Rethinking lifelong citizenship education: Tendencies and tensions in East Asian contexts

Citizenship is a polysemy referring to legal status, entitlements, obligations, identity, and virtues associated with the membership of a democracy. The development of a strong and full democracy is both a political and an educational task. People learn to be citizens, and citizenship entails an opportunity, an outcome, and a process related to learning. This chapter views citizenship education as a societywide political socialization experience across formal, informal, and nonformal contexts over human life course. Citizenship is learned in various forms and processes embedded in a wide variety of social and political institutions. Mass media, public broadcasting agents, libraries, museums, civil society organizations, and the community are all important sources and agents of political learning. This chapter illustrates the intersection of citizenship education and lifelong learning by discussing the cases of four East Asian societies under different state-society relations (Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan) and highlighting the significant roles of civil society organizations in citizenship education. The chapter then turns to the marginalization of citizenship in the present lifelong learning discourse, discussing that fostering citizenship with lifelong education is yet a fully delivered promise as it is not an official central concern, especially given the recent neoliberalist education policies in East Asia as well as in other parts of the world. Reclaiming the public and democratic nature of citizenship in lifelong education, the chapter calls for improving learning and institutional conditions (diverse opportunities, access to information in particular) that enable active and critical citizenship for lifelong engagement in both the state and the civil society.