Let’s say that a place is perfectly familiar to you if you hardly notice you’re there. You can walk from one room of your house to another without using any mental resources to find your way, and if things haven’t changed, you hardly register the environment. I became so familiar with my Metro commute to College Park, MD–45 minutes each way for 15 years–that I often didn’t even notice changing trains at Fort Totten. I would have to look up to see if I had already shifted from the Green to the Red Line. Even accounting for some eccentricity on my part, I think this is a general phenomenon: We save our attention for what is new and requires thought.

I’m interested in when we reach a stage of familiarity. It doesn’t seem to take all that many hours. For instance, I would guess I spend an average of 2-3 hours per week on airplanes. Each plane is different. Yet that’s enough time to make the situation familiar once I settle into my seat. The context pretty much disappears and I can be fully absorbed in reading, thinking, or talking. So I think familiarity increases on a steep curve.

But then it matters how much time passes between experiences. My mother-in-law’s house in Georgia feels extremely familiar to me. I’ve spent no more than two percent of my time there since the mid-1990s, but our visits have been spaced fairly evenly over the years. Returning for a couple of days every 3-6 months seems to be sufficient to retain a sense of familiarity. In contrast, if we had spent three months there in 1996 and never returned, I’m pretty sure it would feel unfamiliar.

There is surely some individual variation in how we experience familiarity. I am not sure how I’d like to be in this respect. Attaining familiarity seems desirable, insofar as it reduces stress and distraction and lets us focus on our choice of tasks. At the same time, it seems bad when it makes us careless or inattentive to the world or when it makes time pass too quickly.

As I’ve discussed before, the White House Office of Public Engagement has organized an elaborate online discussion to provide guidance on how to enhance transparency, participation, and collaboration in the federal government. More than 2,000 ideas were submitted and discussed in the first round. Of these, the Office has selected a few for further discussion online.

One cluster of ideas that they have selected involves civic education, which is the topic of the day today. It would be helpful if people who care about civic education weighed in, especially since some previous discussions have gone off on tangents. Here’s where you go to comment.

This is the original announcement from the White House (issued yesterday):

On Thursday, June 11th, we’ll turn from talking about how government can create better opportunities for participation to address how to promote the civic literacy needed to participate effectively in government. On Promoting Civic Education, you said:

• Provide a toolkit, including neutral discussion guides, to facilitate community discussions and a website for groups to share conclusions.
• Invest in educating Americans (e.g. through town halls) to analyze complex information.
• Train neighborhood facilitators to use proven dialogue methods that engage a group in 3 hours or less.
• Establish listening and personal story sharing skills workshops in homes & schools.
• Create and sponsor teen model governments to seek solutions.
• Combine deliberation and service on Martin Luther King Day and other holidays.

I like these ideas–in fact, I originally proposed at least one of them–but there’s a need to think bigger and to focus more on schools (which is where the kids are!). Furthermore, the actual White House post highlights civic education less than yesterday’s announcement suggested it would. That’s not a big deal, but I would like to see the discussion shift toward school-based civic education. To that end, I have posted the following; other perspectives would be welcome as well:

Young people can learn to be very effective and helpful participants in public dialogs. Moderated discussions of current events in school, high-quality community service projects with a dimension of research and planning, youth production of news media, and youth service on boards and committees have all been shown to teach relevant skills, knowledge, and values.

Unfortunately, such opportunities are distributed very unequally. Poor children, children in stressed schools, and children who are academically “at risk” rarely receive civic opportunities that are common in high-performing suburban schools. Unless we address this problem, we will miss the voice of low-income kids in any public process.

The federal government invests very modestly in civic education. We estimate that federal spending on all the relevant programs (in the Department of Education, Corporation for National and Community Service, HUD, and the National Endowment for the Humanities) totals about $2 per student per year. But that small investment could be much more valuable:

1. It should be an investment in innovation. Money should be allocated in open competitions, and grantees should have to evaluate impact rigorously so that the field can learn.

2. It should be coordinated. There should be more integration, especially between the civic education programs of the Department of Education and NEH and the service-learning programs of the Corporation for National and Community Service and HUD.

3. It should be connected to the kind of work that the White House Office of Public Engagement is doing. When the government seeks public involvement in policymaking, students should be included, and they should have opportunities to learn civic and deliberative skills.

I like to mix the usual fare of “civic engagement” and current events that dominate this blog with a smattering of culture. But I don’t think there will be much of that this month. I’m just 240 pages into the recent translation of War and Peace by Pevear and Volokhnosky. If I have anything to say about Tolstoy, it will probably be after I’m done. For now, I’m having enough trouble keeping the characters straight. Is Nikolushka the same as Nikolenka, and is he also Count Nikolai Ilyich? (Yes.) Is Count Nikolai the same as Prince Nikolai? (Nope.) Who is the brother of Princess Elizaveta Karlovna (a.k.a. Liza, Lizaveta, or Lise), and is he also the brother of Princess Elena Vassilievna (a.k.a. Lelya, Helene)? (Absolutely not.) Sometimes I’m tempted to just let it all wash over me, but I’ve found that’s almost always a mistake when you read sprawling 19th-century novels. Sooner or later, there will be some crucial connection that makes everything suspenseful and significant, if only you noticed it. So was that Pyotr Kirillovich (Pierre) or Pyotr Ilyich (Petya) whom Natalya (Natasha, Natalie) met in Moscow?