Private idealists in citizenship education

Citizenship education is most often understood as a governmental responsibility, but also other actors are engaged, i.e. mass media and youth branches of interest organization and political parties. There is also a growing number of foundations, idealist groups and organisations who develop and offer educational programmes in citizenship education. As teachers are under stress of a heavy workload and as politics can be a demanding topic to teach, there seems to be a great interest among teachers for such resources that are sometimes available online, sometimes by visits. These actors thus represent an outsourcing of citizenship education, and in Norway a group of seven such private citizenship education centers (CECs) have made a contract with the national government to provide such educational resources to schools. These centers shape citizenship education. Such centers enter the field in a situation where competing conceptions of citizenship education are up against each other. The disciplinary tradition, the state centered political education approach, the emphasis on students and their life worlds and a focus on deliberative skills are four such approaches (Fallace 2017, Christensen 2015). Across such different approaches is also a growing divide between a traditional rationalistic approach and an approach more focused on emotions, empathy, and personal experience. There is also a basic divide between on the one hand, critical approaches to policies and political institutions, and on the other, system legitimacy and socialization. Who do the CECs position themselves in this field of tensions? Theories of privatization assumes that private service provision implies more adaption to user preferences and may lead to commodification. It is thus assumed that as these centers depend on teachers seeing them as helpful in motivating students, and on positive student evaluations, they will be more inclined to emphasise the emotional and subjective, and that they will focus on citizenship education as related to personal experiences of young people. But it could also be the other way around, as these centers specialize in citizenship education it could be that their approaches are more systematic and thorough than what teachers with too many tasks and sometimes weak didactical training can manage. CECs depend on being visible and accessible online in order to attract teachers. It can therefor be assumed that their websites offer substantial empirical data that can be analysed. This paper presents the results of such an analysis. Christensen, Torben Spanget (2015). Hvad er samfundsfag? I Torben Spanget Christensen (red.). Fagdidaktik i samfundsfag. Freriksberg: Frydenlund. 31 s. Fallace, Thomas (2017). The intellectual history of social studies. I: Meghan McGlinn Manfra & Cheryl Mason Bolick (red.). The Wiley handbook of social studies research. Chichester: Wiley. 30 sider.