Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-1989

Volume

53

Issue

6

Publication Title

Social Education

Abstract

Civic education programs have always played a distinctive role in the American education curriculum. For the most part, however, civic education has been associated with civic knowledge and the cultivation of a cognitive faculty thought to be identical with political judgement (private judgment on public issues).

Perhaps this has been appropriate to a society which understood democracy primarily as a system of accountability in which elected representatives do most of the actual governing and "citizens" limit themselves to the passive roles of voter and watchdog.

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