Despite or perhaps because of globalisation and internationalisation in the contemporary world, the role of education has become more significant in nation formation. However, whereas in the past its function was to create homogeneity and assimilation, today it must deal with diversity and plurality. The modernist premise of “one nation one state” is being questioned and re-constituted with the notion of the plural national-state. This book explores school processes in Hong Kong under these new conditions. The focus is on investigating how the concept of a national identity of the “one country two systems” policy is developing, and is thus a study of that diversity which all education systems now have to address. The policy aims at facilitating national re-integration and consolidation in the face of an insistence on local citizens’ universal civic rights and the values of liberty, equality, democracy and autonomy. The analysis shows citizenship education in the Hong Kong school system is more a locally-oriented cultural and political process than a transmission of a national ideology. Students learn their values, attitudes and perspectives by engaging and interacting with people within and beyond the school community. They acquire a liberal and democratic national identity which is distinct from that of pan-Chinese state-nationalism in mainland China. The book is thus both a case study of Hong Kong and an analysis of change in the relationship of education, citizenship and national identity in the contemporary world.

This book offers nuanced analyses of the narratives, spaces, and forms of citizenship education prior to and during the aftermath of the January 2011 Egyptian Revolution. To explore the dynamics shaping citizenship education during this significant socio-political transition, this edited volume brings together established and emerging researchers from multiple disciplines, perspectives, and geographic locations. By highlighting the impacts of recent transitions on perceptions of citizenship and citizenship education in Egypt, this volume demonstrates that the critical developments in Egypt’s schools, universities, and other non-formal and informal spaces of education, have not been isolated from local, national, and global debates around meanings of citizenship.

This edited book provides new research highlighting philosophical traditions, emerging perceptions, and the situated practice of global citizenship education (GCE) in Asian societies. The book includes chapters that provide: 1) conceptions and frameworks of GCE in Asian societies; 2) analyses of contexts, policies, and curricula that influence GCE reform efforts in Asia; and 3) studies of students’ and teachers’ experiences of GCE in schools in different Asian contexts. While much citizenship education has focused on constructions and enactments of GCE in Western societies, this volume re-centers investigations of GCE amid Asian contexts, identities, and practices. In doing so, the contributors to this volume give voice to scholarship grounded in Asia, and the book provides a platform for sharing different approaches, strategies, and research across Asian societies. As nations grapple with how to prepare young citizens to face issues confronting our world, this book expands visions of how GCE might be conceptualized, contextualized, and taught; and how innovative curriculum initiatives and pedagogies can be developed and enacted.

Using comparative qualitative methodology, this book examines three Chinese societies, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China, as specific cases of democratic, hybrid and authoritarian regimes, presenting the theoretical underpinnings of civic education in contexts other than liberal democracy. It highlights on the concept of ‘good citizens’ in these three regime contexts and explores how these concepts are reflected in civic education and perceived by students in the three societies. The book focuses on three levels of comparison to ensure that all relevant issues can be identified: Level 1: regime “type”; Level 2: curriculum and policy formulations; Level 3: students’ personal experiences. These three levels are linked with each other and form a continuous process of civic education implementation in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China.

This state-of-the-art, comprehensive Handbook is the first of its kind to fully explore the interconnections between social justice and education for citizenship on an international scale. Various educational policies and practices are predicated on notions of social justice, yet each of these are explicitly or implicitly shaped by, and in turn themselves shape, particular notions of citizenship/education for citizenship. Showcasing current research and theories from a diverse range of perspectives and including chapters from internationally renowned scholars, this Handbook seeks to examine the philosophical, psychological, social, political, and cultural backgrounds, factors and contexts that are constitutive of contemporary research on education for citizenship and social justice and aims to analyse the transformative role of education regarding social justice issues. Split into two sections, the first contains chapters that explore central issues relating to social justice and their interconnections to education for citizenship whilst the second contains chapters that explore issues of education for citizenship and social justice within the contexts of particular nations from around the world. Global in its perspective and definitive in content, this one-stop volume will be an indispensable reference resource for a wide range of academics, students and researchers in the fields of Education, Sociology, Social Policy, Citizenship Studies and Political Science.

Adult Education and the Formation of Citizens turns attention towards normative claims about who adults should become through education, and what capacities and skills adults need to develop to become included in society as ‘full’ citizens. Through these debates, adults are construed as not yet citizens, despite already being citizens in a formal sense; this book problematises such regimes of truth and their related notions of the possibilities and impossibilities of adult education and citizenship. Drawing on empirical examples from the two main adult education institutions in Sweden, folk high schools and municipal adult education, it argues that, through current regimes of truth, these institutions become spaces for the re-shaping of the "abnormal" citizen. The book suggests that only certain futures of citizenship and its educational provision are made possible, while other futures are ignored or even made impossible to imagine. Offering a unique focus on critically problematising the role of adult education in relation to the fostering and shaping of citizens, the book addresses the important contemporary challenges of the role of adult education in a time of migration. Adult Education and the Formation of Citizens will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of adult education, lifelong learning and education.

A key objective of education in China is to cultivate one's moral values, with the ultimate objective of becoming fully human (做人). Unlike the "West", which regards moral cultivation as related to but separate from citizenship cultivation, East Asia (including China) views moral and citizenship cultivation as synonymous. The essays in this book offer various perspectives on and understandings of Chinese citizenship and education by a group of scholars of Chinese heritage situated inside and outside of China. They offer compelling evidence and rich theoretical discussions about the practice of teaching citizenship in the state education, the interplay between citizenship and China's cultural and religious traditions, and the construction of citizenship from the groups from marginal positions. The book uses citizenship as a lens to examine the pressing issues of identity, democracy, religion and cosmopolitanism and sheds new light on China's ongoing social and educational changes. Thinking through citizenship and citizenship education may act as an important driving force to transform the culture and paradigms of governance in China and the new meanings of becoming fully human. This book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of Education, Politics, Sociology and Public Policy. The chapters in this book were originally published in various Routledge journals.