Several film crews are going around interviewing people about citizenship or civic engagement. Last week, I was filmed for Song of a Citizen, which is still in production. The following clip is from iCitizen Forum, which is produced by Colonial Williamsburg.

My 8-year-old likes it but says that people will be surprised. When they hear the intro, she says, “they will expect an old guy with glasses.”

Senator Obama said in a major speech, “race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.” The New York Times columnist Bill Kristol presumed that this comment would lead to a national discussion similar to the one that Bill Clinton formally launched in 1997, complete with op-eds, academic panels, and blue-ribbon commissions. Kristol hated the idea. “With respect to having a national conversation on race, my recommendation is: Let’s not, and say we did.”

I wouldn’t be nearly as snarky as Kristol was about that idea. However, I find it interesting that two of our most experienced and thoughtful organizers of public discussions have separately argued against having a formal dialogue on the topic of “race.”

Rich Harwood wrote, “I do not believe a so-called ‘national conversation’ on race is the way to go, if that means a repeat of former President Clinton’s effort on this matter. Remember the national commission he appointed, which soon became embroiled in endless issues about its focus? That initiative had all the negative trappings of a high-falutin’ blue-ribbon panel: formal hearings with far more posturing than conversation. After a much ballyhooed launch, the commission landed with a thud.”

Rich offers six good pieces of advice regarding interracial dialogues, including this one: “It is important to actually do something together (the size and scope of the action does not matter as much as the action itself), because conversation alone cannot create the bonds of trust and relationships that we need. Deeper connections will emerge only by rubbing shoulders and finding solutions together to common challenges, demonstrating to ourselves and others that progress is possible.”

Martha McCoy, the executive director of Everyday Democracy, has organized many Study Circles in racially divided communities. She provides a great post about how to make those conversations work. Like Harwood (but unlike Kristol), she thinks that we need to talk about racial tensions and about disparities in social advantages by race. But we need to talk in contexts where people can raise conflicts of interest and values, work through their differences, and accomplish something together. In other words, the issue cannot be reduced to our attitudes about race (why we “pre-judge and fear one another”), but must encompass the ways our communities and institutions are structured. In Study Circles, participants have patiently and carefully addressed gaps and disparities in ways that have led to real change.

So we need local conversations with racial differences very much on the table. We also need national conversations or deliberations about concrete policy options in various domains. It would be great, for example, for Congress to fund national public discussions about climate change and agree to hold hearings on the report that citizens wrote deliberatively.

But I’m not at all convinced that a formal, national discussion of “race” would be focused enough to produce tangible change. If it led nowhere, it would be worse than nothing at all.

‘Tis the season for dissertation defenses, apparently, and I’m participating in two over the next 48 hours. One concerns abortion escorts, those people who voluntarily walk women into abortion clinics that are surrounded by anti-abortion protesters. The other is a history of congressional pages, those boys (and now also girls) who work for the House and Senate while they attend a special school. The page program is formal and rather prestigious. The escorts are at the opposite extreme: they do not even have an organization, let alone an official place inside the US Capitol. Yet both groups represent particularly intense and demanding forms of “citizenship.”

For a Better America is a student-generated forum for proposing and discussing ideas and connecting to peers. The young organizers cite lots of good, current writing on democracy and civil society and have built an elaborate platform for discussion and action. I like the way such ideas as “produce more environmentally friendly packaging materials” seem to ascend the rankings and get the most attention, whereas the lowest approval ratings go to “elect Mike Huckabee president,” “elect Rudy Giuliani president,” and “elect Hillary Clinton president.” Evidently, For a Better America is about what we can do.

The Girl Scouts have released a major survey of about 4,000 girls and boys (ages 8-17), focusing on their attitudes toward leadership. In the Washington Post, Laura Sessions Stepp summarized the report thus: “A new nationwide survey of girls and boys found that a majority of children and youths in the United States have little or no interest with achieving leadership roles when they become adults, ranking ‘being a leader’ behind other goals such as ‘fitting in,’ ‘making a lot of money’ and ‘helping animals or the environment.'” She quoted me: “‘The millennial generation has ambivalent, even negative, feelings about formal leadership,’ said Peter Levine, director of a nonpartisan research center at the University of Maryland that studies young people and civic involvement. ‘They prefer horizontal leadership in which everyone’s a leader.'”

I will be on Minnesota Public Radio today from 10-11 Central Time discussing the report. I have read the full document this morning, and these are some points I notice:

Kids are much more likely to say, “A leader is someone who brings people together to get things done”–not “A leader is someone who is in charge of other people and makes decisions that affect them.”

Being a leader ranks low on the list of goals. This may be partly because of ethical doubts about command-and-control versions of “leadership.” But it’s partly because young people put their own development first. Staying free of drugs and alcohol, doing well academically, and getting into college rank far above being a leader and helping your community. On the bright side, kids say that they rank fitting in, being popular, and being famous very low.

Given a long list of activities that show responsibility or leadership, girls are more involved in almost all ways than boys are–sports being the exception. This result is perfectly consistent with what we know about extracurricular participation in middle school and high school.

African American and Latino kids are more likely than Whites to see themselves as leaders, to enjoy leadership, and to want to be leaders. This comes as no surprise, since African American children (especially) are more engaged in problem-solving and “giving back” to their communities than Whites are.

The importance of “helping others” declines over the age range 8 to 17, but it falls much more for boys than for girls.

Girls and boys alike cite their mothers as by far the biggest influence on their leadership aspirations. This is consistent with other research showing that today’s youth are close to their parents and especially their mothers. When I speak to groups of kids, I often ask them to raise their hands if they have a living hero. Many hands go up. I then ask them to put their hands down if their hero is their Mom. Most hands go down.

The differences in attitudes between girls and boys are quite modest. I suspect the interesting differences are by age, not gender. However, this survey does not include adults, so we cannot compare generations.