LAUSR

How to enhance the structural integration of a diverse population is a pivotal question faced by political regimes throughout the world. Moreover, with contemporary global migration affecting an ever-increasing share of the world’s population, the content of what pupils are supposed to know in order to fully participate in, and take responsibility for, societal life is necessarily subject to change. The copious volume edited by James A. Banks, a scholar in diversity studies and multicultural education at the University of Washington, puts forward a combination of multicultural citizenship and cosmopolitan human rights education as the most effective way to prepare future citizens for a life within and beyond national borders. First, the book delineates the difficult relationship between minorities and historically grown national citizenship rights in 18 states throughout the world, as well as the efforts of educators to offer those experiencing marginalization a citizenship education aimed at structural integration through a focus on “civic literacy, political efficacy, and civic engagement skills” (Banks 2017, xxix). As such, the authors in the book do not only analyse the status-quo, but are also very much concerned with communicating and learning from best practices within specific contexts around the world in order to contribute to a change in nationally embedded citizenship education curricula (Parker 2017, 457). After outlining the interlinkage between global migration patterns, existing barriers in the acquirement of full citizenship rights, and educational chances (Castle), the first part shows how citizenship concepts bestowed with an either regional (Bashir) or cosmopolitan meaning (Starkey) can be included within national school curricula. This is followed by case studies unraveling the issue of citizen education within single nation-states and within several nation-states (Faour; Osler). In countries conceiving themselves as immigrant nations, the teaching of political (Southern Africa, Moodley) and judicial (The United States of America, Banks) literacy, as well as a perspective on peace inspired by Gandhi (Canada, Joshee and Thomas), is discussed in great detail. Nation-states throughout Europe, in contrast, have found it more challenging to open up societal perspectives to multicultural citizenship. Norway, for example, witnesses a “paradox” between a widely proliferated societal acknowledgement of the importance of human rights, on the one hand, and hesitant human rights education, on the other (Osler 2017, 151). In Asia, citizenship education is analysed in China (Law), which is experiencing massive internal migration, but only pays lip service to minority groups, instead of bringing about a change in attitudes among the majority. More innovative forms of citizenship education can be found in Singapore, which functions as a citizenship education laboratory within specific segments of the socially stratified school system (Ismail), and Korea, where knowledge is prioritized above involvement (Cha et al.). The central question addressed in the section about the Middle East is how to teach pupils to become active and critical citizens in political environments with limited (or a complete absence of) democratic decision-making. Whereas Faour, for example, compares exclusionist mechanisms in educational systems in Lebanon, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, and suggests a focus on social justice in citizenship education, Al-Nakib shows the potential of transformative