Citizenship and the Curriculum

In my K-12 schooling experience I can’t say I really recall any sort of direct citizenship education in the classroom (although my recollection of what I learned in any grade earlier than grade 7 is a little spotty). I feel like it was more somehow instilled through the hidden curriculum and expectations of parents. The school aimed to create personally responsible citizens through the school policies. Westheimer describes an aspect of personally responsible citizens as “must have good character; they must be honest, responsible, and law-abiding members of the community” (240). My school’s “values” excepted students to act with respect and responsibility. I remember every classroom in the school had respect and responsibility posters hung up at the front of the classroom. The only other thing I can remember my school doing is through various clubs they created participatory citizens. I was apart of the almost every club but the SLC would be the club that really creates produces participatory citizens. We planned various events and fundraiser for in the school and in the community. Since I was in a small town school, pretty much everyone had to take leadership positions in order to come up with ideas and make the events happen. These clubs “prepared students to engage in collective, community-based efforts” (241). However, for the students who weren’t in clubs, I feel as though they wouldn’t have gotten any citizenship education in regards to the participatory citizen. I wanted to look on the school website to see if their values were still the same and I ended up coming across the schools vision statement which says, “At Robert Southey School our vision is to prepare students to think, learn and act as respectful and responsible citizens.” I think that vision statement is a bit ironic because the school didn’t really do much to develop the different types of citizens. Now that I’ve read the school’s vision I can see why no aspects of Justice-oriented citizens came up in my education. The idea of students  learning to think as a respectful and responsible citizen seems very limiting in my opinion. It doesn’t allow student to learn to analyze and question “social, economic, and political forces” (242) that would lead students to try and find the root cause of various problems. Furthermore, I believe this idea of wanting to create students that think a certain way could stem from curriculum when the emphasis was on curriculum as a product, which didn’t want to have any out of the box thinkers.