CHAPTER 6: Civic Education Reform for Democracy: U.S. Models in Mexico and Indonesia

Although the meanings of democratic citizenship are as varied and complex as the corresponding mechanisms of democratic governance, we still know relatively little about how such meanings are negotiated in the global context of power politics, where dominant models of democratic citizenship are made available to, if not imposed upon, emerging democracies. Civic and citizenship education programs that are being developed in newly democratizing countries constitute one important arena of negotiated meaning; in this arena, globally circulating conceptions of political citizenship, and citizenship education, encounter local cultural and institutional norms. What results in practice from this encounter can only be dimly foretold.