Exploring the Pattern of Civil Education from Abu Nasr Farabi’s Viewpoint: a Qualitative Study

Civil education is known as one of the important functions of education, and to teach and learn civil education, there must be a model. One of the important theories related to civil education belongs to Farabi, who is an Iranian-Islamic philosopher. The present study aims at exploring the model of civil education from Farabi’s viewpoint. The approach of the study is qualitative and its method is content analysis. All Farabi’s first- and second-hand translated works, which were selected using the purposeful sampling method and convenience sampling, were explored. Thematic analysis method was used to analyze the results of this study. The findings of the thematic analysis were organized in the terms of 50 categories, 34 basic themes, 7 organizing themes and 4 global themes. The results showed that civil education and its dimensions appropriate to the culture and values of our society should be introduced into the educational system. Furthermore, this study introduced some methods of active and participatory civil education and the way to use them from Farabi’s viewpoint.