When we talk about citizen participation, we tend to think about electoral events or being part of the politics of a country, however, we overlook its broad meaning.
As defined by Senace in Peru, an institution in charge of evaluating the viability of projects with high environmental impact, citizen participation is “a space for dialogue between the State, the owners of a project and the citizenry, which allows and facilitates the citizenry to intervene directly in public decisions.”
On the other hand, the Transparencia portal, a tool of the State of standardized information to improve and give greater transparency to public management, defines it as “the process in which citizens, individually or collectively, have the right to express their interests and requests and thus influence the formulation of government decision-making.”
So this is a right, but it must also be instilled as a duty that citizens have to actively participate in building a better country, be it through vigilance, activism, community initiatives or informed and responsible voting itself.
However, to achieve positive and useful participation for society, it is necessary to apply in it the same civic values that we demand of our leaders, such as solidarity, integrity, honesty, respect, justice, equality and The cooperation. Having high civic values, we will be building a virtuous circle that activates more participation and positively influences the social good through State policies.
So, how do we nurture these civic values and activate citizen participation in the country?
At Hablemos del Perú we have the firm conviction that “knowledge of the most important historical events of a nation, taught through specific methodologies, contributes to raising the national identity, social cohesion and civic values of the citizens of a country.”
With our “history viralization” project, we are ready to prove it; we rely not only on our ideals, but also on corroborating studies, for example:
- On a small scale, the thesis work of Amy M. Rogers in Pennsylvania, United States, which demonstrates how the teaching of local history could raise civic values in students.
- On a large scale, the work that the Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute did since its foundation in the 19th century to form a unifying collective memory in its country, referred to in the article: Emblems of Brazil in the 19th century Monarchy: Monarchy, Territorial Unit and Natural Evolution.
- Approaches such as that of the “International Study on Civic and Citizen Education” published in 2018 and referred to in this article: The evaluative investigation of didactic materials for political and citizenship education through historical contents” by Joaquim Prats and others, which highlights that there is a need in Latin America for:
- Promote the development of cultural identity through historical and social knowledge.
- Reflect on the construction of social values through the analysis of social reality and historical knowledge.
There is a phrase attributed to several authors including Leonardo Da Vinci, which says: “One cannot love what one does not know, nor defend what one does not love”; let us then know our Peru, its history and its multiple cultures, in order to love it, defend it and build a nation with equal opportunities for all.
