Introduction

Social policy can be viewed as a branch of public policy that is particularly concerned with human welfare or perhaps human ‘well-being’, since ‘well-being is about how well people are, not how well they do’ (Dean, 2006, p 1, original emphasis). It is therefore interested in a whole range of public policies that aim to improve welfare and well-being, for example, through meeting particular needs citizens have or improving their material conditions or seeking to promote certain forms of citizen behaviour, and it includes a wide variety of policy areas, such as social security, healthcare, housing, employment, pensions, social care, crime and education. Education, at a general level, is an important tool of social policy in the UK and elsewhere, concerned as it is with promoting the intellectual and social development of individuals and the socialisation of young people into society through the transmission of particular norms and values.

Much faith has been placed in education as an answer to the problem of how to promote political participation in diverse, pluralistic societies (Barber, 1994; DfEE/QCA, 1998; Carnegie Corporation/CIRCLE, 2003; Kisby and Sloam, 2009a) – especially given the declining participation of citizens in some forms of democratic engagement, which has become a major theme for policy makers and academics in liberal democracies across the western world (Putnam, 2000; Barber, 2004; Macedo et al, 2005; Hay and Stoker, 2009). Citizenship education in schools has provided a specific response to these challenges. Increasing interest in citizenship education is in many ways an international phenomenon, as illustrated by the strong support for ‘education for democratic citizenship and human rights’ in the Council of Europe (2002, 2010).

This chapter explores the varied approaches to citizenship education in secondary schools in the United Kingdom, the United States, France and Germany. These countries are appropriate for comparison because of their broad similarities as wealthy, industrialised, liberal democratic, western countries that have all developed important initiatives to promote citizenship education since the 1990s. The chapter provides a brief summary of existing provision in these four countries. It then sets out important lessons that can be drawn from these different experiences on the basis of ‘desirability’ and ‘feasibility’ (Rose, 1993).