Citizenship Education and Diversity

Since the final decade of the 20th century, both national policymakers and international organizations have shown increasing interest in the position and status of citizenship education (sometimes referred to as civics) within school curricula. At the same time, there has been increased debate about multiculturalism and multicultural citizenship, as policymakers have sought to address perceived tensions between the desire to promote social cohesion and the need to recognize ethnic, cultural, social, and linguistic diversity within the nation-state. Such trends can be identified in education policy making, both in societies that have readily acknowledged their cultural diversity over a long period of time and in those that had hitherto perceived themselves to be homogeneous. Interest in citizenship education and diversity at the national scale has been ...