A ‘Clarified’ Citizenship Assignment
Since 2006, promoting citizenship has been a statutory task of primary and secondary education in the Netherlands. The aim of this mandate was to foster social integration and counteract segregation, but in practice, it turned out to be unclear how schools were expected to fulfil this task. Partly in response to this ambiguity, public concerns about the effectiveness of citizenship education, and a number of incidents that sparked public debate, the Law Clarifying the Citizenship Assignment was introduced in 2021.
Fundamental Values and Essentially Contested Concepts
This new law aimed to provide schools with clearer guidelines: they are required to promote active citizenship and social cohesion in a purposeful and coherent manner. This includes, among other things, ensuring that students gain knowledge of and respect for the so-called fundamental values of the democratic constitutional state, and that they learn to navigate diversity in beliefs, backgrounds, and lifestyles. The law also obliges schools to create a safe school culture in which these values are experienced and practiced. By referring to these fundamental values, the legislator aligns with a broader societal trend in which citizenship is being more normatively defined (Schinkel, 2010). Furthermore, the legislator formulates the citizenship task as a goal-oriented mandate that encompasses essentially contested concepts (Gallie, 1956).
Aims of the Law
The law serves two purposes. On the one hand, it provides schools with clearer guidance for designing their citizenship education in a purposeful and coherent way. On the other hand, it offers the Inspectorate of Education a more concrete framework for supervising the quality of citizenship education. In practice, however, these two goals have not yet fully converged: more than half of schools receive an unsatisfactory rating for citizenship education, based on the Inspectorate’s interpretation of the law (NOS, 2024).
Questions About the Citizenship Assignment
Although the law is intended to provide clarification, important questions remain regarding its development, interpretation, and implementation. From administrative, political science, sociological, pedagogical, and legal perspectives, a number of theoretical and empirical questions arise concerning the relationship between the legislator’s intentions, academic literature on citizenship education, and everyday school practice. What are the legislator’s explicit and implicit expectations? To what extent do these align with academic insights into citizenship formation? And: can education in practice realistically meet the expectations set by the legislator?
Aims of this research project
These questions lie at the heart of this multidisciplinary PhD research project. By analysing the citizenship assignment from multiple perspectives, the study aims to contribute to a better understanding of the role of education in forming democratically conscious citizens—and of the (im)possibilities the law presents in that regard.