Citizenship Education and the Curriculum in the European Schools System. A multidimensional history (1957-1994)

The present volume examines the European Schools system focusing on the citizenship education they promote and their curriculum from the late 1950s to the early 1990s. A literature review is presented to understand how previous research has described these Schools and their sketched image, which - in the author’s view - is fairly static and accompanied by a value judgement. However, the work attempts to look at these Schools from a historical-educational, phenomenological and performative perspective. It considers citizenship education not so much as an a priori discipline or idea but rather as a constitutive and organisational element of school systems aimed to respond to specific social demands and realised through the use of concepts, teaching methods and educational practices, thus realised through the school curriculum seen as a multi-layered element, not crystallised rigidly but dynamically formed due to the actors involved. The volume goes through the prescriptive and, in part, relational level of the curriculum of the European Schools in an attempt to disentangle the entanglements and retrace the national and international elements and influences that have contributed to its constitution. In particular, taking a diffractive and transnational view, some pedagogical influences underlying the curriculum are mapped, especially in primary school; contacts, albeit transient, with international organisations such as Unesco and Pax Christi are traced; the voices of some teachers emerge lastly, though in a blurred manner. The work thereby provides an initial reconstruction – as well as an indication of potential further explorations - of the network of processes, actors and instances that contributed to shaping citizenship education and the curriculum in these Schools.