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16 T he charge of producing citizens has long been an integral part of the mission of education in the United States. From Thomas Jefferson’s linking of an “educated citizenry” to “our survival as a free people” to educational reformer Horace Mann’s common school movement through John Dewey and other Progressive era pragmatists, from the New Left–era education movements of the 1960s (e.g., Students for a Democratic Society) to the rhetoric of the 2006 Spellings Commission report, education in the name of citizenship endures. Yet as educational historian Derek Heater explains, citizenship— what it means, what kind of behavior it describes, what resources are afforded through it—often suffers under “semantic confusion” in which a “partial range of attributes” stands in for the whole. While Heater tasks the teacher with sorting out the confusion, the realm of education often perpetuates this confusion by labeling so many educational aims as citizenship. Encompassing civic, intellectual , cultural, and vocational goals, the production of the citizen remains an uncontroversial leitmotif in the rhetoric surrounding educational objectives. Citizenship—not just the legal status, but the cultural certification—takes on heightened importance in moments of anxiety, whether economic, social, or national. And often education is used as a way to alleviate these anxieties, playing a role in shaping individuals based on a model deserving of that cultural certification. While citizenship has always been produced in multiple spaces (e.g., federal government, adult education, community groups), the increase in mass formal education, first in K–12 and more recently in higher education,1 has been justified, in part, by its crucial role in the fulfillment of citizenship. Higher 1 in the name of citizenship Citizens should know what their status implies; and they should understand when politicians abuse the term by according the whole concept only a partial range of attributes. It is, moreover, important to understand the complexity of the role of citizen and to appreciate that much needs to be learned if civic rights are to be exercised, civic duties are to be performed and a life of civic virtue is to be pursued. The citizen , in short, must be educated; and no teacher can properly construct the necessary learning objectives if semantic confusion surrounds the very subject to be studied. —Derek Heater, Citizenship, vii in the name of citizenship 17 Education for Democracy, a report from the President’s Commission on Higher Education2 published in 1947, drove a national education policy around the production of citizens and advocated “increased access to college” (Hutcheson, “Truman Commission” 107) as a way of addressing societal concerns during the post–World War II era and at the beginning of the Cold War. By increasing the number of college-educated Americans and through a more fully articulated general education, institutions of higher education would guide “the transmission of a common cultural heritage toward a common citizenship” (United States, Higher Education 88). Along with the G.I. Bill of 1944, the Truman report “marked the beginning of a substantial shift in the nation’s expectations about who should attend college” (Hutcheson, “Truman Commission” 107), thus connecting increasing higher education rates with generating citizenship. While educative spaces have always been positioned as crucial elements of citizenship production, the continued increasing importance of formal education means these institutions now have more of an influence on how citizenship is being produced and defined and, to some degree, has resulted in a definition of good citizenship that is disproportionally focused on success in education. A definition of citizenship in the context of rising standards for literacy and education challenges the seemingly central importance of citizenship to education in general, and, for writing teachers, the influence of citizenship in literacy learning. To this end, I must ask two crucial questions: First, why is citizenship a faithful goal of literacy instruction? In turn, why is literacy so often used to cultivate citizenship? Literacy is supposed to yield a more democratic and participatory citizenship, a more educated citizenship, a more active citizenship— all familiar refrains in the field of rhetoric and composition and beyond. Yet despite assuming that successful writing instruction plays a key role in making good citizens and that the classroom space can reinvigorate democratic and participatory citizenship, the terms and boundaries used to define citizenship are vague at best and often go uninterrogated. Although citizenship has become a superterm that can encompass many definitions, the resultant lack of specificity that often accompanies it allows us to elide crucial concerns about...

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