Civic Education : The Role of History and the Social Sciences in a Civil Society

History has a powerful capacity as an integrative discipline to help students understand the relationships of people, space, and time. For citizenship education, history has the potential to provide a "furniture of the mind" for citizens participating in a democracy. A thorough understanding of history is necessary for an individual to exercise judgment in analyzing political issues. An immersion in history forces the individual to reject simplistic answers to issues of the past and problems of the present. While history provides a furniture of the mind for civic education, it also has the potential to raise animosities among national and ethnic groups. This paper examines the recent democratic efforts of the Democracy Advancement Center in Riga, Latvia to foster citizenship education in the Republic of Latvia. The Democracy Advancement Center in Riga has taken the lead in civic education and works closely with Civitas, an international organization promoting democracy through political science education. The DAC has chosen to organize its work around a curriculum, Project Citizen, which is issues-oriented rather than history-oriented. This paper summarizes to this point in time the recent efforts of the Democracy Advancement Center in Riga, Latvia, in concert with international partners, to initiate programs concerning content and pedagogy in Latvian schools