Educating the Democratic Mind – Political Education Between demos and ethnos

Abstract

The first part focuses on the intrinsic connection between conceptualizations of political/civic education, on the one side, and questions about moral, civic and political duties inherent to citizenship, on the other. In the second part, political formation is perceived as mediating competence between two developmental dimensions or modes of orientation, namely demos orientation and ethnos orientation as relevant frames of citizenship in modern democracies. Both dimensions are claimed as being crucially important for developmental and educational theory of citizenship.