citizenship education

Development Education (DE) it is considered as an educational process that promotes the citizenship committed to development. This issue becomes a topic of particular interest in the context of Post-2015 agenda to achieve the United Nations Millenium Development Goals for human development. This article discusses, from a pedagogical perspective, whether the DE should have its own space in compulsory education in Spain, as it is advocated by some sectors linked to development cooperation, or rather must be integrated by other educational approaches that operate in the school. To solve this issue, we have follow the next steps: Briefly describe the results of the research about the presence of DE in compulsory education; understand what is DE and how it is conceptualized in Spain. We conclude that it is necessary to highlight and introduce the DE in school programs of social education, ethics and citizenship in compulsory education.

The main reason is that education is the means, purpose and basic component of human development.

Schools are required to educate students in community and citizenship. This overall aim comprises a number of specific objectives: to communicate a set of contents, to foster certain values and attitudes, and to develop a range of skills. The purpose of this paper is to present the findings from a survey dealing with issues related to Citizenship Education (CE); 1,557 third-year students in secondary education in the Zaragoza region were surveyed. The paper is structured as follows: first, the international framework within which CE is promoted is described. The issue is then discussed in relation to established Spanish legislation in this regard. Thereafter, the empirical results from a case-study survey carried out among students attending schools in Zaragoza are presented. The focus of the survey was to evaluate student responses to EC as a subject, and its objective was to analyze the views of students both before and after their participation in the subject during academic year 20082009, the first year the subject was taught in the Spanish school system. The results show that there is significant improvement in the theoretical knowledge block, which is consistent with student experience on a taught course at school; however, there is no appreciable improvement in the blocks relating to values and attitudes.

This study presents Nussbaums theory of citizenship education as a cosmopolitan education or worlds citizenship. This approach wants to abolish or overcome the difficulties of  the cultural mixture of Occident as a consequence of current globalization. As the stoicism philosophy, Nussbaum defend the idea that the correct citizenship education is that which wants to rise the worlds citizenship. Many authors defend the democracy education or national education as the right citizenship education, but Nussbaum decline this kind of education and supports cosmopolitan education because it facilitates the social life in the current plural society.

To develop effective programs for civic education in the schools today, educators must confront in some countries a deepening hostility to the inculcation of a national, or civic, identity in any form.   Much of this hostility emanates from those who espouse something called "cultural democracy," or what has recently been called "illiberal multiculturalism."  This form of multiculturalism may be described as an effort to "close young people off into identities already ascribed to them" and to make them think that they bear no personal responsibility for their thinking or behavior because -so the illiberal multiculturalist claims-both are determined by their "culture" or their "race, ethnicity, or gender." In drawing on the various academic disciplines in the school curriculum, civic educators have tended to overlook literary study for its potential contribution to civic education, both to strengthen it and to address these anti-civic forces.

The ultimate purpose of this essay is to show how the construction of literature curricula and the study of literature can contribute to these goals.  In this essay, I describe the anti-civic forces now at work in literature programs in American schools and explain why these forces exist.  I then suggest how literature programs can honor the essence of literary study (that is, the teaching of literature as literature) and at the same time strengthen the underpinnings of a constitutional democracy centered on individual rights and a concept of personal responsibility as well as combat the anti-civic forces emanating from illiberal multiculturalism.  Although I will of necessity use examples from chiefly American and British literature to illustrate my suggestions, civic educators in other countries can draw on the literature of their own countries as support for civic education and to combat these anti-civic forces provided they are clear about what they are trying to accomplish.

The present society demands a new type of education if we want to create citizens fully conscious of their rights and duties. In a democratic society the creation of a good citizen involves preparing him or her to take part in the development of the community as well as enhancing the participating structures in which he or she can get involved. Education requires significant changes in focusing the methodological approaches and the achievement of major efforts aimed at the integration of global values in the process of teaching-learning.

In the dawn of a new millennium, we face the challenge of re-measuring the course of education. We must consider that, the strength of market and the successfulness of our democratic way of government depend on the vitality of our civil society, considered as the inexhaustible source of our being humans.