The Scholarship of Engagement for Politics: - Higher Education ...

The Scholarship of Engagement for Politics
generally (Sloam 2008). The word ‘politics’ stands as a dirty word,
inevitably tarnished by popular anger over ‘flipped’ mortgages, expense
scandals and politicians who don’t seem to understand or care. But people
are nevertheless interested in political issues: poverty, the War on Terror,
themes of justice, the financial crisis, the environment ad infinitum. If the
word ‘politics’ needs rescuing from bad repute, universities should not look
the other way. Regrettably however:
So much [university] funding simply follows measurable productivity,
multiplying useless and needless publication of articles, the majority of
which are rarely read by anybody, as if every teacher had to be, or
pretended to be, an original scholar. And now there is little funding for
extramural teaching, such departments diminished or collapsing all over
the country; for funding now overwhelmingly favours vocational,
certificated courses. Those in the community who value education for its
own sake and non-vocational study are now left out in the cold or charged
‘the real cost’ which excludes much real need. Lifelong learning does not
mean a multiplication of qualifications (Crick 2000: 144–5).
This commercialisation of the sector began with the predominately
vocational, economistic thrust of the Thatcher years but found willing
apostles in government and university management up to and including
the New Labour project. Issues such as employability, teaching quality and
research assessment have dominated the agenda. How we as teachers of
politics respond to these issues is surely important, but there is a sense
that our discipline has been out-manoeuvred. As Bernard Crick neatly put
it nearly a decade ago, politics has ‘locked itself up, or been locked up
where it can do no harm, in the ivory tower’ (2000: 113). But things do not
have to be this way: ‘citizenship education’ is an idea whose time has come.
Citizenship education is by no means a new subject and has been
debated by British educationalists for at least forty years. But since the
1990s we have witnessed an explosion of interest (see Callan 1997; Heater
1993, 2004; Crick 2000; Faulks 2000; Kivisto and Faist 2007). Such
debate led to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA)
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