appropriated by the neo-liberal discourse on education to become more associated with mere instrumental, or means/end, reasoning. Indeed, critical thinking in neo-liberal education is widely portrayed as a problem solving strategy to generate technical solutions within the naturalized market economy system. Although we have enumerated these principles elsewhere (Hyslop-Margison & Armstrong, 2004) it is worth briefly reviewing how some programs are designed to achieve this objective.

Five Steps to Better Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making (Guffey, 1996), a business resource created for teachers of career education, emphasizes the daily practical challenges that workers might expect to confront: “Some problems are big and unmistakable, such as the failure of an air freight delivery service to get packages to customers on time. Other problems may be continuing annoyances, such as regularly running out of toner for an office copy machine” (n.p.). This type of corpo-rate thinking and problem-solving focus is even more obvious in Business Education (British Columbia Ministry of Education, Skills and Training, 1998), a Canadian program that embraces technical rationality more directly by suggesting that, “Critical thinking is an important aspect of all courses. Instruction should include opportunities for students to justify positions on issues and to apply economic and business principles to particular circum-stances” (n.p.).

The international success of the corporate discourse on education is visible in the Iowa City Community School District (2003) Career/Business Education high school curriculum that describes problem solving as “an employability skill required by employers” (n.p.) rather than a potential mechanism to transform society. Similarly, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s Division of Vocational and Adult Education (2003) suggests critical thinking skills help students “solve every-day, practical problems” (p. 1). These critical thinking constructs promote technical rationality by encouraging students to address problems from a limited perspective that ignores wider workplace, labor market, and socio-economic issues. The problems learners are expected to address are practi-cal ones all framed by a business mentality within a neo-liberal context. There

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is virtually no opportunity afforded to students to envision fundamental changes to social organization.

When students are tacitly, or in some cases openly, discouraged from engaging the social and economic forces shaping contemporary vocational experience, their democratic right to participate in directing these forces is correspondingly undermined. Indeed, the moral imperatives of education within a democratic society require students to be provided with the neces-sary knowledge and dispositions to make informed choices about current working and labor market conditions, and entertain possible alternatives to improve these conditions. Any educational strategy that interferes with or obviates this opportunity, including instrumental critical thinking, is decidedly undemocratic. An education for thick democratic citizenship begins with structural analysis instead of precluding students from imagining a different sort of society where social justice and economic equality trumps corporate profits.

Kincheloe, Slattery, and Steinberg (2000) recognize the problem with current critical thinking constructs by suggesting they limit student learning to “a modernist logic in which thinking is hyperrationalized and reduced to a set of micrological skills that promote a form of procedural knowledge” (p. 249). Critical thinking approaches in education that advocate technical rationality view cognition “as taking place in a vacuum,” (p. 249) and inappropriately disregard the various forces shaping contemporary social experience. Students are taught to think and reason in predetermined con-texts. Democratic citizenship education preparation cannot be legitimately taught in isolation from historical context because many of the social and economic problems students confront emerge directly from prevailing struc-tural conditions, and the political policies and ideologies that create them. The inability to find meaningful employment for many workers, an ever-increasing number, is not a personal problem but a structural one. Hence, the resolution of this problem must be sought at the social level and not the individual one (Hyslop-Margison & Armstrong, 2004).

The anti-democratic implications of technical rationality (means/end reasoning) highlight the need to promote foundational rationality as the critical thinking model within all citizenship education. A critical thinking construct based on foundational rationality encourages in-depth student examination of economic globalization and international trade agreements, explores current structural conditions, and considers how these conditions might be transformed to improve the vocational experience of working Americans. A citizenship education based on critical theory precepts questions why manufacturing jobs are outsourced for the sole purpose of increasing corporate profits and why fuel prices are permitted to rise


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unremittingly, creating incredible financial hardship for many citizens, when oil companies are experiencing windfall profits. Without addressing these various forces and raising these questions, and considering the means to mediate the related circumstances, students are politically marginalized, and become workers merely responding to crises arising from the actions of others rather than critically engaged, participating citizens in a meaningful democratic society.

We have heretofore argued that current constructs of critical thinking and problem solving in education are inadequate to meet the epistemic, dis-positional, and democratic requirements of thick citizenship preparation within society. A far more effective, politically empowering, and epistemi-cally coherent approach to critical thinking promotes student understanding of the various forces shaping contemporary social experience. This requires discussing with students issues such as globalization, neo-liberalism, inter-national trade agreements, and the impact these agreements currently have on our lived experience and that of our students. It also involves an exten-sive examination of the role and obligations of business and industry in a democratic society, an open discussion of citizenship rights and responsi-bilities, the organizing and bargaining rights of workers, conditions of occu-pational experience, and the relationship between a sustainable economy, occupational experience, and the environment. More generally, founda-tional rationality in critical thinking as a precept of critical theory is prac-ticed in citizenship education when and only when students are provided with significant information about and engage in analysis of the entire socio-economic context of contemporary social and economic experience.

The dispositional requirements of critical thinking in thick democratic citizenship education are inevitably linked with respecting the democratic right of students to participate in constructing the conditions that shape their lives. This means distinguishing between natural and social reality, and helping learners appreciate that social and economic conditions are formed through conscious human agency and actions, and they can be transformed in precisely the same fashion. We are not living in a predeter-mined social context but rather a socially constructed one. Within democ-racies, citizens matter in a fundamental fashion that recognizes their right to shape social and economic priorities, and they are afforded the educa-tion to evaluate and transform the conditions they confront. William Ayers puts it this way:

We can, of course, recognize and insist that the present moment – in spite of all we are told – is not the end of history. The present moment is not a point of arrival. It is as dynamic, contested, full of energy, and in-play as any moment ever was or ever will be. History was not made

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in the 1960s or during the 1990s or during the great wars. History is being made right now. What we do and what we don’t do matters. (Ayers, 2004, p. 146)

Following Ayer, critical thinking approaches in citizenship education that respect thick democracy treat students as legitimate participants in a democ-ratic dialogue about economic, labor market, and working conditions. The direct political participation, or praxis, of students as part of their citizen-ship experience is a prime objective in citizenship education that helps develop the necessary dispositions required for participatory and robust democratic citizenship.

SUMMARY

The current educational milieu, dominated by human capital objectives, seriously jeopardizes the preparation of students as future democratic citizens. Thick democracy requires citizens who possess the knowledge and inclination to question and transform their social experiences. Citizen-ship education that prepares students to assume this responsibility uses concepts such as critical literacy, lifelong learning and critical thinking to investigate the social structure of opportunity as a primary unit of analysis rather than prepare them for some naturalized social reality.

Critical theorists understand education and pedagogical tools as potential vehicles to explore more deeply the entire social structure of opportunity rather than mere instrumental devices to advance corporate ideology and profits. Contemporary education, including that at the post-secondary level, requires draconian changes in design and delivery to meet the imperatives of thick democratic citizenship. We should recognize the task is a daunting but entirely possible one in face of the hegemonic forces designed to tell us otherwise. In Chapter 2 we elaborate on various threats to thick democratic citizenship education to underscore further why critical theory and the knowledge and concepts it employs are urgently required within contem-porary citizenship education.

NOTES 1 It should be noted that the Province of New Brunswick engaged in further consultation due to wide-spread public protests over the Advantage New Brunswick proposals. A subsequent report was released that virtually sustains all the substantive proposals contained in the original report minus the use of the term “polytechnic”.

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