Programs for Democratic Citizenship in Mexico's Ministry of Education: Local Appropriations of Global Cultural Flows

Introduction

Recent scholarship in comparative education has called attention to the problems and challenges associated with the intensified globalization of educational programs.¹ Structural arrangements for schooling in poorer countries have become increasingly subject to the mandates of neoliberal economic policy as these are dictated by powerful international agencies and national elites. In places like Latin America, the recent predominance of schemes for educational decentralization, privatization, and "accountability" illustrate that, in matters of policy, the sovereign state is indeed strongly "conditioned" by external influences.²

However, as Arnove and Torres emphasize, globalization processes always entail a "dialectic of the global and the local," in which the outcome is never fore-ordained.³ If structural reforms tend to show the heavy hand of the global market at work, thus favoring the global over the local, then on questions of curricular content, teacher education, textbook production, and the like, the effects of neoliberal globalization are much less clear. Developments in curriculum and pedagogy more explicitly engage the terrain of ideologies and cultural values, and are arguably less malleable to external conditioning or subject to external oversight. Moreover, social actors rooted in local cultural traditions are more likely and able to appropriate such prescribed changes and transform them into something rather different from what was originally intended. Thus, if so-called cultural globalization has only an indirect relationship to economic globalization, then certain aspects of cultural globalization, such as curriculum, may be even more subject to local transformations.

One of the most interesting and pertinent arenas for investigating the question of cultural globalization is in the emerging global network of organizations and government ministries dedicated to democratic civic, or citizenship, education. Over the last twenty years, new forms of democratic governance have been developed in nations that had previously experienced a long period of authoritarian or totalitarian rule. Not surprisingly, countries with little or long-submerged democratic experience at the national level have been most active in revising programs for civic education in order to create a broad-based democratic political culture to accompany structural reforms.⁴ Perennially a bulwark of national identity and allegiance for more authoritarian regimes, schools are now seen as the potential seedbeds for a new kind of democratic citizen.⁵ To be sure, "newly democratizing" countries have occasionally undertaken to survey and revive more local democratic traditions and practices within their own borders.⁶ Yet in articulating the form that education for democratic citizenship should take, such countries have more often than not reached out to other countries and international organizations. An ever-growing array of liberal democratic governments and related nongovernmental organizations stand ready to meet their needs.⁷

A long tradition of thought about the bases for political citizenship takes as its model of democracy the constitutionalist liberal democracies of the North.⁸ Citizens in the modern nation-state are defined as those with constitutionally-specified rights and obligations, which typically include voting, due process, free speech, respect for law, defense of the country, and so forth. This model of citizenship is centrally functional to the operation of the nominally democratic nation-state, which has in the past fifty years become the hegemonic, if not universally recognized, global mode of governance. In this political framework, "responsible citizenship in a constitutional representative democracy" requires "the capacity for informed, reasonable, deliberative and freely made choices in response to competitive public elections and contested public policy issues."⁹ And in virtually every nation-state, of course, mass public education is charged with substantially forming the citizen.¹⁰

One of the fundamental presuppositions of this paper is that the model political citizen of constitutionalist democracy, legitimated by Western political theory and exported now around the world, actually enfolds a number of particular cultural and ideological assumptions.¹¹ Available international schemes for democratic citizenship thus tend to place emphasis on representative government and certain forms of civic "engagement" or "participation." In terms that may be more or less explicit, such schemes articulate a cultural model of the "educated person," an idealized set of attitudes...