Different visions

I'm doing some reading about models of citizenship education for a paper I'm writing. A few have described how there are different visions of how "we" want citizens to act in the world - and these result in very different educational models for producing citizens. One article describes 3 different types of citizenship visions: personally responsible - someone who is a good person and helps others; socially active - someone who gets involved in organizing local activities; and justice-oriented - someone who looks at the root causes of social issues and lobbies to change them.

There was a neat CBC interview this morning that highlighted how these different perspectives can result in different ways to address social problems. A BC minister of something was talking about a study on domestic workers and caregivers and some of the problems they face - from being pushed to work more hours than their contracts, through outright abuse. The interviewer asked: are there any structural reasons for this? And he talked about some - that workers stay in the homes of their employers; that they suffer the consequences of reporting abuse; that we don't subsidize day-care in Canada, leading for a need for workers. The Minister didn't see any structural issues. He said that a majority of workers (from what he knows) are happy about the program. It seemed he just saw the need to tweak it - versus address the global economic imbalances that produce the program, or the inherent power imbalance in these particular relationships.

Theory in real life: yes!