Citizen education: Silencing crucial issues

Content in the Greek civic education curriculum presents significant discre pancies and discontinuities with the practices, concepts, and attitudes whi ch frame the everyday lives of most students. The issues of democracy, immi gration, 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, surv ey, verify the complexity of their thinking on such issues. Civic education textbooks, however, formulate such issues in a descriptive manner that emp hasizes formal institutional functioning over actual events and political p rocesses. No explicit connection is made between the lived experience of th e students and the formal approach of the textbooks. The civic education cu rriculum and student attitudes and practices appear to be on two independen t and unconnected trajectories, thus depriving pupils of the opportunity fo r reflective consideration of the interplay of textbook content and everyda y experience.