Education for Democratic Citizenship

Thoughts and actions have similar descriptive norms. Starting from this fact, this chapter discusses the topics which are absolutely necessary for instituting democratic thinking and democratic actions for a citizenship education on which consensus has been reached.

In contemporary democracies, it is no longer meaningful to differentiate between elitists and activists. The objective is to ensure that all citizens are elite, and not ordinary participants.

An individual cannot be told how to think. However, how people think can be described. It is possible to make someone realize that some ways of thinking are better than others. For example, a person who thinks reflectively does not persist in his individual habits and he learns to be open. He learns to see himself from other people’s perspectives and to put himself in their place.

A person who thinks creatively can risk being different, he can take time in deciding, can think flexibly, and imaginatively, reason fast, and focus on the subject matter rapidly. He is not a perfectionist but selfconfident, flexible, and positive. Creative thinking reinforces critical thinking because it aims to find solutions for a problem and critical thinking aims to evaluate and test the possible solutions. Critical thinking helps a person to experience freedom of thought. It helps to eliminate and disprove irrational thoughts and to find sound solutions to problems.

The principal objective of this section is to discuss ways of heightening the disposition of teachers to accept and effectively use question and answer and discussion methods and collaborative and selfregulated learning models as indispensable practices in raising democratic citizens.

Keywords: Democratic citizen, thinking, action, learning.