The Study Of Citizenship Education In Social Studies

Basic education stage is the key period in which teenagers learn their knowledge, form their attitude and develop their skills and abilities. All countries regard cultivating qualified citizens as the initial purpose of Basic education, which is achieved through specialized citizenship education curriculum or integrated citizenship education system. The school education of our country has held blenching attitude towards citizenship education issue for a long period of time because of history and culture, and the concept of citizenship education is seldom mentioned in the education researches. With the development of China's society and economy, the citizenship character required for participating in social and political life is becoming higher and higher. However, there are still many problems existed, such as indifferent citizenship awareness,insufficient social morality awareness, and limited participating skills etc. These inconsistencies urge many scholars to begin to consider our citizenship education issue. Under this context, it has quite a certain realistic meaning for us to make the connotation of citizenship education clear, to analyze the current condition of citizenship education in our social studies, and to research practical strategies for citizenship education in our social studies.The introduction part of this thesis analyses the background of this research, introduces relevant domestic and overseas researches, illustrates the research's purpose and value, and puts forward the basic thoughts and methods for this research.In the second chapter "citizen and citizenship education", the connotations of citizen and citizenship are analyzed at first. Then, the citizenship education theories are clarified in terms of the logic structure as "democratic system"-* "citizenship participation "- "citizenship" -" citizenship education". Democracy is a kind of political system as well as a kind of life style. It permeates every aspect of social members' lives. There are demands of participating and sharing the values of democracy from common community life to national political life. The quality of national political life and social life depends on the citizenship awareness, citizenship morality and the citizenship skill level of the whole society, whereas the perfection and the advancement of social members' citizenship are realized though citizenshipeducation. Our country is a socialist nation, which adopts democratic system, and democracy is the core feature of socialism, so the socialist democracy has the same requirement for citizenship and citizenship education as mentioned above. Therefore, the necessity to carry out citizenship education in our countiy is demonstrated. At the same time, the commonness of citizenship education between our country and other countries is discovered, which provides foundation to selectively use overseas citizenship education theories as the reference for this thesis.The contemporary western citizenship education thoughts are deeply influenced by the liberalism, civic republicanism, communtarianism and multiculturalism. Liberalism is the foundation for their citizenship education thought. It sparkplugs humanity liberation, respects citizen's freedom and equality in democratic society, and criticizes the educational ideas and behaviors of cultivating citizens following like sheep. Liberalism's theoretical limitation is corrected by communitarianism, civic republicanism and multiculturalism from different sides, so the western citizenship education thought is continuously perfected in a dynamic balance. The core idea of contemporary western citizenship education is to respect human's subjective nature, to pay attention to cultivate individual's ability to participate national politics and social life, and to sparkplug equal attention for personal value and social value. These thoughts are reflected by many countries' citizenship education practices. All contemporary countries emphasize the citizenship education's core status in the basic education, place th...