TY - RPRT A1 - Kostakos, Georgios A1 - Krüger, Karsten A1 - Virchow, Fabian T1 - Policy Brief: Education for Responsible Democratic Citizenship. A European Vision. Submitted Version N2 - Democracy is the cornerstone of European identity, which is complementary to national identities. In view of the challenges democracy is currently facing, at both European and national level, such as growing polarisation, increasing threats to human security and expanding digitalisation, it is important to defend and consolidate it, as a sine-qua-non element of “the European way of life”. Education for responsible democratic citizenship (RDC) or education for democracy (EfD) for short is a way of doing so. EfD strategies and tools to strengthen the democratic agency/capacity for action of citizens, the youth in particular, through transformative learning, has been the focus of the DEMOCRAT project (March 2023 to February 2026). This Policy Brief was initially drafted after the seven first months of the DEMOCRAT project but is now being finalised with the experience of two-and-a-half years of project implementation in mind. Key findings and proposed policy actions presented here include: · To safeguard democracy within the European Union, transformative education for democracy must be reinforced, also taking into account fast-moving digitalisation and fast-breached planetary boundaries. · The shift to transformative education for democracy should be based on a coherent competence framework defined in complementarity with the frameworks of citizenship competences proposed by the EU (Key Competences for Lifelong Learning) and the Council of Europe (Competences for Democratic Culture). The four key RDC competences identified by DEMOCRAT are: Solidary Participation, Deliberation, Judgement, and Democratic Resilience. · The above competence framework should be translated by EU member states and schools in different parts of Europe into a sample curriculum for responsible democratic citizenship adjusted to their education systems and societies. · Schools have to be laboratories of democratic practice on a daily basis and across subjects, not just for a few hours of civic education or education for democracy per week, and need to connect with a conducive local, regional, national, European, global and digital environment. · Students need to be aware of both their rights and responsibilities, and be guided to act on both, within their peer groups and in relation to their teachers, parents, local authorities and other relevant stakeholders. A crucial aspect of any approach to education for democracy is the competence of the teacher to create an environment in which the students can learn democracy in action and not just in words KW - FBSK_Webseite KW - Demokratische Bildung Y1 - 2025 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:hbz:due62-opus-60287 PB - DEMOCRAT ER -