The Birth Of Citizens

With the development of socialist market economy, China has entered the era of legal administration, which requires us to treat social members as citizens, to develop the sense of citizens, and to cultivate modern spirit of law.To our country, which lacks the tradition of civil culture, the implementation of citizenship education is undoubtedly indispensable to the development of the modernization of socialism in this new century. In July2001, the "tentative" "Guide to the Curriculum Reformation in China's Basic Education" was issued, which pointed out that the basic education curriculum should "reflect the nation's requirement on basic civil qualifications." In October 2001, "The Guide to Moral Education in Primary Schools" was announced, which proposed to "educate qualified socialist citizens with ideals, morality, culture, and disciplines. " In February2002, "China's Little Citizens' Moral Project" began to carry out, with which national wide schools held various activities on "Becoming qualified little citizens".As institutional public educational organizations, schools are important places to carry out citizenship education. Primary schools lay the foundations in cultivating citizens' basic qualifications. It is their main task to teach children primary knowledge and skills on how to become citizens, to let them gradually understand citizens' right and obligations, to help them to develop the ability to participate positively in social life and develop citizen's morality.This thesis traces the development history of citizenship education home and abroad, and concludes different countries have different value orientations because of their various social structure, historical tradition, and political culture. The thesis discusses obligatory citizenship education characteristic of Germany, right oriented citizenship education characteristic of USA, and morality oriented citizenship education with Singapore as its example. Accordingly, in different countries the citizenship education in primary schools has different aims and content.After summing up the experience of world wide citizenship education, the paper analyses the changes in China's citizenship education, and finds that there are many sharp problems in it, such as the lack of the sense of right and that of agent, the lack of public spirit and social co-operation spirit; so the author proposes the most important civil qualifications to be developed in our country: the spirit of law, environmental morality, and co-operation.Obviously, in our country the civil society is not mature, and the institutional ethics is not sound. What is more, the discussion on the theory of citizenship education in our country is not enough, so the basic significance proposed by this paper needs re-considering and verifying by practice.Summarily, the practice and theoretical research on citizenship education in China has just begun, so its maturity relies on the improvement of curriculum, educational administration, and teachers' teaching qualifications.