The Hope and Failure of Civic Education: Lebanon, China, and the UNHRC
How digital education has failed civics students, and why China can help.
Originally published February 17th, 2020 (Blogger)
#StudentVoice
In the spring of 2019, high school students across Ontario walked out of schools en masse. They were protesting the Conservative government’s proposed changes to the education system — four mandatory online classes; increased class sizes; reduced funding to autism programming; and a decrease in funding that would lead to thousands of teachers losing their jobs. The government accused the students of being manipulated by teacher’s unions. The students organized around a hashtag (#WeTheStudentsDoNotConsent) and spoke eloquently on national news.
At a time when mislabeled “millennials” are universally painted with the same brush — a blend of “anxiety grey” and “pop nonsense neon” — this act of civil disobedience hearkened back to the non-violent resistance movements of previous generations. It seemed as though young people were reclaiming their power as engaged citizens. No longer #protestinglol , but exercising their rights.
So why didn’t they accomplish anything?
Online Lifeline
Am I allowed to teach my students how to protest? In teaching them about civil rights, social justice, and democratic freedoms, am I limited to historical examples only — or can I do what a good teacher does with other subjects, and get them to work with their hands? If not me, who?
Research conducted around the globe has examined student engagement in civic life, and what role their education takes in determining their level of democratic participation. From post-war Lebanon, to underground migrant classrooms in China, to refugee schools established by the United Nations, students are taught how to be citizens. Yet what they do with that education varies wildly.
Multiple studies have outlined participatory politics, the attempts of communities to leverage their online presence to influence public issues. We see this mostly in young people; if they cannot speak at the ballot box, they’ll speak online. Youth feel increasingly disengaged from the traditional political process, so they form their own political spaces on blogs and social media. Research from Khane, et al., out of Mills College, analyzed over 2,300 responses from the Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP) and Pew American Life surveys over five years. Their findings indicated that these forms of connected civics is kept together by a shared interest in “lifestyle politics” — the blending of the personal and political seen in vegetarians and gun owners alike. While there is plenty of support within these groups, they often struggle to find legitimacy in traditional power structures, nor are they taught as a legitimate form of civic engagement. They create dozens of artistic posts about anything from #BlackLivesMatter to #MAGA…and nobody, outside their echo chamber, notices.
Until January 6th, 2021. When rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol buildings. Then, they were noticed. Then, the failures of civic education shone through.
Virtual Failures
Other countries have significant experience in using civics education to close political divides; to prevent current generations from repeating past atrocities. Post-civil war Lebanon, for example, implemented an ambitious digital citizenship curriculum to build social accord and national cohesion. Its goal was to leverage the Internet as a unifying force which would help students see each other as equals across party or ethnic divisions. It didn’t work.
Citizenship here is about personal gain, not democratic engagement.
A two-year study from the University of Notre Dame-Louaize, covering hundreds of students from half of Lebanon’s school districts, found a significant issue with students and Internet access. Post-war Lebanon had a weak network structure, so while efforts to increase connectivity in schools ramped up, the home life of many students remained offline. This led to what the study calls a “two lives” approach — outside of school, maintaining the same civic divides as pre-war; in school, parroting the curriculum just for Internet access, mostly used for pirating films, music, and software. Citizenship here is about personal gain, not democratic engagement. The example of Lebanon shows that Internet access in and of itself clearly does not lead to greater civic empowerment in youth.
Even in scenarios where citizenship is not taken for granted, and is a lifelong dream for many, digital civic education falls short. For decades, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has been establishing refugee schools around the world. Their goal, ostensibly, is to help displaced people — who are legally not citizens — learn the value of citizenship. Yet an analysis of the UNHRC Global Monitoring Report, conducted by Harvard, shows a long struggle to create a functioning refugee school system. Year after year, responsibility shifts from the UNHRC, to the community schools, to the local governments, and back. The result is that students in these fragmented, unsupported programs do not see “citizenship” as a goal. For them, becoming a citizen remains at the most basic level of human rights and personal legitimacy. Participating in the democratic process is impossible if your education does not teach as a value.
Power to the People…But Which People?
Both Lebanon and the UNHRC examples show failures in attempts to use civic education as a means of bringing communities together. Yet both also show that students want to be engaged — Lebanese digital pirates are using their power to subvert democratic norms; UNHRC refugee students are drawing attention to the basic necessities of citizenship. What they share in common is a distrust for traditional, technocratic education systems.
If traditional education networks are failing to make connections, what is the alternative? The answer may lie in guanxi.
Min Yu, a professor at Detroit’s Wayne State University with a focus on migration and ethnographic research, has a guanxi network. So do most people from China. Based on Confucian doctrine, guanxi can be described as a personalized social network; a community that both uses and requests influence from its members to advance its interests. A colleague once described guanxi as “the acceptable level of social grifting”, or a formalized system of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”. Over a period of six years, Yu used her own guanxi network to conduct longitudinal qualitative research among migrant families across six districts in Beijing. What she found was remarkable.
Participating in the democratic process is impossible if your education does not teach as a value.
There are approximately 35 million migrant students in China. It is impossible for the formal education system to address all their needs, let alone have physical room for them in its schools. However, the guanxi networks of these families creates a patchwork, underground education system that provides not only schooling but child care, housing, and community gathering spaces. These guanxi “schools” function so well in part because the regular systems do not, forcing families and social groups to compensate. Like the refugee UNHRC students, these migrants have questionable citizenship status; like the students of post-war Lebanon, they operate under an undemocratic system; unlike the others, however, they have guanxi.
Places, Please
Being a citizen means being part of a “place”. How that “place”, physical or otherwise, intersects with government leads to how a student’s concept of “citizenship” is formed. Slowly coming out of an oppressive post-war society with limited Internet, as in Lebanon? Citizenship is about understanding the system enough to profit off it. Stateless and shifted between ever-changing wards, as in the UNHRC schools? Citizenship is about survival, not participating. Posting in an online echo chamber and feeling increasingly disconnected from reality, as in North America? Citizenship is anger, frustration, fear, and denial.
Like the refugee UNHRC students, these migrants have questionable citizenship status; like the students of post-war Lebanon, they operate under an undemocratic system; unlike the others, however, they have guanxi.
Yu’s research indicates that a personal connection could make this better. Whether it be guanxi or some other form of in-person, community-based involvement, students will not feel like they are citizens unless they feel they belong to a real, diverse community. Protesting is “flash citizenship” — coming together in person quickly, amorphously, and with great energy, but then dispersing with sometimes incoherent results. Online life does not reflect reality. Combining the two does not seem to work, whether it be in students protesting education changes or rioters attempting to destroy democratic processes.
So what is a teacher to do? Foster these relationships, then be held accountable by parents and governments for “indoctrinating” children? Leave it to NGOs who have their own agendas, and face the backlash seen by the WE Movement in Canada? The answer is unclear, but the solution lies in teachers actively wrestling with the issue — not leaving it to governments, corporations, technocrats, or media.
Mario Mabrucco is a educator with almost 20 years experience teaching literacy, arts, and social sciences to youth in Canada, Greece, France, Italy, and Monaco. He has a M.Ed in Curriculum and Education Policy from the University of Toronto, and designs curriculum for the National Film Board of Canada. Read more of Mario’s work on Medium or follow him on Twitter: @mr_mabruc
WORKS CITED
Dryden-Peterson, Sarah. (2016). Refugee Education: The Crossroads of Globalization. Educational Researcher, 45(9), 473–482. doi:10.3102/0013189X16683398
Ghosn-Chelala, Maria. (2018). Exploring sustainable learning and practice of digital citizenship: Education and place-based challenges [Lebanon]. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 1–17. doi:10.1177/1746197918759155
Kahne, Joseph, Hodgin, Erica, & Eidman-Aadahl, Elyse. (2016). Redesigning Civic Education for the Digital Age: Participatory Politics and the Pursuit of Democratic Engagement. Theory & Research in Social Education, 44(1), 1–35.
Yu, Min. (2018). Rethinking Migrant Children Schools in China: Activism, Collective Identity, and Guanxi. Comparative Education Review, 62(3), 429–448.
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