My Citizenship Education
My citizenship education in K-12 started with “reduce, reuse, recycle.” This was repeated so frequently that I honestly don’t know how old I was when I actually understood what it meant. All that I really took from it as a child was that I should recycle paper products and cans. We never really spoke about reducing or reusing. A few years later we were all given saplings and told that good citizens plant trees, and that we should get into the habit of planting a tree every year. That’s the only one I ever planted and my dad accidentally killed it while mowing the lawn. In ninth grade, we were required to volunteer for a certain number of hours over the course of the year. I already volunteered at my church, so I just wrote a paragraph about it, had my pastor sign it, and moved on. In tenth grade, our teacher had a mock election. We all voted and she tallied our votes and made that her actual vote. We were never actually told anything about any of the candidates. I chose the guy who I hadn’t seen running any smear campaigns.
The focus of my citizenship education was definitely “the personally responsible citizen.” We touched on “the participatory citizen” on occasion, but not much of that stuck with me and likely not with many of my peers either. We absolutely never had any education on being “justice oriented citizens.” This made up all very good at being kind and recycling, and some of us even feel volunteering is important. But we were not nourished in a way that we might become social activists. We were never taught to question things. Why are we having a food bank drive? Why are we donating toys? Why are these neighbourly acts necessary? We were taught poverty, racism, sexism, all of these things were just the way the world works. We were taught to work with them rather than work to eradicate them.
It seems as though your citizenship experience in school was very similar to mine. It was always the basic citizenship concept of recycling or planting trees in your case. In your opinion, how do you think teachers could better incorporate participatory citizenship within the classroom? As well do you believe it is important to introduce all three different types of citizenship in the classroom?
My education on citizenship was also very limited and mostly about the personally-responsible citizen. It is so important that students learn about all three kinds of citizens and learn how they can help in the world. If we had more education on justice-orientated citizen maybe the world would look a bit different if more citizens wanted to get to the root of some problems and not just donate to them.