Citizenship Education and Global Migration

Assimilation, Diversity, and Global Migration

Prior to the ethnic revitalization movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the aim of schools in most nation-states was to develop citizens who internalized national values, venerated national heroes, and accepted glorified versions of national histories. These goals of citizenship education are obsolete today because many people have multiple national commitments and live in more than one nation. The development of citizens who have global and cosmopolitan identities and commitments is contested in nation-states around the world because nationalism remains strong. Nationalism and globalization coexist in tension worldwide. The number of recognized nation-states increased from 43 in 1900 to approximately 195 in 2011. The number of people living outside their country of birth or citizenship grew from 120 million in 1990 to 160 million in 2000. In 2008, the world's population was almost seven billion; approximately 200 million migrants—about 3% of the world's population—were living outside the nation in which they were born.

Democratic nations around the world are required to deal with complex educational issues in ways consistent with their ideologies and declarations when trying to respond to the problems wrought by international migration. Researchers have amply documented the wide gap between democratic ideals and the school experiences of minority groups in nations around the world. Researchers have described how students such as the Maori in New Zealand, Muslims in France, and Mexican Americans in the United States experience discrimination in school because of their cultural, ethnic, racial, religious, and linguistic differences.

Research and theory indicate that when they are marginalized in school and treated as the “Other,” ethnic minority students—such as Turkish students in Germany and Muslim students in England—tend to emphasize their ethnic identity and to have weak attachments to their nation-state. The four Muslim young men who were convicted of bombing the London subway on July 7, 2005, had immigrant parents but were British citizens. They apparently were not structurally integrated into British mainstream society and may have had a weak identification with the United Kingdom and non-Muslim British citizens.

Democratic nation-states and their schools are grappling with a number of salient issues, paradigms, and ideologies as their populations become more culturally, racially, ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse. The extent to which nation-states make multicultural citizenship possible, the achievement gap between minority and majority groups, and the language rights of [Page 362]immigrant and minority groups are among the unresolved and contentious issues with which diverse nations and schools are required to deal.

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