According to current educational legislation in Europe, the role of the curriculum is key, providing knowledge, skills and values of responsibility and participation, so that students can manage to cope with the challenges of being active citizens. This research seeks to establish whether textbooks of Social Sciences (History and Geography), Natural Science and Technology, published in Spain during the last decade have been built upon these aims. The whole sample consists of 24 textbooks (4 publishing houses x 6 grades= 24) used in primary school for children's from 6 to 12 year-olds. First of all, we analyse how much importance, in terms of frequency, has been given to contents related to responsibility and participation. On the other hand, we address the qualitative analysis of these contents, in order to get the main dimensions. In examining the results, we find that the active dimensions are less worked in the textbooks. This means that textbooks pay more attention to contents presenting information in order to learn tasks and norms that are useful to regulate relationships, and they don't care so much with the contents of participation