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Cosmopolitanism, the social imagination, and citizenship education: what shall we teach?

Paper presented at the Fourth Annual International Metropolis Conference, Washington, D.C. December 7-11, 1999

Linda Farr Darling

The University of British Columbia

linda.darling@ubc.ca

DRAFT

Introduction

This paper begins from the premise that citizenship education, or political education, is a type of moral education, a claim analogous to those made by Nozick and Kymlicka that political philosophy is a form of moral argument in which we try to work through (and justify) variously interpreted ethical ideals that human beings cherish, such as freedom and justice. Taken seriously, this claim compels us to recast debates about the purpose and form of citizenship education, as examination of these same ethical ideals and practices ought to be at its centre.

However, some of the present discussions about the goals of citizenship education take us away from this pursuit, in particular discussion about where our political allegiances ought to lie. Debates between cosmopolitans, who want to prepare citizens of the world (Nussbaum) and nationalists, who want to teach about our own democratic traditions (Rorty, Hackney), distract us from more important questions of what we ought to teach and why. Questions of purpose rather than polity direct our attention back to the dispositions and understandings required for responsible citizenship, or what might be called the necessary conditions for effective participation in any public sphere. In this paper, I outline the contours of the debate between nationalists and cosmopolitans, and show why I believe these debates to be distractions, deflecting our attention from the real point of political education. I also briefly frame what I believe should be the central features of this educational enterprise, and in doing so offer an argument for teaching about the nature of moral disagreement alongside encouraging the development and expression of communicative virtues necessary for fruitful deliberation.

Part 1: Nationalism vs. Cosmopolitanism

The landscape of political philosophy has experienced ground breaking shifts in recent years, thrusting previously entrenched features aside to make room for new ones. For a long time in Western thought, a traditional line in the sand has demarcated thinkers on the left from those on the right, socialists from free market capitalists, those who believe in equality as the first principle from those who cherish freedom above all, and liberals somewhere in between but on the same line. The mainstream concerns of political theory have been with particular conceptions of justice and freedom as they operate in the public sphere. These concerns have also been central to citizenship education in schools. Certainly these were the two dominant political themes in my own school experience, and I expect the same is true for other students exploring political matters in their social studies classes. Much of what I learned about rights and responsibilities (what we owe people, what we are owed) was laid within this traditional political framework.

According to Will Kymlicka (1992) the image of one line on which political principles fall from left to right has been inadequate for some time as a description of how we view the political world and our commitments within it. Present political theories and realities just don=t fit the traditional picture. AT{t}here are issues of our historical and communal >embeddedness= which are not addressed in traditional left-right disputes,@ Kymlicka writes. A We cannot begin to understand feminism and communitarianism, (to name just two) if we insist on locating them somewhere on a single left-right continuum.= (p. 2).

The philosophical debates of the last twenty years have brought to light the fact that the political ground beneath our feet is actually shifting, and more than the traditional left-right continuum is changing. For one thing, the public sphere on which our attention has focused and in which our principles are debated and practiced, has been shown, by Nancy Fraser (1990) and others to be an exclusive sphere that leaves many people on the margins or completely on the outside. It is also said that this sphere ignores at its peril the historical contexts in which our political and social practices arose. (Walzer, 1994, MacIntyre, 1985). Redefining and reconstructing the contours of the public sphere to effectively address concerns of liberty and equality from multiple perspectives, has been an important project of the latter half of the 20^th century, and theorists including Arendt, Habermas, Benhabib, Taylor, and others have taken it on.

Questions about the public sphere, its scope, its central concerns, its members and their status, have also surfaced in discussions about citizenship education. For the past fifty years, writes Rahima Wade (1999), citizenship education has been promoted as the place in the curriculum where students learn about democratic ideals, policies and practices of their nation. In this educational arena too, as within the public sphere, we have seen the application of social justice in actual contexts contested by women, minorities, and others, and never more vehemently than in the multicultural milieu we now find ourselves in, at the very edge of the millennium. Which justice? For whom? Whose democracy is it? What does it mean to have rights? What happens when rights conflict? How will we teach these things? Our school curricula, our textbooks, our teacher preparation programs have all struggled to keep up with information dealing with emerging political issues and agendas from a multitude of directions: indigenous peoples, immigrants, environmentalists, labour groups, and so on. Faced with so many competing voices clamoring for recognition, educators with an interest in citizenship education for social justice, such David Sehr, have tried to re-imagine the terrain. (Sehr, 1997).

Part of the debate about the goals and content of citizenship education keeps returning to the question: What ought to be the polity , that is the context for our civic or public concern? Communitarians, of course, (MacIntyre for one) advocate for the most local of attachments: neighborhood, community, cultural group. But others, like Sheldon Hackney and recently Richard Rorty, look to the national context where the ideals of democracy are firmly rooted in our consciousness if not all of our practices. And recently, (following some years after the first calls for global education) there has been a resurgence of interest in an ancient Greek ideal: cosmopolitanism. (Ignatieff, Nussbaum) Proponents of the cosmopolitan ideal argue that we should be citizens of the world and that citizenship education should prepare us for global allegience. Strident allegiance to countries, or extreme patriotism as it is found in many parts of the world, is destructive and damaging to prospects for global peace. At the very least, even >moderate= patriotism renders people blind to the interests or conditions of those beyond their own borders. According to Michael Ignatieff in Warrior=s Honor, and Martha Nussbaum, who has made cosmopolitanism the subject of a recent book, nationalism inevitably leads to disastrous results. In supporting the principle of >hail motherland,= Martha Nussbaum writes that Americans are,

giving the fact of being American special salience in moral and political deliberation, and pride in a specifically American identity and a specifically American citizenship a special power among the motivations to political action. I believeYthat this emphasis on patriotic pride is both morally dangerous and, ultimately subversive of some of the worthy goals patriotism sets out to serve- for example the goal of national unity in devotion to worthy moral ideals of justice and equality.(p. 3)

Instead, these goals would be better served by the Avery old ideal of the cosmopolitanYa person whose allegiance is to the worldwide community of human beings@ (p. 4) not to any particular nation. In her essay, APatriotism and Cosmopolitanism,@ Nussbaum offers the Stoics= arguments for cosmopolitanism and more to the point here, education for cosmopolitanism.

_ First, the study of humanity entailed in such a conception of civic education and attachment leads to more complete self-knowledge. We see ourselves more clearly in relation to others.

_ Second, political deliberation is continually sabotaged by partisan loyalties. This can be avoided by taking a larger world view and recognizing an allegiance to justice that transcends the local. We will make headway solving problems that require international cooperation only when we consider seriously the interests of others.

_ Third, cosmopolitanism Arecognizes in people what isYmost worthy of respect and acknowledgment: their aspirations to justice and goodness and their capacities for reasoning in this connection.@(p.8)

According to Nussbaum, one does not have to give up local affiliations in order to be a world citizen. Indeed the Stoics found these to the Asource of great richness in life.@ (p.9) ABut we should also work to make all human beings part of our community of dialogue and concernY@ (p9) In educational contexts this means learning to recognize humanity in spite of difference and coming to understand our common ends, no matter how variously they may be instantiated in ways of life around the world. An education that takes national boundaries as morally salient reinforces the Aunexamined feeling that one=s own preferences and ways are natural and normal.@ (p. ) Nussbaum even goes so far as to say that self-definition by reference to one=s country is reference to a Amorally irrelevant characteristic.@

Nussbaum=s critics

Nussbaum=s critics offer a number of different arguments, some claiming that a nationalist focus for citizenship education remains the most appropriate because it links us to our own histories and traditions. Gertrude Himmelfarb and Michael Walzer (whose names are not often said in the same breath) both argue that citizenship has little meaning except in the context of a state. There is no world community, writes Himmelfarb, so what is it I might belong to as a citizen and how would I find out what my responsibilities are? This is not to say that we don=t have obligations beyond our borders, but that the primary focus of our civic concern ought to be on national matters. Walzer writes, AI have commitments beyond the borders of this or any other country, to fellow Jews, say, or to social democrats around the world, or to people in trouble in far-away countries, but these are not citizenship- like commitments.@ (p. 126) Those belong to a state- where our allegiance is real and concrete, not merely imagined or hoped for.

Even if we could conceive of some kind of world community that circled all of humanity, it=s such an abstraction, that it=s hard to know what we might be attaching ourselves to. This is the view of Sissela Bok in arguing against a cosmopolitan ideal for education. Beyond being able to assert that we are all human beings, what can we say by way of concrete detail about the lives and circumstances of people on other continents (or even the next state or province for that matter)? Extending our circles of attachment to the entire world is not an attainable goal. Our difficulty in accurately imagining the lives of other people is partly to blame. How we could come to care in even a minimal way for so many strangers? But there is also a question of the appropriate limits of our moral obligations, what we are bound to do vs. what=s supererogatory. It might be a good thing to participate in relief efforts halfway around the world but is it ethically required that we do so? If such a demand conflicted with a more local one, one rooted in a special relationship, most of us would have little trouble choosing between them. Our moral responsibilities arise from the particular contexts in which we live, the attachments we have, the roles we are born into or take on. Bok writes (1999)Aour allegiances depend on our situationYin life and cannot be overridden by obligations to humanity at large.@ (p. 39)

Richard Falk (1996) sees trouble for both nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Neither one is a satisfactory response to present global realities, what he calls the originality of our contemporary circumstances. Traditionally, national consciousness reflected the reality of the sovereign state as the organizing basis of international society, and as the Aorienting basis for education, socialization, aspiration and loyalty.@ But increasingly, the Aautonomy and primacy of the state is being seriously and cumulatively compromised , if not challenged, and even superseded, by various types of regionalization and globalization, especially by complex forms of economic, ideographic, and electronic integration.@ (p. 54). The reasonable response is to look beyond one=s borders for identification with larger humane ideals but at present a cosmopolitan orientation won=t do. It assumes Aan ethical context for global affirmations that is increasingly difficult to reconcile with the actuality of contemporary globalism.@ (p. 56) In other words, cosmopolitanism is naïve with respect to the realities of the world.

To project a visionary cosmopolitanism as an alternative to nationalist patriotism without addressing the subversive challenge of the market-driven globalism currently being promoted by transnational corporations and banksY is to result risking a form of fuzzy innocence. A credible cosmopolitanism has to be combined with a critique of the ethically deficient globalism embodied in neoliberal modes of thought and the globalism that is being enacted in a manner that minimizes the ethical and visionary content of conceiving of the world as a whole.

The events in Seattle last week, massive protests against the World Trade Organization suggest that many more people are coming to realize Falk=s point exactly.

Part 2: A Different Question

But do we need to choose between a nationalist and a cosmopolitan focus? Hilary Putnam and Amy Gutmann both think it=s a misguided pursuit. Each of their arguments supports my view that we have to look back at the moral purpose of citizenship education to see that our allegiance lies not with a particular polity but with political ideals. Amy Gutmann believes that our allegiance is to the ideal of democracy and that only a conception of nationalism in which this ideal figures centrally is sufficiently moral to merit this allegiance. Hers is a defense of democratic humanism as a goal for citizenship education. We need to Areject the idea that our primary allegiance is to any actual community, and to recognize the moral importance of being empowered as free and equal citizens of a genuinely democratic polity.@ Our capacity to act to further justice everywhere Aincreases when we are empowered as citizens.@ On her view, the constitution of just democracies is necessary to achieve justice in the world. Gutmann brings out an important distinction, one she says Nussbaum collapses, between taking national boundaries as morally salient and recognizing them as politically salient. A true democratic education will reject national borders as morally salient. But since they are politically salient, as most of us would easily recognize them to be, then public education ought to cultivate in students the Askills and virtues@ of democratic citizenship within a national context..

For Putnam the argument is somewhat different though his conclusions are similar. In his view we wouldn=t know what justice was unless we learned it through our own practices within a democratic society. In the absence of concrete ways of life the universal maxims of justice are virtually empty because Aactual reasoning is necessarily always situated within one or another historical tradition.@

the maxims of justice are often universal in the sense of being found wherever reflection on moral lives take place, maxims that make it the rule not to murder, steal, commit rape, commit adultery, or lie, and enjoin us to cooperate with our fellow humans, be loyal to friends, and so on are examples, although of course what is permissible exception to those rules is something on which there is no universal agreement- there is no such thing as a universal conception of the >good life= (p. 94).

For Putnam the choice between nationalism and cosmopolitanism is an empty choice. We need the context of our own traditions in order to understand what justice is. And it is justice that we ought to be committed to. We need to remember that all of our present affiliations and claims to belonging have potential moral relevance for our participation as citizens in all public spheres. Sissla Bok agrees:

I see no reason to teach children that claims to national or other identities are morally irrelevant. Rather, the question is how and on what grounds to weigh these claims when they conflict, and what responsibility to acknowledge with respect to each. Education programs that declare either a global or more bounded perspective to be the only one are troubling insofar as they shirt circuit reflection concerning such choices.(p.42)

This shifts our focus in an important way. Underneath the arguments about where our political concern ought to be directed, to a local sphere, a national sphere or a transnational one, are the questions that I believe are the central to citizenship education. These are not focused on where our concerns ought to be directed, but on the dispositions and abilities needed to deliberate in the public spheres in which we find ourselves throughout a lifetime. (Even if it is likely that opportunities to effect change at local community levels will be come up more often for most of us) Certainly there are differences in the kind of knowledge needed for effective participation in community concerns, federal matters or global affairs. These differences should not be underestimated. Importantly, they point to the kind of expertise necessary for making responsible decisions and they will determine to some extent the content of citizenship curriculum. All the same, I think it is worth exploring the notion that in all contexts, local to global, we will often be asking the same questions, among them:

_ How should we live together?

_ How can we best attend to our own needs and the needs of everyone else? and;

_ What should we do when we disagree?

Deliberating about those questions, whether we are considering what to do about community revitalization, national health care or acid rain requires the expression of certain Acommunicative virtues.@ such as trustworthiness, patience and perseverance. (Burbules and Rice, 1991) The development of these ought to be at the core of citizenship education. But even before we can lay these out, we need to set the conditions for preparing students to understand what is at stake in the conversation we are asking them to enter. A prerequisite to developing communicative virtues is an understanding of the nature of political and moral disagreement and how it might be resolved in particular cases. Disagreement is a fact of life. In complex disagreements there are often many considerations involved and these considerations come into conflict. Stuart Hampshire writes:

The ways of life that men aspire to and admire and wish to enjoy are a normally a balance between and combination of disparate elements; and this is so partly because human beings are not so constructed that they have just one overriding concern or end, one overriding interest, or even a few overriding desires and interests. They find themselves trying to reconcile, and to assign priorities to, widely different and diverging and changing concerns and interests, both within a single life of an individual, and within a single society.

Both James Wallace (19 )and Thomas Nagel (1991) offer interesting and I think helpful insights on exactly this, Wallace because he turns our attention to the moral frameworks in which arguments are situated, and Nagel because he turns our attention to the root of much of our disagreements about what should be done in the case of publicly oriented concerns. Both have something to say, I think, about the content of political education.

Part 3: Examining the nature of moral disagreement

In political disagreements, people who argue from within a particular political and therefore moral framework, often fail to realize that others, who may be representing opposing viewpoints, are likely to be arguing from a moral framework as well, but a framework in which they have assigned value to, or prioritized commitments in entirely different ways. Recognizing this is the start to understanding that others have legitimate perspectives even if their views are in opposition to our own. Understanding the nature of moral disagreement helps us correctly identify problems, clarify key concepts and sort out people=s various perspectives so we can begin to deliberate earnestly and in good faith about practical solutions to practical problems. It is Wallace=s belief that Aactual moral controversy remains embroiled with what he calls relevance problems and conflict problems.@ (p. 7) Relevance problems are those that occur because although we agree on the general meaning of a concept (for example we all know murder is wrongful killing) we disagree on the application of the concept to a particular case- we disagree on whether for instance euthanasia (whether passive or active) is an instance of murder. The other kind of moral disagreement is based on what Wallace calls problems of conflict. Conflict occurs when two principles that we are committed to(and the resulting moral duties and obligations we might have depending on our roles), clash in an actual case. Take the riots in Seattle of two days ago that began with organized protest against the WTO. At least two and likely three principles were in conflict: the right of free citizens to participate in acts of civil disobedience, the right of innocent people not to be punished, and as well the right of free citizens to inhabit a safe and peaceful environment. Wallace puts it this way:

Public officialsYhave a responsibility to preserve public order and safety. They also should protect individuals who are innocent of any offenses from arrest and judicial punishment. In a time of widespread rioting, looting and disorder, measures necessary to control disturbances which threaten public order- mass arrestsY for example, may also substantially increase the possibility that innocent individuals will be arrested and punished. In this situation, to what extent is it justifiable to risk punishing innocent people in order to control riots? How far may public officials risk the public=s safety to protect individuals from miscarriages of justice? The answers to these questions will require a determination of the relative importance of these considerations in the particular situation.

The questions Wallace poses are just one example of the way a classroom discussion on conflicting democratic principles might proceed. Introducing students to the idea that there are problems of relevance and problems of conflict is an important task for educators teaching for citizenship. This is because learning to deliberate in the public sphere is in part learning how to understand the nature of disagreement in order to keep disagreement and dissenting views from paralyzing discussion. Recognizing that other perspectives have moral worth, that is they fit within a moral framework we can recognize as moral is a beginning. Knowing that we can become more clear about the issues that divide us may not dissolve those divisions but it is a place to start in trying to find some common ground. The knowledge that other people have legitimate points of view, even when you do not share them, is essential political knowledge. This knowledge coupled with a belief in the possibility of rationally solving our problems, can move deliberation forward. Wallace writes, Aif it should turn out that such problems do not admit of solution by rational means, then it is not clear why any moral considerations should be of great concern to those committed to seeking intelligent reasoned solutions to the problems of living. (p. 8)

Nagel: the impersonal vs. the personal standpoint.

Nagel also gives us a promising way to view the task of citizenship education in terms of learning to deliberate, although he does not in fact write about such an enterprise in Equality and Partiality. What he explicitly does here is lay out an argument for social and political deliberation that fully recognizes human beings are pulled in different directions by two standpoints they hold simultaneously: the personal and the impersonal. Walzer speaks of a divided self too, in Thick and Thin which adds even a further division; we are divided selves first as individuals occupying different roles (parent, teacher, friend) second as inheritors of multiple traditions (religious, cultural, political) and finally as individuals committed to higher ideals such as equality. Like Nagel, Walzer believes the self speaks with Amore than one moral voice.@ (p. 85) Nagel sees the most difficult and complex pull between moral voices is between the voice that speaks for our particular concerns, attachments and affections and the voice that speaks for humanity at large- the collective. We might otherwise describe it as the pull between our concern for the common good versus our concern for our own particular pursuit of a good life. His reason for claiming that this is the case is disarmingly simple: we each know that our own existence matters to us, and because of that, we know with equal certainty that other peoples= lives matter to them.

You cannot sustainYindifference to the things in your life that matter to you personally. Some of the most important have to be regarded as mattering, period, so that others beside you have a reason to take them into account. But since the impersonal standpoint does not single you out from anyone else, the same must be true for the values arising in other lives. (p. 11).

In this sense we are pulled by commitments to both the partial and the universal. Because we do not only occupy one point of view, each of us is always susceptible to the claims of the other point of view. The division is represented by the claims of the individual versus the claims of the collectivity, the latter, in fact, giving force to individual claims.

The impersonal standpoint in each of us producesY a powerful demand for universal impartiality and equality, while the personal standpoint gives rise to individualist motives and requirements which present obstacles to the pursuit and realization of such ideals. (p.4)

The reconciliation of these two standpoints in given cases is the essential task of a political system. The standpoints exist in the individual, but they also exist in society. Sometimes these standpoints will play out in conflicts within our private lives, sometimes within particular societies, and sometimes they will be identified with conflict on a more global scale, or between ethnic groups such as those explored by Michael Ignatieff in Blood and Belonging. These tensions between our commitments to equality and partiality will never be fully resolved, but in each context and case we find ourselves in, the task will be to balance these.

Arguably, then, our most important civic role then is to participate in public conversations about needs, rights and responsibilities knowing there are multiple interpretations of each we need to hear out and weigh. We should not expect that this process will yield any certainty when it comes to the resulting solutions we construct. Pragmatists (quite rightly I think) tell us we are not aiming toward a universal truth or ultimate resolution in these discussions. Answers don=t exist outside our deliberations about them. But in the absence of a final word, or a truth that might bind us all, we need to continue to talk about how to live together. As Onora O=Neill reminds us, Awe need to keep the conversation going@ and we need to do this in the face of persistent moral disagreement that will threaten to shut conversation down. Much of this disagreement will inevitably arise from the dual standpoints we all hold.

Extending this argument to education, it seems clear that we need to prepare students to understand and try to balance the inevitable tensions human beings experience because of our dual attachments to what the impersonal vs. the personal standpoint or in Nagel=s wordsA equality and partiality.@ We need to learn to respond appropriately to the claims made by others and balance them against our need to pursue our own ends and have that pursuit protected. This will obviously call for a great deal of thoughtful deliberation in the face of conflicting demands, within ourselves and within any collective. Therefore, an effective education for citizenship will help students to develop the requisite virtues and abilities to deliberate responsibly in the public sphere despite the inescapable tensions and even the risk of failure when it comes to decisions we can all live with. This education will include developing abilities to:

_ listen with humility to other people,

_ imagine with compassion other lives, and;

_ consider with Asituated intelligence@ (Dewey) the decisions made in the name of justice, freedom and the good.

Conclusion: Keeping the conversation going

A number of communicative virtues are essential for the conversation to keep going. (Burbules and Rice, 1991) Among them are: humility, tolerance, empathy, a sense of justice, patience, curiosity, and integrity. These will have to the subject of another paper about citizenship education as they deserve far more space than I can devote to them here. My central purpose in this paper has been to explore the terrain of citizenship as it could be and lay out several first steps in reconceptualizing it from the standpoint of understanding moral discourse. I am not alone in wanting to re-inject Aconcerns of social justice into discourse@ about education. (Blum, 1999) Civic education on Lawrence Blum=s view has to teach us to Acare for worthy collectivities,@ wherever they are found. And David Sehr in Educating for Public Democracy, writes that we need publicly oriented citizens who will Aorganize to take control of the powerful institutions of society, or create new social institutions through which to build social justice, fairness, equality, economic opportunity- in short the conditions necessary for the self- development of all members of society.@ (p.55). Important goals, but as with many well-intentioned prescriptions in education, these calls for building social justice in the institutions that should serve us don=t take us very far in planning curriculum. Program content is too often under- specified. We may know why we should teach for a morally aware citizenry, but questions of how are still left unanswered. Fortunately, there are some worthy exemplars to explore in classrooms where teachers have taken to heart the idea that political education is education for the furthering of justice and equality. Their practices emphasize learning to understand conflict and the complex nature of needs and rights. As final note to this paper, there are three examples of good practice in this area I want to briefly describe, one at the elementary classroom level, one at the intermediate (middle years) level and a third at secondary.

The first example of what might be done in schools is described by Kathy Bickmore, an education professor who joined a grade 4 Toronto class for a year to help teach about conflict and to research students= understandings and attitudes about both personal and global conflict and its resolution. They explored human needs and wants by, for example, re-enacting scenarios in which relief workers try to hand out food to refugees, and a desert community tries to decide how to equitably divide a limited supply of fresh water. Photographs and news stories supplied background knowledge. Students also explored local and interpersonal conflict using Amultiple communication strategies@ to try to come to fuller understandings of people=s emotions, intentions, and the consequences of their actions. Importantly, in each instance that was examined and reflected on through writing and discussion, the emphasis was not on resolution as much as it was on coming to understand the origin of the conflict, the competing claims involved, and the difficulties inherent in balancing rights, distributing goods, and meeting human needs. AComplex international material@ seemed to enhance these children=s learning experiences by providing multiple representations and many entry points for understanding main ideas.@ (p 67.) But the local remained important too, emphasizing for the students the connections between their own lives (the personal standpoint) and the lives and interests of others (the impersonal standpoint.)

A second example comes from a Lower Mainland School where students in grade 6 are working their way through a number of novels in small literature circles. Number the Stars, a story of the Danish Resistance, is one of the novels, and one book of Kit Pearson=s trilogy about British children brought to Canada in WWII is another. The Summer of my German Soldier is another. Each novel is characterized by its moral conflicts such as: our obligations to help strangers vs. our responsibility to those closest to us, becoming a pacifist vs. going to war, and weighing principles of freedom and responsibility when they are competing for primacy. In Looking at the Moon, for instance, part of Kit Pearson=s trilogy, thirteen year old Norah is sure she knows what courage is all about- it=s fighting the Nazis. Refusing to fight would be cowardly. Then she is confronted by her cousin Andrew=s doubts about joining up and suddenly the world is far less simple than she thought. The Grade 6 students are asked to examine the conflicts from as many points of view as possible, and imagine the consequences if the protagonist of each novel had not acted in the way he/she did, or had seen the conflict from another perspective. Then they are asked to rewrite a selected passage based on another standpoint.

A third example comes from a local high school=s Grade 11 and 12 Drama classes. For this year=s performance on Remembrance Day, students spent the term studying many conflicts of the 20th century. They addressed far more than the history of the World Wars and Canada=s role in them. Ethnic and religious wars as well as the Vietnam War were explored. Many of the students in the school are first and second generation immigrants from Asian nations for whom these conflicts have special significance. The purpose was to further the larger student body=s understandings that war is a feature of the lives of people everywhere, and the legacy of war affects everyone, whether or not they were Canadians fighting in World War I or II. The dramatic performance included scenes from a number of plays written about refugees, prisoners of war and soldiers. It also included a piece the students wrote on Ghandi=s famous efforts to bring peace and justice to not just his Indian homeland, but to the world. In an important way these students fulfilled the aims of citizenship education as a moral enterprise, that I have set forth in this paper.

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