1. A new holistic approach to better meet today´s challenges

Dear teacher,

The European Heart Project wants to bring democratic values closer to young people. The goal is democratic maturity. To be mature in a democracy means that I can form my own judgement, that I am consequently oriented and that I am also accordingly prepared to act democratically.

In current political education, these abilities are defined in terms of competencies. The model for basic democratic competences (Krammer, Kühberger & Windischbauer, 2008) distinguishes four basic areas from each other. We want to reproduce this model here in an extremely abbreviated form and give an overview of which methods, following this model, should be used in the classroom:

Figure 1: model for basic democratic competences

In principle, we find this model very useful for political education in our schools.

In our opinion, however, this model is missing an essential component!

If you briefly familiarise yourself once again with the teaching methods proposed in it, you will find the following suggestions:

 

Figure 2: basic democratic skills - cognitive skills

So, these are quite cognitive skills throughout. These skills are undoubtedly important when it comes to becoming and remaining democratically responsible.

However, this more cognitive approach tends to disregard emotions. But if we look at emotions from the point of view of the role they play in forming our opinions, i.e. in our perception and thinking, and the role emotions also play in what we do and what we avoid to do, then we have to consider the following:

Emotions serve cognitive functions (Nolting, Paulus, 1993) by influencing who or what we pay attention to, how we perceive ourselves and others, and how we interpret and remember various features of life situations. And emotions can activate and control certain behaviour, but they can also paralyse it. Emotions can tempt us to passivity or spur us on to do or refrain from doing something specific.

Figure 3: Emotions and cognitive functions

And everyday observation also shows that politics, especially in times of an election campaign, is done very little through rational messages. Politicians predominantly send emotional or even emotionalised messages: in discussions, at press conferences, in interviews, in broadcasts, on social media channels, in commercials, etc.

Politicians often speak a language that appeals to feelings, they try to generate emotions. So, they emphasise often more the emotional aspects, the personal experience and feeling, and less the factual aspects.

Why? Because by emotionalising information, one only achieves people's interest and attention because the information conveyed becomes more comprehensible as a result.

In our opinion, democracy education must therefore not only include cognitive skills, but also enable emotional understanding, emotional questioning and emotional interaction.