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The Center for Civic Education is a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational corporation dedicated to fostering the development of informed, responsible participation in civic life by citizens committed to values and principles fundamental to American constitutional democracy.
The Center specializes in civic/citizenship education, law-related education, and international educational exchange programs for developing democracies. Programs focus on the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights; American political traditions and institutions at the federal, state, and local levels; constitutionalism; civic participation; and the rights and responsibilities of citizens.
Today, the Center administers a wide range of critically acclaimed curricular, teacher-training, and community-based programs. The principal goals of the Center's programs are to help students develop (1) an increased understanding of the institutions of American constitutional democracy and the fundamental principles and values upon which they are founded, (2) the skills necessary to participate as effective and responsible citizens, and (3) the willingness to use democratic procedures for making decisions and managing conflict.
The following statement by Thomas Jefferson expresses the Center's rationale and goals.
"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion."
The Center's headquarters are in Calabasas, California with an office in Washington, D.C. Since its origin in 1969, Center materials have been used in all fifty states and the District of Columbia, the trust territories, and a long list of foreign countries, including Argentina, Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, the Czech Republic, Ethiopia, Germany, Ghana, Hungary, Israel, Japan, Lithuania, Mexico, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Poland, Romania, and Russia. |
