Effectiveness of Civic education: case study in “The Institute for Democracy and Human Rights”

Abstract

There has been a global surge of democracy throughout the world. It is the power of the people but for having that power citizens must possess the skills, embody the values, and manifest the behaviors that accord with democracy. Civic education is the tool through which citizens will gain necessary skills, values, and behaviors. This study was undertaken to focus on civic education in Armenia and the concentration was on non-governmental organization, as NGOs are the main realizers of civic education in our country. The aim of this paper was to see how effective is civic education in Armenia. More particularly, the study was done in the “Institute for Democracy and Human Rights” NGO and interview conducted within the participants of the six-week courses of civic education. Then for checking the effectiveness of the course the participants were compared with non-participants with similar backgrounds. This was accomplished through 44 interviews in each group, totally 88 interviews were conducted. Having analyzed the major findings of this study, it is possible to conclude that in Armenia the effectiveness of civic education is quite low. The results of the present study demonstrated that the difference between the knowledge of participants within the experiment and control groups is not great. The difference was checked based on three categories of civic education: civic knowledge, cognitive civic skills and participatory civic skills. As a result of the study it can be concluded that ways should be found to make it more effective in Armenia. Finally, this study suggest that it is not enough to improve on just one category without paying attention to other factors. For maximum impact all factor need to be present and for that aim the time frame of civic education programs should be long enough to include all the categories. All these in concert will be effective to form effective civil society, which is essential for a democracy to survive and flourish.