A Study of Citizenship Education Practices in Higher Secondary Schools in Indian Perspective

Author(s) : Alok Gardia & Deepa Mehta

Abstract:

The global community recognizes the real capital of India to be its age old democratic social order. Democracy here is not only a form of government but also a way of life. Education in this context plays a very important role in nurturing a democratic order among future generations of the country. But, somehow due to increased weightage on cognitive dimension based competition in society the schools are lagging behind in their task of developing citizenship qualities, thus, a status check is seriously needed. In such premise present study was undertaken on a randomly selected sample of 504 teachers of 68 higher secondary schools of Varanasi district of Uttar Pradesh, India. The findings reveal a dismal state of citizenship education particularly in state government schools. Further, private schools and urban schools were found better in providing citizenship education in Indian context. It is recommended on the basis of the study that serious effort from all educational stakeholders is seriously needed to make education a viable tool for developing an ideal citizenry for the country.

Keywords: Citizenship Education, Civic Education, Citizenship Qualities, School

effectiveness, Quality schools