As Delanty (2000) suggests, changes in the nature of societies have forced us to rethink the meaning of citizenship. We are challenged by technology, ecology, the media and consumerism, for example, but above all by globalization, into rethinking the concept of citizenship. In the classic model of national citizenship, four components formed a unity of function: rights, responsibilities, participation and identity. These no longer constitute a unitary model of citizenship, and entirely new discourses have emerged instead.  Furthermore, it is argued that instead of a nation-state, citizenship entails membership of a political community, which may be called a civil society. The transition from the classic model of national citizenship (connected to the nation-state) to the so-called post-national citizenship, or more broadly, even cosmopolitan citizenship, formulates the questions we are dealing with in our presentation. At the same time we are conscious of the complicated substance of citizenship and the fact that there is no single, agreed-upon answer to the question of what constitutes citizenship.

The main purpose of our presentation is to clarify the presence of citizenship and its substance in curriculum documents from 1986 onward. Indeed, different institutions of the nation-state have traditionally had a crucial role in the process of socialization into citizenship. Since school and all school subjects have a significant role in the production of new citizens, our research questions are:

1. What is the basis of the socialization process (the production of citizenship) from 1986 onward according to the general Finnish curriculum documents?

 2. What is the basis of the socialization process (the production of citizenship) from 1986 onward according to the Finnish physical education curriculum texts?

3. What is the connection between the previous two questions?

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