It looks exactly the same. From both photographs and history books, I knew that although the Allied bombing of Frankfurt destroyed much of the city, the central train station suffered only minor damage. Only the advertising looked different. My mother remembers smiling while she waved goodbye so that her mother wouldn't cry. She also remembers giving her favorite doll to the girl seated opposite her, who was disconsolate.
They were 2 of the children on the train headed to relative safety in Switzerland. It was the last time my mother would see her family. Although my parents—both German Jewish refugees—spoke little about their experiences during World War II, I suspect that the profound injustices that informed their childhoods have had an indelible impact on my views about education in democratic societies. What went wrong in German society that led to such unthinkable events as those that define the Holocaust?
How could such a highly educated, mature democracy descend into such unimaginable cruelty and darkness? Historians have suggested a great number of causes, including Germany's punishing defeat in World War I, the suffering German economy after the worldwide Great Depression, and the populist appeal of a leader who promised to fix all that.
As an educator, however, I can't help but wonder what German schools might have done differently. What can we learn from what schools did or didn't do in Weimar Germany which was a democracy too? What, if anything, should schools today teach children about democracy? How can schools help young people acquire the essential knowledge, dispositions, and skills for effective democratic citizenship to flourish? When I ask teachers, students, parents, principals, and even superintendents to tell me about their ideal school, the places they imagine are vastly different from the images of schools conveyed by, for example, the standardized-testing industry or school reformers focused on "competitiveness.
Isn't it surprising that debates about school curriculum seem so important to everyone? You drop your kid off at school in the morning. The school administrators and teachers keep her safe, make sure she eats lunch and makes friends, and teach her things before they send her home again. Isn't that enough? Do people really care so much about exactly what is taught? But we all do. I suspect the reason the battles over curriculum loom so large—not only in school reform circles, but also in the media, among politicians, and around the dinner table—is because what we teach in schools is a proxy for the kind of society we hope to create.
And questions about whether we should keep our society mostly as it is or change it somehow challenge deeply held beliefs and commitments about how we want to live. In the past two decades of school reform, we've become increasingly focused on standardized test scores in math and literacy to the near exclusion of all other educational goals.
That worries me. The United States, we like to believe, is a stable democracy, and some might argue that the purpose of schools now is simply to train students for the workforce, teach them basic skills, and maybe teach them to love their country.
But democracy is not self-winding. I ask, "What kind of citizens do we need? I think about schools not only as vehicles for the transmission of knowledge, but also as places where children learn about the society in which they are growing up, how they might engage in society productively, and how they can fight for change when change is warranted.
Schools have always taught lessons in citizenship, moral values, good behavior, and "character. Today's schools teach these lessons as well. For example, schools teach children to follow rules, and certainly sometimes following the rules is necessary. But do schools also help students consider whether being a "good" citizen ever requires questioning those rules, or what might be the proper balance between rule following and thinking about the origins and purpose of rules?
Just because schools teach children about citizenship and character doesn't mean they always do it well or even toward admirable aims. In fact, schools and other youth organizations have sometimes engaged in some of the worst forms of citizenship indoctrination. Counted among the many examples of organized "citizenship" education are the hateful lessons learned by members of the Hitler Youth brigades, who were the same age my mother was when she boarded the train to Switzerland.
My aim isn't to convince anyone that schools should teach citizenship—that's a given. How classrooms are set up, who gets to talk when, how adults conduct themselves, how decisions are made, how lessons are enacted—all these and more inevitably serve as lessons in citizenship.
Whether teachers explicitly "teach" lessons in citizenship or not, students learn about community organization, the distribution of power and resources, rights, responsibilities, and of course, injustice.
But knowing that schools are always instruments of citizenship education makes it vitally important for anyone who cares about education and society to ask what kind of citizen our educational programs imagine.
Educators today face enormous pressures to reduce teaching and learning to math and literacy, test preparation, or career training. But I'd like to think that most educators believe that schools, beyond teaching children how to read and write, do math problems, and understand science and history, also serve as an inevitable influence on young people's views of the world and are, therefore, a potentially powerful tool to shape our society for the better.
If you were to ask people on the street whether schools should teach children how to be good citizens, I would bet that almost everyone would nod in agreement. But the kind of citizenship many people have in mind is the kind that socializes children to follow the rules and be a good person. Hugely popular character education programs, for example, teach students to follow the rules, listen to their teachers, be honest, help others in need, clean up after themselves, try their best, and be team players.
There's nothing wrong with any of those goals. He notes in Chapter 6 that in his experience and research, programmes and pedagogies that focus on educating the personally responsible citizen are in the vast majority, valuing responsibility in the community, working and paying taxes, picking up litter, giving blood, recycling, helping those in need, giving to charity, volunteering, obeying laws, etc.
Westheimer points out that although developing positive character attributes, contributing to charity, and volunteering are laudable traits for any populace, there is nothing inherently democratic in them. In fact, uncritical conformity to behavioural norms can be characteristically undemocratic, and we should be suspicious of politicians who advocate volunteerism as an alternative to appropriate social policy and organisation.
Meanwhile, "social justice-oriented" citizens critically assess structural and systemic causes of injustice, and strive to change established systems and structures that reproduce patterns of injustice over time. It is clear from his analysis in Chapter 7 that, of the three "types" described, Westheimer considers them to represent a continuum with the "social justice-oriented" citizen the most suitable type for a democratic society, and the "personally responsible" citizen the most problematic in terms of serving to maintain the status quo at best, or in fact contributing to greater pedagogical and political authoritarianism at worst.
The concluding three chapters of the book apply Westheimer's analysis of the challenges of current citizenship education and his typology of possible approaches to the question of implementation. Chapter 8 therefore presents a series of brief case studies that Westheimer uses to showcase classroom experiences that aim to connect learning with civic goals. He complements these real-life examples with guides for teachers and for parents to engage students in critical thinking and community action.
Chapter 9 explores seven common "myths" that impede educators and policy makers from embracing critical thinking in education. In describing the first myth, Westheimer addresses the earlier-mentioned assumptions about equating national standards with quality assurance, while in the second he counters the rise in treating signs of dissent or rebellion against the standardisation regime with medication.
Myths three and four speak to challenges that educators might face in their intentions to promote critical thinking, in that democratic thinking can only be taught in a democratic school environment, and that knowledge must always precede action in community-based experiences.
Number five looks at the critiques that teachers who care about critical thinking supposedly do not care about facts or basic skills; number six counters the argument that politics should be kept out of schools as a "neutral" learning environment; and finally, number seven suggests that community-based experiences do not always have to be "successful" to be meaningful in the education of good citizens, since it is more important that experiences be authentic.
Westheimer believes that these myths have damaged the pursuit of democratic education, and must be eradicated in order for teachers to achieve different results in their practice. The final chapter in this book summarises the book's main theme that democratic societies place special requirements on teaching and learning to teach students how to question and think critically, in order to be able to promote the change that moves democracy forward.
Westheimer's book undoubtedly provides a comprehensive, useful guide for educators to consider their own teaching practice, along with some of the short-and long-term efforts they can make to better align their teaching with the values of critical thinking for social justice.
Readers will benefit from the insightful, on-point analysis of the role that standardisation has played in the present regime of de-skilling the teaching profession to narrow curriculum provisions of the basics of literacy and mathematics. As a theoretical work, Westheimer's analysis and typology of "kinds" of citizens raises many questions. Are these categories mutually exclusive, or would a social justice-oriented citizen also undertake "participatory" actions like give blood and organise a food drive?
Westheimer's typology does not seem to account for these kinds of interrelationships among the three along with potentially other dimensions of democratic citizenship that may be more multifaceted, nuanced, and temporally shifting.
Could not first-hand personal experience through community service and project organisation deepen students' intrinsic motivation and insights for structural change and political engagement? Can an over-emphasis on structural and systemic problems and solutions in fact promote individual passivity and dampen agency, as the scope of seemingly legitimate channels for action are narrowed?
And can the fragmentation of thinking and analysing from participating and doing inadvertently lead to a sense of elitism between "thinkers" and "doers"? Education means more than teaching students the basics in literacy and numeracy. They are being asked to be proficient in adding numbers but not at thinking about what the answers add up to or how they connect to our society. Ontario does not experience the egregious consequences of the high-stakes testing culture that characterizes education in the United States.
But we share some of the outcomes, including an over-emphasis on literacy and numeracy to the detriment of other subjects such as social studies, history, science and the arts.
Westheimer observes that proponents of teaching these latter subjects feel compelled to demonstrate how they contribute to improved literacy and numeracy achievement. This is certainly happening in Ontario and other provinces where there is pressure to link, for example, the importance of studying music to strengthening numeracy skills. Teacher professional judgment is another casualty of standardized curriculum and assessment, according to Westheimer.
He argues that the only way schools can create learning environments that support teaching students how to think and critically analyze multiple perspectives is to free teachers to explore their own interests and passions.
Much of this book focuses on a discussion of different concepts of citizenship and the extent to which they are promoted through public education. Westheimer identifies three types of citizens: the personally responsible citizen, the participatory citizen and the social justice-oriented citizen. The participatory citizen is encouraged to actively participate in civic affairs. Does either the personally responsible or participatory citizen actually contribute to examining and questioning the root causes of particular social issues and to affecting change?
One, known as the Madison County Youth Service League, gave students hands-on research experience about how government and social agencies worked in their community. The program resulted in students having a better understanding of how government worked and developing an interest in participating in civic affairs.
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