The civic imperative, Thomas Jefferson and John Dewey: A content analysis of 'CIVITAS'

The question of the role of schools in providing citizenship education is often perceived as a self-evident one. That is, it is largely unquestioned. This dissertation examines the issue of citizenship education from the perspective of deriving a platform or model that practitioners can use based on the ideas of Thomas Jefferson and John Dewey. The paradigm that is drawn is one that is participatory and based on what knowledge, skills and attitudes graduating seniors from high school should possess. Using this platform, the curriculum framework CIVITAS is then critiqued using a de novo form of document analysis designed by the author. The results of this study indicate that as a framework for citizenship education documents, CIVITAS is flawed by virtue of being too mainstream and too insensitive to issues of race, gender and class. The ideas of Jefferson and Dewey as well as the CIVITAS framework were examined from both a liberal perspective and a critical systems analysis.