Citizen Education: Silencing Crucial Issues

Content in the Greek civic education curriculum presents significant discrepancies and discontinuities with the practices, concepts, and attitudes which frame the everyday lives of most students. The issues of democracy, immigration, political freedom, political participation, and integration of the European Union carry multiple and engaged meanings for Greek adolescents. Research in progress, as well as the results of the Youth and History survey, verify the complexity of their thinking on such issues. Civic education textbooks, however, formulate such issues in a descriptive manner that emphasizes formal institutional functioning over actual events and political processes. No explicit connection is made between the lived experience of the students and the formal approach of the textbooks. The civic education curriculum and student attitudes and practices appear to be on two independent and unconnected trajectories, thus depriving pupils of the opportunity for reflective consideration of the interplay of textbook content and everyday experience.