Perpetuating Old Mindsets through New Civic Education Textbooks: The Case of Post-communist Albania

Abstract

This article looks into the end-user impact of the civic education curricula in Albania. It discusses their goals, achievements and gaps by reviewing its processes, stakeholders and the final body of knowledge provided to school students through the civic education classes taught in the 9th, 10th and 11th classes in the Republic of Albania. It concludes that civic education texts presently used in Albania’s high schools suffer from a plethora of problems ranging from weak contents and ineffective transfer of notions to poor illustrations of concepts, contributing to the overall low impact of the subject of civic education on the students. The failure to address the low quality of the civic education textbooks in Albania at the input side and the deterioration of the delivery of civics into a merely formal process at the output side are two significant indicators that stand for the perpetuation of a culture of apathy in a country still struggling to come to terms with liberal democracy. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2016.v5n1p237