The Discursive Field of Civic Education in China and the United States

• In Event: The Reemergence of Curriculum Theory

Abstract

In this paper the authors will argue that civic education, in one form or another, is embedded in the curriculum of most nations. In this paper they add complexity to discussions concerning civic education by theorizing civic education as a tool of internalized social regulations for the security and stability of the state or governmentality in the China and the United States. Using publically available policy statements and curriculum materials from governmental and non-governmental organization as data, they asked how do discourses surrounding civic education in the China and the United States disempower rather than empower students and citizens within the context of globalization.

Two perspectives guided the research in answering this question. The first lens focuses upon the discourse of governmentality, which helps examine the building and maintaining of technologies that serve to create self-governing individuals in the service of institutions ranging from prisons to the nation state. They focus upon the discourse of governmentality as it functions in civic education as a form of social control, a control that often disempowers members of the nation state in the interest of efficiency. This functioning of the discourse of governmentality is of particular concern within the scope of civic education because it thrives upon the downplaying of inequalities between individuals and groups in the favor of efficient governance. By downplaying these inequalities, the discourse of governmentality serves to empower the nation state at the expense of the empowerment of marginalized individuals and groups within the nation state and by extension, the world.

The concept of a discursive field helped examine the context in which the different nations frame civic education. The relative power of discourses in relation to each other is contingent upon what, when, and where people are speaking. Discourses are not equally powerful but embedded in a dynamic network of power relations. The competition between dominant and marginal discourses on a discursive field is governed by power relations or “orders of discourse”. The study used these perspectives to understand how the discursive field in which civic education in which China and the United States reflects and reifies a global discursive field of power relations.

The findings indicate that civic education is framed differently in China and the United States due to the global discursive fields in which they operate. The need for the efficient workings of global markets places pressure on local and national communities to form efficient, self-regulating individuals or citizens. This serves to intensify nationalistic discourses while, ironically empowering the discourses of governmentality and globalization. Market rationality is evident in the curriculum in both nations through an emphasis upon consensus as a form of efficiency. In this view, the civics curriculum is framed and functions to create self-starting, self governing entrepreneurs who have internalized rules that support national security, both military and economic. The findings suggest new ways to look at civic curriculum and the way that it empowers or disempowers civil society, markets, national security, and global communities.

Authors

• Steven Paul Camicia, Utah State University

• Juanjuan Zhu, Utah State University