I feel that citizenship was not a major part of my schooling. As I try to think back to my experience the only thing that can come to mind is when our teachers would constantly remind us to “treat others how you want to be treated” and “always treat others with respect” but obviously this did not resonate with every child. In addition to this students would participate in a school election for the president of the school who really had no purpose but to help with “pep rallies” which were essentially games for students. We as well would do volunteering where each student was required to volunteer somewhere for 10 hours. This was not a big task but it did help teach us to give back to the community but for some students they ended up failing the class because they refused to go volunteer.
From my own schooling it was very clear to me that my own experience falls into the category of personally-responsible citizen. Growing up we were always told by teachers that they were preparing us for our future and making us into good people or good citizens. In my one class there was this particular teacher who would tell us everyday to not do drugs, not drink alcohol, and to try hard in school. For some reason she thought this would create us into better people. The teachers within my school for the most part would organize a time during the school day to go pick garbage in the parking lot and around the school. They as well would organize school wide food bank fundraisers where every student is expected to bring some type of non perishable food that will be donated to the local food bank. I found that this type of citizenship was more common in subjects such as physical education but thankfully there was a small sense of participatory citizenship in subjects such as health or my career class where we were encouraged to shadow different people in a range of jobs. These subjects more so allowed us as students to think critically and examine why we are seeing certain issues in our world today and to question why we were collecting food bank items, or picking up litter.
Ultimately, the problem with only being taught from a personally-responsible citizen viewpoint is that as students we learn to be good people but do not learn to get to the root of the problem. If people are littering in the parking lot maybe we need to set out more garbage cans or consider why people are doing this. Although we need all three types of citizens in our world we also need to encourage students to critically think and analyze situations deeper. Ultimately, I do believe it is important for students to be able to experience all three different types of citizenship within their time at school.
Ireland South's Blog 