Staatsbürgerliche Kenntnisse, Einstellungen und Verhaltensweisen von Schülern und Lehrlingen - 2000
The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), headquartered in the Dutch capital of Amsterdam, was founded in 1959 and has since carried out a number of internationally comparative educational research projects. At the 1994 General Assembly, it was decided to launch a study in the field of political education at school. The IEA had already tackled this topic earlier. However, the end of the Cold War and the resulting democratization processes in different countries made it seem appropriate and desirable to update knowledge about the problems, methods, possibilities and limitations of civic education. The Department of Education of the University of Freiburg was in charge of the participation of Switzerland. A first publication with the results from the first phase of the project appeared in 1999, in the form of a volume based on case studies describing the situation of civic education in 24 countries, i.e. the majority of the 28 participating countries.
The results of these case studies were used to prepare Phase 2, which was empirically oriented. Specifically, it focused on a test to assess the civic knowledge of fourteen-year-olds and a survey of their attitudes and behavior. The sample size was around 3,000 per country (3104 in Switzerland). In total, about 90,000 young people took part in the study in this way, as well as their teachers, who were asked about their goals, methods, difficulties, priorities, etc. The publication with the results of the empirical part provides extensive information about what the young people at the end of the 90s know about the democratic processes and institutions and what they think about it. The results tend to suggest that civic education is more or less the same everywhere. Should we therefore highlight the multiplicity of situations? Certain things seem to be constant across large geographic regions. For example, civic education is too often limited to imparting knowledge from the top down, while the encouragement of critical thinking and political commitment is neglected. At least the teachers seem to thnik this way and also claim to regret this fact. Another common deficit is found in the treatment of economic issues, which leads to political issues being often treat in a abstract context.