Civic Education and Contested Democracy: Towards a Pedagogic State in the Netherlands post 1945

254 Pages·2020·2.401 MB·English

by  Wim de Jong

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY
Civic Education and
Contested Democracy
Towards a Pedagogic
State in the Netherlands post 1945
Wim de Jong
Palgrave Studies in Global Citizenship
Education and Democracy
Series Editor
Jason Laker
San José State University
San José, CA, USA
This series will engage with the theoretical and practical debates regarding
citizenship, human rights education, social inclusion, and individual and
group identities as they relate to the role of higher and adult education on
an international scale. Books in the series will consider hopeful possibili-
ties for the capacity of higher and adult education to enable citizenship,
human rights, democracy and the common good, including emerging
research and interesting and effective practices. It will also participate in
and stimulate deliberation and debate about the constraints, barriers and
sources and forms of resistance to realizing the promise of egalitarian
Civil Societies. The series will facilitate continued conversation on policy
and politics, curriculum and pedagogy, review and reform, and provide
a comparative overview of the different conceptions and approaches to
citizenship education and democracy around the world.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14625
Wim de Jong
Civic Education and
Contested
Democracy
Towards a Pedagogic State
in the Netherlands post 1945
Wim de Jong
Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Palgrave Studies in Global Citizenship Education and Democracy
ISBN 978-3-030-56297-7 ISBN 978-3-030-56298-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56298-4
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Morality is nothing but exercising power without saying so.
—Joop Goudsblom (1932–2020)
Acknowledgements
This book was conceived at two moments: Chaps. 2, 3, 4 and 5 are based
on a translation and reworking of my Ph.D., defended in Nijmegen in
September 2014, Van wie is de burger? Omstreden democratie in Nederland,
1945–1985. They all broadly cover one decade of post-war Dutch his-
tory. For the English publication I have pursued the story up until the
present, which means the story shifts gear in Chap. 6, when inversely,
four decades are covered in one chapter.
I want to thank my colleagues in the NWO project Repertoires of
Democracy (2008–2014), supervised by Remieg Aerts and Wim van
Meurs, and Carla van Baalen, who commented at different stages on the
manuscript, as well as my friends Tim Houwen and Joris Gijsenbergh.
For the English adaptation, comments by Bram Mellink have been help-
ful. Of course, the biggest thanks go out to my wife Marieke and daugh-
ter Bente, who supported me all the way through the finishing of a
manuscript during a global pandemic.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Moralizing Citizens. Democracy and Civic Education
During Reconstruction (1945–1950) 23
3 Tolerance and Individuality. Debating Democracy in the
1950s 61
4 No Country for Old Men. Contesting Authority in the 1960s 99
5 Participation and Indoctrination. Education and
Democracy in the Long 1970s 137
6 Moralism and Hedonism. Towards a Pedagogic State
Since the 1980s 175
7 Outlook 217
Select Bibliography 227
Index 245
ix
1
Introduction
We live in a pedagogic state. Twenty-first-century western societies often
see social problems in educational terms. Education, among other things,
should counter racism and sexism; schools should contain crime by pro-
moting school attendance.1 Citizens should also live more healthy lives:
in 2018, the Dutch government concluded a ‘National Prevention Deal’
with 70 civil society organizations, countering tobacco, alcoholism and
obesity. Instead of strict measures, state secretary Paul Blokhuis wants to
‘help people make the right choices’, making them aware of a healthy
lifestyle. He derides claims that this is patronizing as ‘retarded’: ‘there is
broad support for changing social norms’.2
There is also a near-universal consensus that schools should raise chil-
dren to citizenship. A growing sense of urgency can be observed among
public officials in the western world, as on the verge of the 2020s, liberal
democracy in the western world is ubiquitously believed to be in peril, or
1 David F. Labaree, ‘The winning ways of a losing strategy: educationalizing social problems in the
United States’, Educational Theory 58 (2008) 4: 447–460, 447–448.
2 Enzo van Steenbergen & Martine Kamsma, ‘Dit was het hoogst haalbare voor staatssecretaris
Blokhuis’, NRC 23-11-2018.
© The Author(s) 2020 1
W. de Jong, Civic Education and Contested Democracy, Palgrave Studies in Global
Citizenship Education and Democracy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56298-4_1
2 W. de Jong
at least in a state of crisis.3 With good reason: leaders with a populist,
authoritarian style of leadership such as Trump, Orban and Putin are on
the rise; public confidence in political parties as well as democracy in
general is decreasing, as does participation in elections. The sense of alarm
is aggravated by research surveys that show a waning belief among mil-
lennials and younger generations in democracy as the best political sys-
tem, or at least the least bad one.4
The causes of this crisis are sought in a diversity of places: stagnating
solidarity between elites and people; neoliberal policies without alterna-
tives; and commercialized and misinformative traditional and social
media among them.5 One of the most important in this list is the politi-
cal competence of citizens. Many see civic participation as basic to
democracy. That makes apathy of citizens and ignorance about politics a
core problem. This even leads to arguments against democracy, and occa-
sional op-eds by academics arguing to make voting dependent upon hav-
ing passed a test, clearly not seeing themselves as the target group of such
proposals.6
A critical strand of political theorists conversely points out that the
fault for disaffectedness should not be sought with citizens, but in politics
itself; a cynical, unrelatable system breeds the citizens it deserves.
According to Colin Hay in Why we hate politics, globalized neoliberalism
has fostered an antipolitical culture, and the impression of a duplicitous,
untrustworthy caste of politicians as ‘self-serving and self-interested ratio-
nal utility-maximizers’; politicians cannot lay the blame solely with the
‘demand side’, but should reflect on their role in this process.7 Following
3 A.C. Grayling, Democracy and its Crisis (London: Oneworld Publications 2017); D. Innerarity,
Politics in the Times of Indignation: The Crisis of Representative Democracy (London: Bloomsbury
Publishing 2019) 4; W. Merkel, S. Kneip (Eds.), Democracy and Crisis. Challenges in Turbulent
Times (Springer International Publishing 2019) 3.
4 R.S. Foa and Yascha Mounk, ‘The Danger of Deconsolidation. The Democratic Disconnect’,
Journal of Democracy 27 (2016) 3: 5–17; Richard Wike, Katie Simmons, Bruce Stokes and Janell
Fetterolf, Globally, Broad Support for Representative and Direct Democracy But many also endorse
nondemocratic alternatives (Pew Research Center 2017) 25.
5 Boris Vormann, Christian Lammert, Democracy in Crisis: The Neoliberal Roots of Popular Unrest
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2019) 10; M. Castells, Rupture: The Crisis of Liberal
Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press 2019) 16; 31.
6 Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton University Press 2016) 15.
7 Colin Hay, Why we hate politics (Cambridge: Polity 2007) 217–218.