INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL STUDIES EDUCATION ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRATIC CULTURE AMONG JUNIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN KADUNA STATE, NIGERIA

¹Agbo, Eunice Oada; ²Gana, Deborah Rekiya; ³Ibrahim, Okewu Josephine

¹Department of Educational Foundations, Faculty of Education, University of Abuja

²Centre for Gender Security Studies and Youth Advancement, University of Abuja

³Department of Social Studies, Federal College of Education, Okene, Kogi State, Nigeria

Email: ¹oadaagbo@gmail.com; ²debgana@yahoo.com; ³ibrahimokewujosephine@gmail.com

ABSTRACT:

Incessant rise in thuggery, hooliganism, snatching of ballot boxes, armed robbery, kidnapping, banditry, herdsmen and farmers clashes, and religious intolerance is an evident to the failure of the societal democratic culture. Kaduna state has been experiencing this uprising which is the thrust of this study. The study uses Likert scale to measure the weight of the responses and t-test hypotheses to measure the level of influence of social studies education on the democratic culture of the respondents. At the end of the day, it was revealed that there is high extent at which social studies education influences students’ democratic culture. This was revealed when the Likert Scale means score for the study in both urban and rural areas was revealed to be 2.61 and 2.63 respectively while the testing of the hypothesis also revealed that there is a significance difference in the influence of Social Studies education on the democratic culture of students in the state. This showed that t-stat -0.02 was less than >t-crit 2.36 (2tail sig.) at degree of freedom 8 which implies that the hypothesis was accepted. Based on the established facts of this study, the following recommendations were given for improvement. The teaching of social studies education should be extended to the senior secondary school students. This would enable them to be up to date of the societal norms and values so that they will not be used as thugs in the discharge of their democratic process in the country. Teachers should continue to use diversified teaching methods such as dramatization, role play etc. during teaching and learning to enable students have a glimpse of the real life situation when the deviate from the learnt norms and value system in the society. Teachers should lay more emphasis on social studies education as a vital tool for developing democratic culture among students in urban and rural schools by using the Social Studies objectives that is humanistic citizenship, intellectual and value education. Teachers should continue to encourage the development of democratic culture among students irrespective of their gender by involving both in games, debates, prefect ship, drama groups such as flash cards, real objects, picture tape recorder, video, charts, resource persons resource places, maps, web sites, artefacts resource centres etc. Teachers should not relent in the use of appropriate instructional resources in teaching and learning of Social studies because it has a positive influence on students’ performance and behaviour in the society.

Keywords: Democratic Culture, Social Studies Education