Citizenship Education

I was pondering the idea that notions of citizenship are changing. It's a tough one in my mind. On the one hand you see a lot of people driving around Killeen with little flags hanging from their cars from countries like Cuba, Venezuela, or Argentina. I'd be willing to wager that for the most part this isn't meant to flaunt their divergent origins or show lack of appreciation for the opportunities the USA has provided. I imagine they do it more as a result of usually being labeled "hispanic" or "Mexican" and wishing to show some pride for their home countries.

I guess that's neither here nor there. It's certain that there is a lot more diversity in the population of western countries today than there was fifty years ago. But has this led to a significant change in citizenship or citizenship education? I'm not sure. I found a cool website ( http://www.ecs.org/html/educationIssues/CitizenshipEducation/CitEdDB_intro.asp ) that compares the citizenship education requirements in P-12 for all the states and checked to see what was being required and what kind of changes were being made). After looking at it I found that there wasn't much that you wouldn't have expect to find. Most recent legislation in the 50 states involves more "rigorous" rules for testing the existing standards like knowledge of the branches of government and the Gettysburg address. Some states are still passing laws requiring the US flag to be displayed in all classrooms (no problem with that, just seems a little behind the curve). Oklahoma passed a law protecting the right to display "In God We Trust" in public school.

There are a few interesting examples of trying new things. Vermont and Virginia are establishing forums to determine best practices for civic education. Virginia also has some rhetoric in a new law requiring more teaching about the impact of minority persons. South Carolina is trying to make it legal for a 16-17 year old student to run a polling station as long as an adult is around. That's pretty novel. Hawaii is doing some interesting things to promote civic responsibility. According to the site Texas isn't working on any changes to its citizenship curriculum right now.

However, a little further digging shows that a six member panel is currently reviewing Texas' social studies curriculum and it's drawing fire for considering downplaying the importance of minority figures like Thurgood Marshall and Cezar Chavez (http://kut.org/items/show/18200). That's getting a bit far from the general topic of citizenship education (and one reason for downplaying them may well be to try to allot more time for citizenship education in the curriculum), but it almost feels like a slight backlash against diversity in education.

The curriculum changes also seem to be against anti-american rhetoric such as imperialism being taught in out social studies texts. This, combined with the American flag laws kind of makes me think that even though notions of citizenship may be changing in some small ways, citizenship education remains a bit less about diversity and more about nationalism. I'm not saying that's wrong, a country has a right to promote itself in schools as long as it's footing the bill, but on paper at least, I'd argue that citizenship education is not changing much.