Read the full EAEA Statement on the European Year for Digital Citizenship Education 2025 (pdf)
EAEA welcomes the launch of the European Year for Digital Citizenship Education (EYDCE) 2025, recognising its potential to promote critical digital engagement and civic participation. Yet, we remain concerned by its narrow, formal education focus, which sidelines vital role of adult learning and non-formal education in building active, critical, and responsible digital citizens.
Despite its aims, EYDCE risks becoming it risks becoming another top-down policy effort unless it actively integrates community- driven, democratic approaches.
Framing digital citizenship around individual responsibility rather than systemic accountability ignores deeper power structures. It also neglects how digital exclusion intersects with class, migration, accessibility, and digital labour.
Digital citizenship cannot be defined by those who already hold digital power—it must be co-created by the communities it seeks to serve.
The digital divide is not just generational. Digital literacy must be lifelong, adaptive, and critically examined—not confined to school curricula. If EYDCE 2025 is to have real impact, it must prioritize accessible, community- based, and lifelong approaches to digital citizenship education.
We need to foster not only digital literacy but digital democracy, ensuring that learners—young and adult—are empowered to challenge corporate and state control over digital spaces. If left unchecked, AI risks deepening existing inequalities—privileging the voices, languages, and worldviews of the most powerful actors while marginalizing others. Digital citizenship cannot be defined by those who already hold digital power—it must be co-created by the communities it seeks to serve.
Digital citizenship is a lifelong civic right, not just a technical skill. EAEA calls for immediate reforms to ensure that the EYDCE 2025 does not reinforce existing digital inequalities.
The Council of Europe’s planned Action Plan on Digital Citizenship Education should reflect:
- Integration of non-formal and adult education as a core pillar of DCE, not an afterthought.
- Critical engagement with digital power structures, ensuring that DCE does not become a tool for passive compliance.
- A rejection of the commodification of digital literacy, reducing reliance on corporate-controlled platforms and AI.
- A participatory governance model that gives real decision-making power to learners, educators, and civil society.
- An explicit intersectional approach that recognises how digital exclusion intersects with class, race, gender, migration, and disability.