State of Art and Possibilities for Citizenship Education in the City of Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This chapter scrutinizes what is the meaning of educate to citizenship and tries to scale this concept in the case of the educational system in Rio de Janeiro within the project “Urban regime and citizenship. A case study for an innovative approach.” Citizenship education is, from many years, the center of a lot of public debates in many western countries and it is also subject of lively theoretical debate that involves many researchers afferent to different disciplines. There are many different reasons that justify the actual interest in citizenship education in democratic political context. We discuss the efficiency of citizenship education, on its effective capacity to contribute in social cohesion with the education of a citizen who is able to cooperate with whom thinks differently and follows a different lifestyle. Henceforth, we debate the state of citizenship education in Rio de Janeiro’s public secondary schools and how improvements in this area could be fruitful in this context. We then present our idea for a module for citizenship education to be used as a learning tool by teachers of public schools.