The Manifestation of Citizenship in School books a Reading of Civics Books for Primary Education in Algeria

Abstract

Education for citizenship is based on the use of education as a mechanism for embodying the values and dimensions of citizenship, which are linked to general social, political and cultural transformations at both local and global levels. Textbooks serve as a means of transmission and undoubtedly contain rules, norms and dimensions related to the organisation of social and human life. However, behind this apparent image there are also implications, challenges and contradictions related to the level of intellectual and political development of society, its political authority and historical processes, as well as the clarity of the social project it represents. For this reason, the subject of citizenship in textbooks, especially in civics textbooks, has attracted the attention of numerous local and international studies within the framework of what is known as the sociology of curricula or the sociology of the textbook.

The conceptualisation of citizenship in Algerian textbooks suffers from confusion, mainly due to the borrowing of the concept from its historical and political field, without a scientific examination of the limits of this borrowing. As a result, the meaning of citizenship fluctuates between its original reference, in which it was born and developed, and the fabricated meaning associated with another historical and civilisational reference, in an attempt to combine what is not local with what is deeply rooted in mental structures and collective consciousness.

This article seeks to explore the methods by which authors of civics textbooks for primary education in Algeria have overcome this confusion, and how they have constructed the new meaning tailored to the Algerian context in order to identify its characteristics.