<TITLE: Perspectives on Citizenship and Education
ACADEMIC DOMAIN: behavioural sciences
DISCIPLINE: education
EVENT TYPE: seminar presentation
FILE ID: USEMP13A
NOTES: continuation of and continued in USEMD280, seminar also includes presentation USEMP13B

RECORDING DURATION: 8 min 44 sec

RECORDING DATE: 25.4.2007

NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 11

NUMBER OF SPEAKERS: 1

S6: NATIVE-SPEAKER STATUS: German (Switzerland); ACADEMIC ROLE: masters student; GENDER: male; AGE: 24-30>


<S6> <COUGH> well erm , in switzerland first i looked at the federal level to well actually the assignment was to find erm something a curricular or curricular guidelines or some programme of education erm for from compulsory er education and see how much citizenship education is in there erm i looked first at the federal level in switzerland and er as expected there is no department or ministry of education so erm , the federal level has kind of a framework on what should be known to the people that graduate from a from a certain level of school but there is not really guidelines in saying how they should erm pursue these goals , so then i looked at my home canton in switzerland which is er grison it's in the south eastern part and erm , i found some things er especially in the law education law in the introduction what the er idea or what the the goals are in in educating people and there's quite a lot of stuff that has not really to do with with er , education in , erm educating people in different skills or subject matters but to do with er shaping people to be parts of society and erm well the first one more general is to educate people to be independent and responsible members of society , erm that's more like the the overall , one can say the overall er objective of educating people there then the second one was christian values which is actually kind of er not so surprising because er this canton is quite catholic and quite rural so there has not been er , the reformation was not there or not extensively there there are some villages that are reformed protestant but not er that many and most are also when i look at the political spectrum erm it's more that the the erm conservative christian value parties that are quite prevalent there , then er a third aspect was erm that the people er has have to respect the historically grown grown identity and language and culture of the community and society this is also not so surprising because grison has quite a lot of different erm languages erm three of the official four languages of switzerland are there erm german to some extent italian in the southern part and er romansh which is probably the , well was at the time nowadays not anymore but was the biggest erm la- language there and , romansh has is quite fragmented there are quite a few la- i- la- i think five major dialects in romansh and er i come later to that one also again so the historically grown identity and language is quite important there it's kind of surprising because that probably erm , if i look at the diversity in language and and er culture there it's quite , well the culture is not that diverse but especially language that might go into the this might fragment a little bit the canton itself because there are so many different languages then er a fourth point was sagacity which is er ability to judge to er educate people so that they can judge about different things erm this is probably a little bit more in the critical thinking aspect the first ones were quite er er on loyal- loyalty and not so much questioning the the authority and this one is a little bit more i think but erm this is not so much for er questioning what the state is doing but much more for the civic culture which means going to vote because switzerland is very keen on er people that can vote although the voting rates are quite low erm , then er fifth point was the understanding for fellow humans and er environment so here comes the respect also very much into the game and er sixth point is a balanced as er well that's like the , also again a little bit more an over- overall goal in education is to educate balanced er to have people that have a balanced relationship between er social personal and technical abilities erm , besides the general education and skills , so this says a lot about s- there are not really that many activities involved here in the in the guidelines erm but more characteristics how people should be to be a part of the state or part of the canton in that sense erm what was interesting i looked a little bit further beyond this law and saw i looked at a little bit at curricular what kind of books erm people have should have in different areas and erm this was interesting erm , for , especially the the historically grown identity and language because erm every village that has a different dialect has different school books in their own dialect and for their own history so the five major dialects erm for romansh have their own school books sometimes even differ- different in different la- er schools this is probably erm the case because the educational councils are very local and not er cantonal so erm the the education is very decentralised and what people are taught is very decentralised , but that is quite interesting also erm well yeah , for example there is er , a book for just one one valley for maybe i don't know this is i would say maybe 200 peoples pu- pupils or something like that which is er one book <FOREIGN> normas surmiranas </FOREIGN> erm in one dialect in one language , erm <P:08> so to conclude it's more , erm very much a focus on characteristics not so much on erm activities what people should er do to be part of the state and it's it strikes a little bit kind of a balance between this loyalty side and er erm and the critical thinking side i think and it's , it's little hard to see exactly from this those those guidelines how they are erm erm implemented in the different schools so . well if i i have talked to some people about it and how they were taught in school and there the loyalty part was much more prevalent than the critical thinking part but it depended very much on the teacher if the teacher many teachers were very erm had their view of things and if pupils pupils did did not erm , approve of it or said for example in an essay or something like that something different against it then they got bad grades for example and er there were there are though some teachers i had one er that were quite open to to different er opinions and encouraged people to think about it and have different opinions , yeah </S6>
