Topic: citizenship rhetoric

OK, as I think about this some more I'm thinking about based on the following thoughts:
1) Lisa Delpit's assertion that schooling (as an institution) is always about "other people's children". The premise inherent in this is that "we can raise our kids right, but we can't trust those people to do it right." (Which ties nicely into my previous post about the trope of threat as a driving force for education--see below.) 2) Especially since we're talking about publicly funded schooling, we're talking about what sort of future citizens are creating?

So my topic is really about what definition of citizenship (i.e., what sort of citizens) are we calling forth in the rhetoric of our education policy?

So what intrigues me about A Nation At Risk, is that it calls forth citizens who are conceived of as contributors to a global economy (or more accurately, contributors to American supremacy in the global economy)--and really little else. This is important in that it marks a move away from rhetorics that define a citizen's duty as more than a taxpayer--from ones that conceive of the duty as a citizen to create social justice, extend democracy, etc.

This is important on one hand because (one of) the inherent premise(s) in NAR's rhetoric, is that the competition in this global economy is fundamentally fair, and it elides any critiques (thereby obviating the citizen's need to address them as well) of the system as a way to maintain economic inequality.

But I think one my most vexing problems is how to help the reader of it (who will presumably be coming from an education background--how many other folks do you suppose will pick up a dissertation about education policy?) will see it as talking about rhetoric (first and foremost), rather than talking about a particular policy, or as an argument for a certain type of citizenship, etc.--since that's what I'm really most interested in.