The Kettering Foundation Press has just published a new book entitled Agent of Democracy: Higher Education and the HEX Journey. The editors are my friends David W. Brown and Deborah Witte. (The word HEX in the title refers to the High Education Exchange, a journal long published by Kettering.)

I have a chapter about how, after the academy moved away from sixties-style radicalism and social critique, a new generation of scholars developed ways of engaging with politics and social issues that were more “pragmatic, open-ended, and solicitous of institutions, of existing communities, of civic culture, and of public deliberation.” Mary Stanley responds with a strong critique, arguing that the shift I celebrate is really a retreat in the face of corporate domination.

Claire Snyder provides a chapter on the history of American colleges and universities in relation to democracy. Harry Boyte argues for “public work,” his conceptualization of the citizen’s central roles in democracy. Adam Weinberg, dean at Colgate, explains how public work was institutionalized at his college. Scott Peters focuses on the land-grant system and its powerful heritage of democratic work. Jeremy Cohen brings civil liberties and constitutional rights into the discussion. Noelle McAfee provides a somewhat different theoretical frame from Harry Boyte’s–more grounded in deliberation and the public sphere. And then Douglas Challenger describes how deliberative democracy has been institutionalized at Franklin Pierce College.

Since I’m in the book, it would be unseemly to plug it, but it is a nicely diverse conversation about the role of colleges and universities in our democracy.

I’m having an email correspondence about whether Americans are politically ignorant and apathetic. Those are harsh and undiplomatic words, but they could be true.

Are we apathetic? Voter turnout is low compared to other countries, around two thirds in presidential years. But about 60 percent of Americans volunteer, according to the DDB Needham survey; and that represents an enormous voluntary contribution of time and energy. Just under 50% attend meetings at least annually. That rate is lower than it used to be, but it’s still a large voluntary contribution of time.

Are we ignorant? I’m not sure. According to Pew, 93% can identify Hillary Clinton. 88% know about the surge in Iraq. 69% can generate the name of Dick Cheney, but apparently more can pick him off a list when offered a multiple-choice format. Are these numbers too low? It may help to set them in context. For example, 49% of Americans think that antibiotics affect viruses. Just 60% can pick the right definition of DNA off a multiple-choice list ( source). 37% think that kissing can spread HIV, and 16% think you can get it from a toilet seat (source). 14% of adult Americans score “below basic” level in literacy, meaning that they have no more than “simple and concrete literacy skills.” In short, more people can identify Hillary Clinton than can read a paragraph of prose. Many more are right about the Iraq surge than about how one contracts AIDS.

This interests me because literacy and medical information pay off directly for an individual. Even people who are rather selfish should be motivated to obtain skills and knowledge that they can use in their own lives. Political knowledge, in contrast, does not pay off for an individual who thinks in selfish or narrow terms. Maybe being well informed will make you a better voter or help you in a community meeting. But there are hundreds of millions of other people who vote and attend meetings, and you can easily get away as a free-rider.

A model, then, of human behavior as self-interested would predict very low levels of political knowledge and interest. What we observe seems better than that to me. Surveys always reveal disturbing gaps in knowledge, whether we ask about geography, science, religion, or any other topic. Politics doesn’t stand out as a particularly weak point.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t work to enhance both knowledge and participation, especially so that we can reduce inequality by social class. That will require more than “messages” that provide citizens with information or exhort them to participate. I think a feeling of responsibility already has some positive effects on people’s political behavior. Without it, 110 million people wouldn’t cast ballots in election years. We need to reinforce people’s sense that they ought to engage by providing stable rewards for participation, such as institutions that actually respond to their legitimate activism. It is, for example, hard to persuade people to vote in congressional elections when the districts have been drawn so that only about 10% of them are even remotely competitive. It’s hard to follow the news when the local TV station serves up only rapes, fires, and murders. It’s hard to improve local education if the No Child Left Behind Act has centralized educational policy. And it’s hard to seek office in a union if the union has closed.

I’ve been involved in this project for some time, so I am pleased to post the following announcement:

Students often seem to be required now to interview “experts” as sources for their term papers. For whatever reason, I get several interview requests each week from students who are not enrolled at my university. I am generally inclined to help them, but I’ve developed some tips that other interview targets might want to borrow, and professors might want to recommend to their students:

Don’t tell me that you want to interview me because you need several sources for a required paper. Tell me that you are interested in an important topic and want to talk to me because I seem to know something about it.

Before you contact me, read at least some of the most prominently posted material on my organization’s website. I will help you to navigate through our site, but I want you to look first. Ideally, your questions will be prompted by something that my colleagues or I have written or said.

Send me the questions by email so that I can respond right away and don’t have to email you back to schedule a time for a call.

Be polite. For example, “thank you” is considered a nice ending to an email. (Email, btw, is an old-fashioned alternative to texting.)

Doyle Stevick is an education professor at the University of South Carolina. Here is his contribution to the CANDE newsletter. (My contribution was yesterday’s post.) The assignment, again, is to describe an ideal civics class, without worrying about what might be politically palatable or practical.

Between 2001 and 2004, I spent hundreds of hours in civic education classrooms all over Estonia. I observed teachers in different cities, sometimes on the same day, and the drives gave me a great deal of time to reflect on things I’d like to see change in civic education generally. Here, I’ll keep myself to just three.

In my exposure to civic education materials, I have seen very little representation of children as social actors. And yet children do and have done extraordinary things. It is one thing to see the work of Craig Kielburger, who traveled around Asia at age 12, founded an international children’s organization, and the like. His is an inspiring tale, well represented in his own words in his book “Free the Children” and the Bullfrog Films documentary “It takes a Child.” Yet, as with college students who read about Paul Farmer in Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, the sheer scale of his accomplishments can overwhelm rather than inspire and inspire a sense of civic self-efficacy in children.

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