Every act of education is a kind of socialisation. To put it simply, education teaches us to live together (Delors et al, 1996 cited in Akar, 2007). My aim here is not to advance education as a magical tool for creating a perfect world; still it aims at reducing the degrees of inequality and war to a great extent (Delors, 1996 cited in Akar,
2007). Scholars regard citizenship education as an essential tool for development (Arnot and Dillabough, 2000). Education in order to be effective must be connected to the reality of world events. Citizen-ship education refers to the use of education for preparing people to become citizens. This education can be disseminated through the process of formal schooling at any level, or through informal adult education, through the media, through legislation directed to the public. With the passage of time and with the increasing infl uences of globalization individuals, communities as well as nations are trying to reassess their place in the world. In the process of this reassessment citizenship education has been acquiring a global character where the major areas of thrust have been the rights and responsibilities towards each other; justice and fairness towards one another; freedom and constraint; power and authority; equity and diversity; passive and active participation (Green, 1997).
In this context it would be relevant to mention four core elements of citizenship (Sears and Hughes, 1996). In accordance with citizen-ship’s fi rst element, namely national consciousness or identity, citizenship education works with the aim of achieving not only knowledge but an emotional commitment to or identifi cation with one’s nation, a sense of loyalty and duty usually coexisting with other identities like regional, cultural, ethnic, religious, gender, class identity and so on. How these multiple levels of identity can be brought together under one umbrella is a matter of serious concern in education for citizenship.
Political literacy, knowledge of and a commitment to the political, legal and social institution of one’s country forms the second element of citizenship education. It implies something more than mere casting of votes. It requires an understanding of key political and social issues and thereby possession of the necessary skills and values for effective political participation.
Observance of rights and duties forms the third element of citizen-ship education. The fact that every individual tends to overlook that s/he has some duty in relation to his/her fellow individual is manifest
in the irresponsible behaviour that is forwarded against one another in society, be it in the form of racial inequality or gender discrimina-tion. The aim of citizenship education is to train people to resolve any possible confl ict between rights and duties.
The fourth element of citizenship education refers to values.
Values like equality, solidarity, autonomy and the like are of utmost importance expected to be enjoyed and exercised in relation to others in the society. Besides societal values which are more or less common to a given society there are other universal values, especially of an ethical nature, which can easily create dilemma and confl ict. Citizenship education aims to teach the knowledge and skills to deal with value conflict in acceptable ways. It goes without saying that the four elements described above presuppose an adequate level of literacy and intellectual competence.
Connolly (1974) has pointed out that problems regarding citizen-ship education arise not only because it is an internally complex concept, but also because it is a normative concept. Normative concepts usually do not have a universally shared defi nition because of the reason that they describe things from a moral point of view (Connolly, 1974).
The meaning of citizenship education thus varies a lot. Citizenship education is not so much concerned with the narrow legal defi nition of citizen as with some normative sense of good citizen (Hughes, 1994 cited in Sears and Hughes, 1996). It is evident from the discus-sion that citizenship education is a vast fi eld which includes a wide range of philosophical, political and ideological perspectives as well as pedagogical approaches, goals and practices. Underlying all these approaches and perspectives there remains a general agreement that the main aim of citizenship education is the development of good democratic citizens. And it is from this standpoint that the issues of gender, race, class and the like can come in within the purview of citizenship education to fi nd out whether an emancipated individual can contribute to the creation of a social order where cases of violence against women would gradually diminish.
Furthermore citizenship, instead of limiting its activities in the public sphere only equated with the public world of politics and paid employment, should equally focus on the private sphere equated with the private world of home and unpaid labour and thereby recognise both the spheres in an equal capacity. In the twenty-fi rst century the concept of citizenship would accept the fact that the personal is political; and equality which exists in the public sphere is most of the times based on the inequalities in the private sphere.
Scholars (Kymlicka, 2002; Heater, 1999) often distinguish be-tween two frameworks of citizenship: civic republican discourse emphasizing universal active participation and liberal discourse based on individual rights guaranteed by the state. Civic republican discourse highlight a civic identity among young people characterized by commitment to the political community; cooperative participation in activities like voting, involvement with political parties as also civic activities. In the civic republican view, civil society is the now-neglected third sphere of democratic life and the primary sphere for citizenship working with the aim of healing our fragmented contemporary civil society. In accordance with this discourse a weakened civil society results in weak social capital which needs to be rejuvenated by civic education.
Liberalism, on the other hand, is a discourse of individual liberty focussing on the equality or the ability of all people, especially peo-ple living in historically marginalized and oppressed groups to fully exercise their freedom in society. Mention must be made of the two predominant discourses within liberal discourse namely Neo Liberal-ism and Political LiberalLiberal-ism. Neo liberalLiberal-ism, a combination of liberal market ideology and aggressive individualism is not considered as an explicit discourse of citizenship but educators argue that political liberalism envisions a more limited political arena with greater focus on procedures ensuring fair, inclusive deliberation about governance and policy (Gutmann, 2000 cited in Abowitz and Harnish, 2006).
According to the liberal conception, citizen, who is also the moral
person, is free, self-originating and responsible in exercising rights and discharging duties. This, of course, should not mean that citizenship teaches to use this freedom as one wishes. It is to be understood as an attempt to say that children should know there are better and worse ways of using their freedom and no one educational authority should totally dominate. It, therefore, calls for a forum where all citizens are treated as equal participants in the process of deliberation. Along with the constitutional and civic rights, John Rawls (1993, citied in Armstrong, 2004) has recognized the cooperative dispositions and shared aims of citizens in a democracy. To achieve this, what is needed is the training in citizenship education whereby students learn to think critically and communicate with power and precision.