Abstract
This chapter focuses on the historical and current conceptions of citizenship and models of education for citizenship in the USA. The authors begin with reflections on the country’s colonial circumstances and the colonial understanding of the ‘human’ that defines what it means to achieve the American identity and, therefore, the status of a citizen. Building on this definition, the chapter expands on the politics of the incorporation of immigrants into American citizenship via civics education as a process of subject-making with the end goal of social control. The authors argue that the same ideology of assimilation to the socio-economic ‘norm’ that undergirded much of the Americanization campaign of the twentieth century is guiding a form of neoliberal Americanization in the twenty-first century in attempts to invent a new ‘human’ under the regime of market fundamentalism.
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Notes
- 1.
Based on the facts of the Jamestown settlement, often called ‘the first permanent English settlement’ (see nationalhumanitiescenter.org).
- 2.
In developing the concept, Foucault was inspired by Max Weber’s work. As Lemke (2001) explains, ‘Weber was important for having shifted Marx’s problem of the contradictory logic of Capitalism onto a level where he discussed it as the irrational rationality of the capitalist society’ (p. 192).
- 3.
By itself, economic efficiency is not a concept or value particular to neoliberal thinking. But placing it on par with humanistic and social values is.
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Leonardo, Z., Vafai, M.M. (2016). Citizenship Education and the Colonial Contract: The Elusive Search for Social Justice in US Education. In: Peterson, A., Hattam, R., Zembylas, M., Arthur, J. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Education for Citizenship and Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51507-0_29
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