For the purpose of this topic area, the term civic education is used to cover the larger job of educating citizens so that they can take responsibility for their roles and responsibilities within democratic states and exercize their rights as free human beings.

'Civic education' has gained favour as a description of this empowering and freeing process, but it retains some tinges of a civilizing and urbanizing mission with which astute educators operating in varied contexts will want to grapple.

It is these varied contexts which form the basis of the following sections of the topic area. While there are core themes involved in civic education, the contexts within which these are explored and developed have become more diverse. And as the role of education in taming (or civilizing) these contexts and making them fit for citizens - and citizens fit for them - has become more important, so it is necessary for educators to pay attention to their differences and trajectories.

These themes are those of vision, virtue, habit and practice.

Explorations of civic education invariably start with explorations of democracy and the related terms of citizenship and civil society. Those engaged in civic education have a vision of empowered citizens voluntarily organizing themselves for self-reliance and political impact in societies where representative and participatory democracy produces peace, prosperity and personal liberation. All of these are contested concepts. However, although the 1990’s with their belief in the triumph of democracy as a regime of government, when civic education received renewed impetus, have given way to the more cautious years in which war and terror have re-emerged as tools of state building and power projection, any civic education programme must place a vision before educators and learners.

Vision

Civic virtue has become a stock theme in a number of curriculum innovations and projects designed to shift the focus of education from merely a knowledge and information activity – learning about the politics of particular countries, or the history of the development of a constitution and the manner in which that constitution has been used or abused – to a consideration of the personal responsibility of the individual learner to behave well in relation to the democratic society in which he or she lives. Lists of virtues have been created which are assumed to be particularly appropriate to this form of living. They include respect for others, co-responsibility for the community, commitment to constitutionalism and human rights, peace and friendship in local and national affairs.

Virtue

In some educator typologies virtues and habits intersect with one another and with the separately defined civic skills. But all agree that civic education must inculcate behaviours which enable people to construct a democratic way of life, irrespective of the particular regime under which they find themselves. Amongst these habits are the simple ones of non-violent conflict management; shaping, expressing and promoting interests and needs so that competing interests and needs can be identified and resolved; voting; being a public as well as private person and so on.

Habit

Societies are always complex – and democratic societies have to establish, on the basis of their particular histories and balance of forces, practices which enable them to meet the bare minima (see Meaning of Democracy) which form the bedrock of such a society. Having constructed these practices and procedures – and in the process of renewing and reforming them to meet contemporary demands – societies seek to educate their citizens in making use of and participating in them.

Practice

At its heart then, civic education seeks to make people powerful and capable of participating to the fullest in a democratic society, or to create that democratic society. But contexts differ, and the challenges facing educators therefore also differ.

It is important that decisions taken in developing programmes, looking for models and materials, seeking support from other practitioners and empowering people take account of these differences. Is the civic educator involved in preserving and renewing a democratic state (see Civic Education in Established Democracies), building or re-building after war or civil conflict (see Post war reconstruction), tending the emergence of democracy (see Civic Education in Emerging Democracies), or transforming societies (see Authoritarian Regimes and Fragile States)? Or is the educator part of a team addressing a much more unstable crisis in which the concept of state is irrelevant to the immediate emergency (see Civic Education During Emergencies)?

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OSCE Election Observation Mission to Kyrgyzstan, presidential elections 2009 by mcaton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic License.