Education for Citizenship in the 21st Century: A documentary analysis

Abstract

Educational policies, by focusing on teaching individual skills, have somewhat neglected social and democratic values. Recognizing the importance of citizenship education to balance these skills and values, we conducted a documentary analysis using the main official documents of the Council of Europe, the European Union and UNESCO, between 2000 and 2020, aiming to understand the evolution of education for citizenship, in the supranational political context. The results identified a greater dedication to the conception of adaptive/inclusive citizenship, followed by critical/democratic citizenship. The citizenship conception that received the least attention was the participatory/active. These results appear to not follow the trend of studies carried out in the school context, that reflect the need to improve the guidelines to develop critical/democratic citizenship education.