Citizenship and Culture of Peace in Educational Reform

The concern raised by the themes and contents of civic education and the culture of peace in childhood and youth are issues that are felt in various academic sectors, in social organizations and educational authorities that sometimes translate into articles in the media, where, among other things, one speaks of "the loss of values", generally having as reference to the young generations and making invisible that this loss is mainly present in the adult generations, which are responsible for this situation. These concerns, in spite of that conscious ambiguity, are not gratuitous. They can be a starting point to become aware of the need to develop new capacities and values, the absence of which young Latin Americans identify in their political and social leaders, as has been pointed out in cited studies, carried out by UNICEF for Latin America and for Beatriz de Cazali for Guatemala. The need to respond to this concern is also present in the participants in the dialogues and municipal consensus (2000), as well as among authorities and curriculum developers of MINEDUC in the last five-years.