Democratic citizenship in textbooks in Spanish primary curriculum

This paper analyses how textbooks deal with the issues of education for democratic citizenship encompassed within the European framework and Spanish educational reforms. The sample comprised the 24 individual texts in social science, natural science, and technology for 6-12-year-olds. This paper delimits and defines the six themes for analysis: responsibility, participation, conflict resolution, diversity, and human rights. It offers a qualitative description of the content of each theme as well as a quantitative assessment of the frequency with which they appear. The results indicate that European ideals of citizenship education are dealt with unevenly, and in some cases barely, in these textbooks.