Abstract:

Research background:
The democratic deficits of post-totalitarian states result in an irresistible and lasting sense of corruption, double standards of governance, lack of respect for the state, national priorities, lack of faith in the justice of the judiciary. This can easily be seen as a trend through the Corruption Perceptions Index measured each year by Transparency International. The problem gets profound by globalization and migration processes when multicultural aspects of different ethnic and religious communities in a country are added to the destructive heritage of totalitarian morality and values. The mechanisms for mitigating and limiting corrupt behavior begin with the formation of anti-corruption thinking and culture. They are beyond the scope of defensive lawmaking or law enforcement and must be the subject of education and training programs and methods in the field of civic education.

The common understanding of this type of education of adolescents and young people is that the knowledge and understanding of the state governance system will lead to awareness and improvement of democratic values of the society and the formation of individuals with active citizenship and civic behavior countering individual and/or community corrupt interest. This would be true if civic education is implemented based on an old democratic value system, established by the family and developed by the school, in societies where democratic reality does not conflict with the taught one. However, this does not apply to the transforming reality of post-totalitarian societies, where the experience of civic education is either neglected or results in an awareness of the rights and opportunities for democratic values and mechanisms to be distorted in favor of personal interests, regardless of the consequences for the community.

The main purpose of the article is to show that the mechanical introduction of civic education in post-totalitarian countries would harm the conditions of transitional and unstable value systems in the communities, which will lead to distortions in the understanding of democratic mechanisms as empowering the manifestations of irresponsible and unpunished behavior with a focus on the rights of the individual not bound by his responsibility to the community. This requires that new effective methods for conducting civic education be sought and that additional mechanisms be developed and introduced to counter and neutralize destructive and corrupt thinking at an early stage. Some of these mechanisms refer to introducing creativity-based decision-making models in the process of educating and forming suitable and long-lasting social skills instead of extreme moralizing or the most often used approach of applying excessive restrictions on student behavior.

Methodology and findings:
This article proposes a model for the use of civic education in secondary schools to develop sustainable behavior with zero tolerance for corruption, which in the long run will lead to overcoming the deficits in the post-totalitarian understanding of democracy and democratic citizenship and respectively might be an effective tool in the fight against corruption at all levels. The main methods in the report are diachronic and comparative analysis, systematic analysis, and conceptual analysis of documents.

Keywords:

Civic education, corruption intolerance, active citizenship, democracy.