Influence of Involvement in Co-Curricular Activities on Students’ Commitment to Democratic Values

Abstract

Ever since the declaration of modern democracies such as USA in 17th Century, the pursuit for commitment to democratic values has remained at the core of nations which are inclined towards democratic ideology. A companying this pursuit, has been the debate of appropriate means by which, young citizens in these nations can be made to adapt democracy as a life value. Although many democratic nations such as Kenya have opted to foster it through education, the potential of various frames of their school systems (such as co-curricular activities) in cultivating this democratic desire, have remained unempirical verified. In effort to fill this gap, this study aimed at verifying the potential of various co-curricular activities in influencing students’ commitment to democratic values. In so doing the study sort to find whether there were significant differences in commitment to democratic values between students involved in social movements, talent enhancement and academic enhancement co-curricular activities. The study was conducted among public secondary schools in Kiambu County, Kenya. A total of 430 students were involved drawn from target population of 28,213 Form IV students using stratified proportionate random sampling procedure. The study results revealed that, there were statistical significant differences in commitments to democratic values among students involved in talent enhancement, academic enhancement and school social movement co-curricular activities at (F (2, 340) = 4.70, p ≤ 0.01)with Tukey’s test indicating talent enhancement was significantly different from other two co-curricular activities. Multiple regression on co-curricular activities yielded a significant regression equation (F (3, 339) = 5.563, p<0.001) with R2 of .047. Thus, confirming that, there were variations in influence of different co-curricular activities on students’ commitment to democratic values.