There is a lack of consensus about the meaning of citizenship and the implications of educating for citizenship in schools; neither has it been evident how practicing citizenship could contribute to the overcoming of social inequalities. Taking Lazar (2013) as a reference, we intended to comprehend the values and features of citizenship in the educational planning, by analyzing the discourse of the documents of National Education Planning (NEP - second documents), from Brazil and Colombia. These state documents aim to rule the policies and educational actions for a decade. Methodology of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), proposed by Fairclough (2003), allowed us to identify the multiple purposes of NEP, social actors that participate in the construction of the documents and features of citizenship. We found the two documents share most of the values of citizenship, these values have been wished by political communities since antiquity and they last and sophisticate in modern societies. This challenges the contextual character of citizenship and suggests an efficient functioning of technologies of governance (Foucault, 1970). Main alliances of citizenship in Colombia are made with peace and social harmony, while in Brazil the main alliance is with a work-oriented education. Citizenship sometimes worked as an empty signifier (Laclau; Mouffe, 1987) and it was often exchangeable with democracy. There are relevant differences in the role that education specialists and teachers played in each process and document. Besides their aim of being a guide for planning, NEP documents revealed didactic and advertising intentions.