Citizenship under Fire: Democratic Education in Times of Conflict

IN THE SUMMER OF 2002, Israeli high school students took their final exams for their high school diplomas. At age seventeen or eighteen, just before gaining their voting rights and beginning their mandatory military service, these students were confronted with the following question on their civic studies exam: "Explain why conscientious objection is subversive." With a stroke of a pen, the exam writers had abandoned decades of democratic deliberation on the balance between conscience and compliance, between majority rule and minority dissent. The students were presented with the conclusion, veiling a demand to refrain from joining the ranks of soldiers who, in the preceding months, had refused to serve in the occupied territories. At a culminating point of their civic education, the students were expected to be able to explain why opposing the decisions of a democratically elected government is, in the context of war, treacherous.

Civic education, democratic principles, peace and war are entangled in many ways. When a liberal democracy lives peacefully for a long period of time--as the United States did until September 11, 2001--the circumstances of peace become neutral. They move to the background, to be taken for granted, and they fail to draw the attention of citizens or to generate philosophical and political discussion. This failure is based on a misperception; as Susan Sontag pointedly maintains, "[T]hroughout history [w]ar has been the norm and peace the exception."1 When such a democracy enters a period of war, many of the basic assumptions upon which its social order is constructed are distorted. Civic freedoms, long held as guaranteed, are suddenly limited. Social practices and personal priorities are revised. The education system cannot evade this fate. As public institutions responsible for preparing future generations to become part of society, schools are inclined to undergo change. This book explores some of these changes and offers a normative direction they should take, herein dubbed "expansive education."

Since September 2001, the American political and academic spheres have become absorbed in discussions of terrorism and war. With the one field trying to combat global terrorism and the other field struggling to understand it, little room is left for talk about democratic principles or visions of peace. Civic society and the public education system can reinforce this trend or contest it.
Having been raised through the seemingly endless IsraeliPal-estinian conflict, I began thinking about civic education in wartime in the context of the Israeli political sphere and local public education system. I was challenged to generalize the concepts I was developing by some striking similarities in the post-9/11 American public sphere. Those analogous social processes generated by the sense of vulnerability that conflict produces are termed here "belligerent citizenship." The main examples used here are the Israeli and the contemporary American ones, but the conceptual framework is wider than these two examples. The conceptualization of belligerent citizenship offered in the first chapter is relevant to some extent, with necessary local modifications, to other democracies at war. Similarly, the need to respond educationally to the changing conceptions of citizenship is evident in countries beyond those used here to illustrate the theoretical suggestions. In addition, the relevance of the project goes beyond wartime alone. Expansive education, focusing on attitudes relevant for preserving democratic inclinations in wartime as well as for containing the social discord that peace and the road toward it are bound to bring, is an important part of the political education of future citizens in any contemporary democracy. Examining education in the context of war and the quest for peace, beyond its immediate relevance to countries at war, can help educators and political theorists focus their attention on crucial and often neglected components of civic education. The significance of teaching civic values lies in their contribution to achieving peace, but not in it alone. These civic values are one and the same as those required for political participation, for tolerant deliberation of the public agenda, as well as for facilitating civic equality. The values and attitudes endorsed by expansive education can support a democratic response to circumstances of social conflict and tensions, not only to those of international conflict (in many cases those two conditions can hardly be told apart). Therefore, the education system's responsibility is to introduce these values to children in order to give them an opportunity to become equal citizens in a democratic peaceful society, which they can help bring about.