Democracy education – Leibniz University Hannover

Scrabble “democracy, freedom, politics, education”, terminological representation of the spectrum of topics that make up “democracy education”

Freedom plays an important role in democracies. As central public education institutions, schools in particular are where students can acquire and reflect upon a fundamental understanding of democracy and freedom. The education-related laws and curricula in the 16 federal states stipulate this. Additionally, for many years concepts for democracy education and democratic action have also been developed for school classrooms, everyday school life and beyond. A current question is therefore as follows: What is the state of democracy education at schools in the federal republic? The “Democracy education monitor” project at the Institute of Didactics of Democracy focuses on this question.

“One aspect that is accentuated differently than what we are familiar with from the debate about political education is the question of participation, because democracy without participation is not conceivable. This also means that teaching and learning processes are not processes that are possible without some form of participation. This is not the case in the context of political education, and this is central to the differentiation.”

“There is no place that is without democracy education. When we understand the process of democratisation as a process that needs to be driven forward again and again from generation to generation, then a society is suffused with these places where democracy education occurs.”

“Democracy education is an interdisciplinary concept, just as teachers need to be interdisciplinary linguistic role models. Democracy education can even take place as part of physics. Although I think that in reality that only actually happens rarely. That’s the problem.”

“Because if we want to have democracy education as a cross-cutting task, then it is of course also a cross-cutting task in teacher education. That is very clear! This is frequently absent, so my impression is sometimes that at the educational policy level the term democracy education leads to a ‘no-win or lose-lose situation’.”

“Democracy education means criticism of anti-Semitism, criticism of racism, criticism of sexism and so on. We have explained in various subjects that criticism of racism should be a concept not only in history or political science classes, but also in other subjects.”