Values and Citizens: Civics Education through Active Learning is a civics textbook that provides an infrastructure of knowledge and skills on which civics education can be built, including the mechanisms of the democratic system of government, the principles and values on which it is based, and the language of civics.

The textbook and the teachers’ guide will help teachers convey information and foster pupils’ understanding of concepts, principles, and ideas associated with civics and provide a basis for teaching the subject in senior high school.

The textbook helps students understand the meaning of a people, a state, a citizen, a democratic state and democratic values. It also helps them understand an individual’s rights and obligations, state institutions and the rules under which they operate, the uniqueness of Israel as the state of the Jewish nation, and the various groups within Israeli society and the relations between them.

Study using this book is based not only on written and processed information, but primarily on dozens of varied activities from which the students can learn and actually teach themselves. Values and Citizens: Civics Education through Active Learning is a means of drawing students closer, through their experience in the civics class, to events in their own social and civil lives.

Values and Citizens: Civics Education through Active Learning was written by a team at the Van leer Jerusalem Institute that spent some seven years writing and introducing a curriculum of active learning in civics in hundreds of schools, in all sectors, throughout the country.

The book was produced with the support of the Naomi and Nehemiah Cohen Foundation and is approved by the Ministry of Education.