20 Introduction 1. SCHOOLS AMID DIVERSITY AND COMPLEXITY Before discerning the central features of our modern, fragmented society and their implications for citizenship education it is first necessary to understand on a basic level what schools and education are meant to do in the context of society. Good education serves to build bridges between the (mostly and hopefully) safe atmosphere of the family, on the one hand, and the more diverse and open atmosphere of society, on the other hand. In so doing, teachers invite students to cross these bridges to actively participate in both the social and the natural worlds, enabling them to accept the invitation to cross by practising the art of living together in the safe space of the school. The historic pedagogue Comenius, therefore, described schools as workshops of humanity, which is a description that can be connected to more contemporary discussion of the school as a mini-society. Hannah Arendt (1977), for example, was very precise in her elaboration of this concept, depicting the school as ‘the institution that we interpose between the private domain of home and the world in order to make the transition from the family to the world possible at all’ (pp. 188–189). Biesta (2022, p. 18) juxtaposed this ‘older, more hidden and perhaps almost forgotten history’ of the school with the ‘more common history of the modern school’. The latter, he stated, ‘emerged as a result of the modernization of society and more specifically as part of the differentiation of societal fields and functions’ (p. 18). In this final, relatively new conception, schools and education first and foremost perform functions of and for societies that have lost (parts of) their intrinsic educative power because work and jobs have moved to factories and offices and become so specialised that special institutions are now required to prepare their future workforce. However, if education has to be a broad, more general and humane invitation to the world, as Biesta (2013, pp. 141–144) argued in his earlier work, then the older, more classical history of the school is in urgent need of rediscovery. Making this argument, Biesta (2022) called the school ‘a kind of halfway house’—that is, not so much a function of and for society but ‘a rather curious place halfway in between home and the street’ (p. 19) (8). This classical vision of schools and education can also be seen in Christian thinking and writing on education. A striking example comes from Aalders (1977), who emphasised that the Christian school should be a cultural forum (in Dutch: cultuurgestalte; p. 223), a concept earlier employed by van Klinken (1953). This indicates that schools need to remain focused on their bridge8 This approach coincides with Epstein et al.’s (2002) theory of overlapping spheres of influence. According to this theory, the position of schools can be described as a remarkable intermediate position between families, state, society and other community partners.
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