Chapter 7: Becoming Citizens:Punjabi ESL Learners, National Language Policy and The Canadian Language Benchmarks

Citizenship has been a problematic concept since modern Citizenship Theory (CT) emerged as a distinct field with the publication of T. H. Marshall’s Citizenship and Social Class (1950). Marshall noted that national citizenship formally confers equal status to all members of particular societies but stands independent of the inequalities of class. While granting the legal right to possess and act in unlimited ways, modern citizenship does not provide any concrete means of realising these rights. So, while the right to property is rather ubiquitous in modern democratic states, the right to gainful employment is rare. In this way, Marshall (1950) contended, citizenship promotes and obscures the inequality of class.