Good Citizen

Guardian, 17 March 1998
Now eat your apple pie
by Linda Grant

Responding to a news story that 'Pupils face "good citizen" classes' in Home Office plans, Grant explores the implications and asks what it is to a 'citizen'? It smacks, she notes, of the Nazi state and Stalin's USSR, where not to subscribe to the state's definition of citizenship meant incarceration. In Britain, will it turn out 'little model Blairs, who in childhood was such a goody two-shoes that he set up his own Civics Society while at school?'. Grant concludes that she is, in fact, in favour of good citizen classes. Morality has generally been taught within the framework of religion, and in a multi-cultural society our children should learn to 'respect each other's freedom to practice their own rituals'. Ultimately, citizenship may provide a small loophole for the impoverished to break out of the mindset of a meaningless existence.