Elite Constructions of Civic Education in Australia

Abstract

Civic education has been the subject of a good deal of debate and discussion in Australia over the past decade. For some writers the re-emergence of civic education in the early 1990s, after an absence of more than 40 years, was enough to generate talk about a ‘new renaissance in civic education’ (Print, 1997). Others have gone further and analyzed the new civics initiatives within broader theoretical frameworks such as feminism (Foster, 1997; Smith, 2001), postmodernism (Gilbert, 1997) and political theory (Hogan, 1997). Yet others have sought to examine specific curriculum exemplars in terms of particular social theories (Meredyth and Thomas, 1999; Gill and Reid, 1999a). It is also clear that civic education continues to be shaped by current social and political environments, and that its rationale does not remain static (Holton, 1997; Walsh, 2000). There can be no doubting the contribution of civic education to the current discourse about the school curriculum in Australia.