Political judgements in civics lessons - a difficult challenge?

Abstract

Political judgement is considered an important goal of civics lessons. When judging moral, political, or literary content, the focus is always on discovering connections between aspects that were originally not related. Existing knowledge about a domain-specific area is the basis for drawing conclusions about other knowledge. In this paper, it is showed how difficult it is to determine the quality of a political judgement in terms of content analysis or from a philosophical perspective. Political judgement is here understood as a competence. Judgement competence is the ability to argue based on justifications, weigh the facts, and decide about political matters in a way that is correct from a factual perspective. ln conclusion, the findings from two political didactics studies on political judgements are presented which reveal that quality is a problem in civics lessons.