A Study On Citizenship Education In American Schools

Citizenship education is the outcome of modern country, with the rapid development of social economy and the curriculum reforming, people pay a great attention to citizenship education. This activity is carried out all over the world. American pays great attention to citizenship education in the educational reform and practice, and gets many achievements. Elementary and middle schools involve this activity, owning their special characteristics.As a result of historical and the cultural reason, our country school education since long ago has the evasion manner to the civic education question, the civic education concept in the research in our country very little to mention. With our country economy and social development, participates in the social life and the political life to the citizen needs the citizen intelligence the request to be increasingly high, but the entire society has the citizen to realize faint, the common courtesy consciousness insufficiency as well as the participation skill low status question generally, these contradictions urge the scholars to start to ponder our country's civic education question.In order to encounter the globalization tendency approaching and with modernization development urgent need of the 21st century, our country is supposed to pay great attention to studying and absorbing the advanced experience of the developed countries. According to the situation, our country will cultivate"qualified citizens"of international tendency. This article takes this as an objective point, in the detailed introduction American elementary and middle schools civic education, hoping provides the beneficial enlightenment and the model on our elementary and middle schools.The article mainly is composed of three parts. The first part is an introduction mainly to this selected topic research background, the domestic and American research present situation and the research technique has carried on the outline. Then writer introduces the concepts of citizen and citizenship education, distinguishing the morality education and political education from the citizenship education, and comparing the three concepts. In the second part, the writer introduces the history of the American schools citizenship education, and analyses the situation. Next, from the goals, contents, approaches and the characteristics of the citizenship education, writer introduces the general situation of citizenship education in American schools. At the same time, this article points problems and foresee the tendency of citizenship education. The last part or the third part compares the citizenship education of American and china current situation, according to the American advanced experience, to throw light on our country.