Author Archives: Peter Levine

democracy and education

I’m on my way this morning to the Wye River retreat center on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where the 1997 Arab-Israeli agreement was hammered out. I’ll be attending a much lower-profile event: a retreat for the First Amendment Schools project. Schools may apply to join this project if they want to increase student participation in their own governance as a means of civic education. For example, they may develop a school constitution, protect free expression for students, and strengthen student government and student news media. There are grants and other forms of support available for participating schools.

Some people take the line that education for democracy must itself be democratic. This is the theme, for example, of Carl Glickman’s Holding Sacred Ground. John Dewey is the patron philosopher of this movement. Dewey and his followers hold that democracy is not just a system of government; it’s a way of thinking about all aspects of life, from ethics to education to science and art.

My own view is a little different. I think that “democracy” means rule by citizens; it means elections and freedom of speech. It’s an open question whether the best way to educate people for democracy is to organize schools in democratic ways. It doesn’t follow logically that education for democracy requires democratic methods, and the empirical basis for this claim is not very strong. Nevertheless, I admire the First Amendment Schools, because I believe that it’s good for educational institutions to embrace comprehensive and inspirational guiding philosophies. If a school embraces democratic education voluntarily and thoughtfully, it should get good results. However, democratic education is not the only way to make good citizens. I can imagine that a school might be organized according to scientific values, for example, and produce excellent citizens as graduates. Science, like democracy, is compatible with public education; but science is not the same as democracy. Likewise, a school might embrace artistic creativity as its core value and get good civic results. (Although some art is democratic, democracy is not the essence of art.) Religious instruction can also produce good citizens, as Yates and Youniss showed in their evaluation of a Jesuit high school that is not internally democratic. In my own work with high school students, we try to embody democratic values, but I regard this as only one road to civic education.

Meanwhile, the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools has officially announced its existence and has released applications for grants. State teams that want to improve civic education are encouraged to apply.

among the ethnographers

I don’t think I’ll be able to write anything substantial today, because I have meetings scheduled virtually without a break from 9 am until the evening. The one I’m most looking forward to is actually a seminar. Some advanced anthropology students at the University of Maryland have been collecting data in the same location that our high school students are mapping (see yesterday). We’re hoping to combine the findings from both groups, to generate really interesting maps. This evening, I’ll observe while the students present their findings from the semester.

mapping

This afternoon, I was out in West Hyattsville, MD with a Palm Pilot, collecting data on restaurants and sidewalks. The data that we collected will help our high school kids to make maps of the factors that may influence obesity in their community. The kids themselves have been going out weekly with some graduate students. Since the grad students are about to finish their semester, I wanted to learn how the Palm’s work so that I (and several colleagues) can take over, starting next week. Unfortunately, on this particular occasion, the adult team outnumbered the high school kids. Life is always chaotic at the school, and you never know how many students will show up. So we adults cheerfully picked up Palms and joined in the data-collection.

I’d love to write something insightful about the commercial strip that we mapped. Any place is interesting if you observe it closely, and this happened to be a solid, working-class district of bodegas, barber shops, speciality stores (and empty lots with gang graffiti) that would provide lots to write about. Unfortunately, my eyes were glued to the screen of the Palm the whole time, so I saw nothing interesting. I did get very efficient at data-entry and rolled through a whole extra block on my own while the high school kids had an ice-cream break.

Iraq and the press: discussion

I chaired a public discussion today about the media and Iraq. The speakers were:

  • Susan Moeller, a former photo-journalist and now a Journalism professor at Maryland who has written a fine paper on media coverage of weapons of mass destruction. Susan has also taught at Harvard, Princeton, Islamabad, and elsewhere and has published two highly relevant books, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death, and Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat; and
  • Christopher Hanson, also a Journalism professor at Maryland and a former reporter who covered the first Gulf War and the civil war in Rwanda from the field. Chris is interviewed here.

    • I talked about why the quality of press coverage matters, in the first place.

    It’s hard to summarize a wide-ranging and serious conversation, other than to say that everyone is deeply critical of reporting about Iraq. Everyone would like to read broader and more substantive stories, not about the daily body-count but rather about the status of Iraq’s infrastructure, or about Iraqi culture and history, or about the reasons for the diverse opinions that Arabs hold. We would at least like to know: how many Iraqis have working electricity today?

    Here are some additional points that struck me as particularly useful:

  • The policy of “embedding” reporters with military units has made them reliant on their sources, but this is nothing new–it’s the problem that usually afflicts “beat” reporters, who become close to the experts and officials in their area of coverage.
  • All the critical questions that should have been asked about the War were asked before the invasion began, but not conspicuously. They appeared once on p. 18 or p. 25, while the Administration’s line apppeared daily on the front page.
  • Reporters take their cues from conflicts among political elites. When there’s little dissent among elected leaders, the press cannot (or doesn’t know how to) create stories that are independent of the official line. Thus the lack of Democratic dissent before the War prevented the press from developing critical articles. Howard Kurtz makes the same point to the BBC today
  • When editors and reporters learn that the public is misinformed about a topic that they are covering, some reply (explicitly): “We don’t educate. Our job is to uncover new information.” They don’t take responsibility for the public’s failure to understand the “big picture.”

    • Whenever I hear that there is a lack of substantive news coverage (for instance, about the state of the Iraqi infrastructure today), I always wonder what factors are to blame: the cost of researching such stories; the (perceived) lack of audience demand for substantive news; a lack of skills in the press corps; or some kind of editorial bias among editors and publishers.

    two interesting meetings

    I actually had several interesting conversations today, but I’d like to mention two. First, I met Dr. Laxmi Ramasubramanian of the University of Illinois at Chicago. She helps to create exciting projects that involve residents–including young people–in mapping their communities and creating visions for the future. See, for instance, these Character Plans for the City of Oak Park. This is the kind of work that we’re gradually building toward with our own high school students in Prince George’s County, MD.

    In the afternoon, I heard a good presentation by Hellmut Lotz (available here). Lotz argues that tyrants always have reason to fear for their lives. Others are afraid of them and may try to kill them in self-defense or to usurp their power. A ruler may be sure that he can ward off challengers, but sooner or later he will want to retire or to guarantee his children’s safety after his death. But even if he says that he no longer desires power, others have no reason to believe him. The dictator (and his children) are always potential rivals to any new rulers. For this reason, there are very few examples of safely retired dictators. In constitutional systems, however, leaders routinely retire to comfort and safety. Absolute power plus personal security would be best, but it is impossible. A constitution gives rulers limited power plus safety, and is therefore in the interest of rulers. And that is why we have a Constitution, according to Lotz.