Citizenship Education in the Republic of Ireland: Plusça Change?

Abstract

This chapter presents a critical overview of the literature concerning the reception and content of citizenship education which has been taught as a compulsory subject to lower-secondary level students in Irish second-level schools since the late 1990s in the form of Civic, Social and Political Education (CSPE). It seeks to illuminate the “placebo” function that citizenship education serves (Gillborn, Educ Citizenship Soc Justice 1:83–104, 2006). While ostensibly concerned with enabling young people to come to a deeper understanding of social and global injustice and empowering them to take action against these injustices, it presents evidence to suggest that CSPE works to constrain young people’s imagination about what is possible and how they might engage in struggle for a more egalitarian world (Kennelly, Citizen youth: culture, activism and agency in a neoliberal era. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2011). The chapter also interrogates the recent reframing of citizenship within a newly foregrounded well-being discourse in contemporary educational policy, paying particular attention to the ideological work performed by the civic dimensions of a newly implemented well-being program in Irish schools. Specifically, it is argued that the citizenship-as-well-being discourse serves to amplify earlier individualized versions of citizenship promoted in CSPE and to encourage citizen-subjects who are self-reliant, self-responsible, self-managing, and resilient. In so doing, it seeks to demonstrate the ways in which the contemporary focus on well-being detracts from the actual social and material determinants of well-being and considers what forms of citizenship are foreclosed by a citizenship-as-well-being discourse.