“Creative and Innovative Citizenry”: Exploring the Past, Present and Future of Citizenship Education in New Zealand

The reform of educational administration and the revision of the compulsory schooling curriculum in New Zealand throughout the 1980s and 1990s had many parallels with similar initiatives in other countries. Within the curriculum revisions, the tensions between the “new right,” economically-driven agenda and New Zealand’s liberal progressive educational traditions were very apparent. Citizenship education was used by proponents of both sides of the ideological debate as a panacea for New Zealand’s social and economic ills. Although education for citizenship was to take a key position as an overarching aim in the revised national curriculum, there was little specific guidance on how to achieve this end. Unlike the majority of examples in this book, citizenship education in New Zealand did not become a compulsory curriculum area or even a content strand within other areas, but the author (Mutch, 2002, 2003) has argued that citizenship notions do underpin several key curriculum areas. More recently, the New Zealand Ministry of Education has conducted a “curriculum stocktake” and the results reveal that citizenship education has again become an area of intense interest and debate.

This chapter examines the relationship between educational policy and education for citizenship in New Zealand through three lenses—the past, the present and the future. The first section, focusing on the past, examines the political nature of the development of citizenship education in New Zealand. The next section, focusing on the present, outlines the current status of citizenship education and examines the nature of citizenship notions in New Zealand curriculum documents before describing a case study of citizenship education as implemented in one New Zealand school and enacted in one classroom within that school. The final section brings all these threads together to place citizenship education in its current context in relation to public and educational debates and raises questions about its present status and its possible future.