Printer-friendly PDF Citizenship education refers to the use of education for training people to become citizens. Education can refer to formal schooling, at any level, or to public information more broadly disseminated, e.g. through the media, through legislation, through informal adult education, etc. It also assumes that citizenship is more than a matter of legal status or political identity, but involves a set of values and commitments as well. In Canada, as elsewhere, citizenship in this context usually contains four elements. The first is national consciousness or identity.
Citizenship education aims to produce national citizens.
This can range from nationalist chauvinists, through moderate patriots, to those with a knowledge of national history, geography and other basic facts. Usually citizenship education aims to achieve not just knowledge, but an emotional commitment to or identification with one's nation, a sense of loyalty and duty. At the same time, this sense of national identity usually coexists with other identities, regional, cultural, ethnic, religious, class, gender and so on. A key problem in citizenship education is to decide how these various levels of identity fit together. Related Web Sites Page 1 .