Civic education and democratic attitudes in secondary education students in Peru

Abstract

Civic education is a fundamental part of countries' education systems and especially important in a context of democracies with many challenges and changes. In Peru, research on the subject has been limited to the educational dimension of civic education and not to its educational achievement or its relationship to democratic attitudes. The objective of this article is to find the effect of knowledge of civic education content on the democratic attitudes of Peruvian secondary school students controlled by different variables. With that objective, a multilevel regression model considering the student and the school is estimated, together with a probability model, to explore the determinants of the student's interest in the policy, using data from the ICSS 2016 assessment. The results indicate that civic knowledge is an important predictor of almost all democratic attitudes, but it has less impact than gender and interest in politics (of the student and the mother). Only for the social tolerance and institutionality variables, the civic knowledge score is one of the most important predictors. Likewise, a relationship between student interest in politics and civic knowledge scores is ruled out, the latter not being significant in explaining such interest.