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Workshop C
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Workshop A |
Workshop B |
Workshop C |
Workshop D
Workshop C - Session 1
Ruud Veldhaus is the manager of a European project at the Institute for People and Politics at the Dutch Centre for Civic Education. He is heavily involved in work around European Citizenship. I going to shift the perspective a little bit. I am asked to talk about active citizenship from a political perspective and the most essential thing in my speech is the competent 'citizen', what knowledge, attitudes, and skills citizens minimally need to be active citizens. There are four citizenship dimensions: political means the rights and duties that you have as a citizen; the social dimension concerns relations between citizens; the cultural dimension has to do with common cultural heritage and the economic dimension of citizenship refers to the labour market, employment and the consumer market. These mix together in what I call the socialisation process. I will try to define the core competence of citizenship. Why is active citizenship important? We have until now some social and economic arguments. It is clear that social cohesion is very negative with a very high percentage of unemployment. I would like to point to the political perspective. In our country we had some weeks ago elections for the parliament and we are pretty worried about the declining tendency of citizens to participate in formal politics and a political system. If the citizens are not supporting the political system sufficiently the nation state has a serious problem, though the United States has a formal participation of approximately 40-50 per cent of its population in the voting and we still call that country a democracy. Civil Society I would like to point to the function of civil society in this context, and I wonder whether everyone is talking about the same thing when we are talking about civil society. Civil society is in my opinion every organisation and institution in between the Government, the state, the community and the market, and you can discuss which organisations belong to this civil society. Civil society is playing a very important role in democracy and in adult education and in trying to give the core competencies to the citizens. A well functioning civil society is an indicator of a democratic government. The curious thing is that this phrase, civil society, came to Western Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is a very popular phrase at the moment, but it indicates I think where we can learn from the developments in Eastern Europe. In Eastern Europe there was no civil society. After the regime had been changed, you could see a flourishing of civil society where the citizens create their own democracy. Civil society offers citizens additional opportunities for participation and this participation in the civil society might be complementary for political participation. Active citizenship can be learned and that is where adult education comes in. What should be learnt, the most essential thing, is knowledge, attitudes, intellectual skills and participatory skills that aim at making young people and adults better equipped to participate in a democratic society. To make that somewhat more specific, I have formulated the core competencies that are essential for citizens in order to be able to participate.W e will never get a consensus about what exactly should be the core competencies of citizenship education, but I think that in any programmes there should be a minimum knowledge for citizens to know their rights and duties. They should know how to use these rights; they should know some basics about elections and how to participate and they should know the basics of decision making processes. What I think is very important is to know what organisations in the society are there to address for when you see certain problems in society. You need certain attitudes, tolerance towards other diverging ideas and respect for other individuals. You need some intellectual skills: in this information society what is vital is that you are able not only to collect the information but also to be able to absorb it in a critical way. The participatory skills are vital to know what social organisations there are, and also how to participate in them. If you are active in any organisation, you should have certain skills to be able to influence decision making within these organisations, and I think that adult education might contribute to active citizenship by focusing on these core competencies of citizenship education. Core Competencies There are of course several organisations within the civil society that can contribute. I am not a real adult educator, I am a political educator, so I will abstain from explaining what can be done in formal education. There are several organisations in this civil society that can be active to teach the core competencies, political parties for instance. They have very often their own training departments; they can be of use to learn these basic skills. There are trade unions which can be used to transfer these skills, the media, women's organisations - women are very well organised - migrant organisations, human rights organisations and third world organisations, to mention several of them. These organisations can be of use in the transfer of the core competencies. In what way can we try to improve civic participation? Of course there is the school. When you look at the curriculum in the different European Union countries you will not see certain basic subjects like civics or social studies. They are not present in all the curriculums in the formal education. One of the best ways of getting citizens to participate in society of course is raising the general level of education, but I think that civics and social studies plays an important role. What is also important is the democratic atmosphere in a school and in a class and having democratic institutions in school. And what I think is very important in formal education is looking for new methods where you actually learn how democracy functions. For instance, in our country, and I also think it is being used in the UK, there are mock elections where at the time of national elections you simulate elections in classrooms. We have some experience with local councils where we teach pupils and also adults and we also transferred this model to Eastern European countries where we taught them by doing, by simulating local decision-making how the local process functions. When we shift the attention to out-of-school activities, in Holland, we are seeing a change in the way politicians are taking decisions. Citizens no longer accept that the politicians just takes the decisions and that the information services explain to the citizens this is what has been decided. That is not feasible any more. We have cultural shift in the decision making process where we are looking for ways where we can involve citizens in a much earlier phase and often confront them in the last phase with what decisions have been taken. We call that inter-active decision making. It is not always to do with the digital media but that is where you can get people/citizens a role in the decision-making process. You have all kind of variations for what we call open plan processes, that you can organise with the use of the digital media, digital debates. What is important is to learn or to organise activities in which you qualify citizens to be active in the civil society.
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