Forming Future Citizens: Assessing ‘educación ciudadana’ in Latin America

This lecture will examine the relationships between school education and citizenship and democratic development in Latin America. The analysis is based on empirical evidence of a recent study about the values and concepts in the school curricula of Colombia, Chile, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Mexico and Paraguay. It shows that the curricular contents of present schooling in the region is at fault regarding the preparation for democratic politics. This reflects a common pattern of focusing more on interpersonal and interactional dimensions of the ‘life with others’ (civil dimension), and not sufficiently foregrounding the relationships with the state and politics (civic dimension). The lecture will present and discuss the implications of this situation.