Citizenship Education and Deliberative Democracy in History Teaching : Dangers and Precautions
The Quebec curriculum proposes that high school history class train citizens to develop processes and operations leading to historical thought — thus allowing them to initiate public deliberations on social, political or economic issues, and to participate in society in an equal, critical and effective manner. This article investigates two problems, elitism and majority dictatorship, often induced by the internal transposition of a deliberative democracy, which cement and/or perpetuate the very inequalities that the deliberation process is aimed at diminishing, as well as certain precautions to take against these dangers.