7.1 The shortcomings of traditional citizenship education

In traditional content-based teaching, citizenship education focused on giving the students facts and information about the country’s institutional framework. The contents were more or less “timeless” and could be taught and tested systematically. From the student’s point of view, however, there was little difference between memorising facts about parliament or the different species of freshwater fish – “learnt” for the test today, forgotten tomorrow. Such a teaching approach adds very little to educating citizens in democratic, human rights-based communities.