Colorado Springs, CO: I’m at a conference of developmental psychologists, talking about service-learning. To repeat a definition used below, “service-learning” is some combination of community service with academic work on the same subject. Almost half of American high schools claim to use this approach. Most of the important debates about service-learning are really about values: Do we want to produce caring citizens who are likely to volunteer and provide face-to-face services? Do we want to produce citizens who are aware of social problems such as homelessness and hunger and may later act politically? What kinds of social and political knowledge do we want to foster? And so on.
Author Archives: Peter Levine
justice-oriented citizens
I’m in the air, en route to Colorado Springs for a conference on service-learning and cognitive science. I’ll explain what that means once I’ve participating in some sessions and understand the topic better.
Yesterday, I spoke at a conference sponsored by the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools within the US Department of Education. This is the office that has responsibility for civic education, and the assignment may be a bureaucratic accident. But it does raise the question: Is there a form of civic education that can help makes schools safer? Perhaps a standard view is that “good citizens” are those who don’t abuse drugs or act violently; thus “civic education” means reducing such antisocial personal behavior. I would like to endorse an alternative position advanced by Dr. Joel Westheimer at yesterday’s conference. Joel argues that we’ll only make schools safer by helping to create active, critical, participatory democratic citizens who strive for justice. “Justice-oriented” civic education will reduce crime because (a) teaching kids to be civic activists may steer some away from negative roles; and (b) if there is a critical mass of active citizens in a school, they may be able to address immediate causes of crime, such as a lack of after-school activities.
Clearly, creating “justice-oriented citizens” would be good even if it didn’t make schools safer. Whether there is a link between the best forms of civic education and safe schools is an empirical question. I don’t know whether it has been answered. But it is plausible to imagine that youth civic engagement would reduce crime.
the Amish and freedom
We’re just back from a family weekend in Lancaster, PA–Amish country. It’s dispiriting to watch real Amish people walk or trot in waggons past huge Amish-themed tourist attractions. (One store is actually called “Amish Stuff Inc.”) Extreme simplicity seems to attract the worst form of consumerism.
The Amish raise a philosophical dilemma that has often been written about. If you believe in freedom, this must include freedom of religion, which means the ability to raise your own children within your faith. Central to most religions are detailed rules or traditions concerning the rearing of children. However, if you believe in freedom, then you must believe in the right of individuals to choose their own values and commitments. Parents can interfere profoundly with such freedom. Indeed, all parents necessarily do. Anyone who grows up in a family is constrained by the legacy of family beliefs and values. (Even those who rebel have been influenced.) However, the tension between parental freedom and children’s liberty is especially sharp and clear in cases like the Amish, who prefer to be as isolated as possible from the rest of the world. In particular, they prefer their children to “drop out” of school in late childhood.
a true public intellectual
In recent entries, I considered what might define a “public intellectual.” (I’m being interviewed on that topic for an article.) I then spent the last three days in the company of the Harvard political scientist Jane Mansbridge. To me, she is a perfect example of what a public intellectual should be. Not many people who hold very distinguished professorships at Harvard would take three days to attend a “researcher & practitioner” meeting on any subject, especially if most of the practitioners ran small, little-known organizations, and the researchers were mostly junior professors. Jane Mansbridge not only attended; she participated modestly but helpfully in every breakout session, listened to every story, developed relationships with many people in the room, and seemed to care about every phrase that was written on a flip chart.
competing forms of deliberation
We are now two days into the “Researcher & Practitoner” meeting that I described yesterday. We tried to get consensus (among 40 people) on a set of factual statements about public deliberation that we could post on a website for public use. For the most part, the academics in the group rejected the statements that the practitioners proposed, on the ground that the research base was too weak. Therefore, we harvested a very long list of plausible, informed hypotheses about deliberation. This may be a more useful product than a set of consensus propositions.
The conversation has generally been very rich and disciplined (and hard to summarize). Instead, I’ll report the following thought that occurred to me. We seem to have a choice between two general approaches. We can randomly select people to deliberate on a public issue (giving them incentives to participate, as if in a kind of jury); or we can try to motivate a large and diverse segment of the population to seek out voluntary opportunities for deliberation. Both approaches are widely used by practitioners in the field of Deliberative Democracy.