Missed Opportunities: The IEA's Study of Civic Education and Civic Education in Post-Communist Countries

Overview & Synopsis

This article argues that the opportunity in Phase I of the IEA's Civic Education Study to include the new democracies' experiences of citizenship education have not been sufficiently exploited. "Borrowing" citizenship education from abroad and citizenship education for "civil society" have been chosen as examples of problems in the new democracies which have not been exploited. The final section focuses on the question of why new and recurring problems in citizenship education, which occurred in post-communist Europe, have not been identified, described or analysed in the IEA's publication "New paradigms and new recurring paradoxes in education for citizenship: an international comparison." The paper also points to some of the circumstances that seem to have had an impact on which problems were analysed in the study and which problems were largely ignored.