Whatever Happened to Political Education?

Abstract

Schools are always involved with political learning. The nature of that political learning, though, is always likely to change and in recent years there have been very significant shifts. This paper argues that the National Curriculum has deliberately neglected to promote professional forms of political learning which will be termed political education and replaced them instead with education for citizenship. The bulk of this argument is based on an analysis of literature although use is made of data gathered from a small sample of experts in the field of political learning.