New Europe College Yearbook 1997-1998 - Free

N.E.C. Yearbook 1997-1998
children develop their full potential: .
Under the circumstances, the question that obviously arises is whether
the hope of relating education to the consolidation of democracy is justified,
beyond any romantic optimism and beyond what sometimes seems to be
regarded as (and, unfortunately, seems even to be) a fashion of transition
periods, which tends to transform civic and human rights education into a
convenience sometimes as tyrannical as the old mechanisms for the
ideological indoctrination of the younger generations in regimes that tend
to perpetuate by force of a new "civic religion".
In order to clarify this issue, in this work we intend to discuss the
epistemological status of the civic and human rights education, in the
light of some present-day controversies concerning the dilemmas related
to citizenship in a democratic society, as well as the identity dilemmas in
today’s more and more globalized world. We shall also discuss the
educational models considered to be good practices in the field of civic
and human rights education, by establishing a link between the normative
pedagogical discourse and the research-action whose purpose is to produce
positive changes at the level of a certain school or local community. The
main questions from which our discussion starts are those related to the
way in which, on the one side, educational actions are justified as such
and, on the other side, to what extent educational actions are related to
the conditions in which civic and human rights education are legitimately
associated to the consolidation of a liberal democracy.
2. Theoretical Perspectives on Citizenship and Human Rights:
Some Present-day Dilemmas and Their Impact on Education
In order to explore the possible contributions of educational actions
to the consolidation of liberal democracies, we have to analyze first the
present meanings of the terms "citizenship" and "human rights" as they
appear in contemporary theoretical discussions. These theoretical
discussions are certainly fed by the evolutions in the field of the real politics
and by different ways of encoding the human rights as well as the civic
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