Children of War? Security, Civic Education, and Democratic Learning

• In Event: Security, Democracy, and Learning: Exploring the Dialectics of In/Security in Educational Space

Abstract

In June of 2006, eighteen young men were arrested across the Greater Toronto Area in connection with a counter-terrorism raid. The so-called ‘Toronto 18’ were alleged to be members of Islamic radical and fundamentalist organizations who had conspired to commit asks of terrorism across Toronto and Ottawa. In the aftermath of their arrests, Canadian media outlets were flooded with editorials and opinion letters asking how it was that these young men, most of whom were either born or raised in Canada, could turn against their own nation and plot to commit such heinous acts of violence. Of special interest to educators, however, was the targeting of education policy by the Canadian public as one of several arenas in which Canadian society had ‘failed’ to properly educate and assimilate migrating populations. In the clamor to understand, approximate, and target the growing threat of alienated Muslim youth, increasing importance was placed on the question of how schools make ‘good citizens’ out of first and second generation immigrants.
The concern about ‘homegrown terrorism’ and the integration of immigrant youth coincides with a now two-decade long trend in the emphasis of civic and citizenship education at all levels of schooling. The literature of civic and citizenship education, while diverse and profuse, coalesces around several dynamics that target young people as a population that is apathetic, disengaged, and alienated from democratic processes and practices. This emphasis by educators, policy makers, and the general public takes on new meaning in a post-9/11 context in which the immigrant ‘other’ is viewed as a radicalized threat. In these discourses, the cultural positionality of newcomers is viewed as ‘deficient’ in democratic knowledge, skills, and attitudes and this deficit in understood as being derived from cultural values that are fundamentally at odds with western liberal democracy. The social and civic integration of recently settled immigrants, and their children, becomes, in this policy context, a public priority.
This paper reports findings from an institutional ethnography project examining the implementation of a standardized Grade 10 civics curriculum in Ontario, Canada. Formulated from the standpoint of immigrant youth, particularly youth who have migrated from war zones or experienced war vicariously through family, this paper focuses on the dialectical articulation of the relation between ‘security’ and ‘democracy’ through civic education and its mandate to craft ‘the good citizen.’ Findings indicate that civic education programs establish contradictory positions around questions of ‘security’ while reproducing social relations of difference and class within schools.

Author

• Sara Carpenter, OISE/University of Toronto