Variations of Citizenship Education: A Content Analysis of Rights, Obligations, and Participation Concepts in High School Civic Textbooks

A quantitative content analysis of three widely adopted high school civics textbooks revealed that concepts associated with traditional liberalism—citizens' rights and freedoms—far outnumber concepts associated with classical republicanism or communitarianism (e.g., civic virtue, the reciprocal relation between citizens' rights and their responsibilities to the public good). Moreover, this focus on rights and freedoms to the relative exclusion of duties and obligations may be at odds with a more collectivistic value orientation held by recent immigrant groups. Consistent with previous studies, our analysis indicates that the concept of political participation, outside of voting, plays a very small role in civics texts.