I believe that current forms of politics are, in general, too manipulative. Americans recognize that they are being focus-grouped, polled, canvassed, frightened, divided, titillated, and provoked; and they don’t like it. They want opportunities to share ideas and develop solutions.

However, when we ask why citizens have been sidelined and what to do about it, we offer various answers that reflect our political views. That’s fine; there are many valid “flavors” of civic renewal. Nothing would be more useful than a competition or debate among political parties and candidates who vied to put “citizens back at the center.”

Examples:

A libertarian version might favor vouchers so that citizens could create and run their own schools. It might recommend allowing residents of urban neighborhoods to form associations that could purchase their own municipal services. And it would strive to remove regulations on nonprofit organizations.

A cultural-conservative version might strive to reduce the influence of courts and the federal government so that citizens would be more involved at the local level in debates about, for example, teaching evolution. This version would support civic education that emphasizes patriotism, knowledge of the Constitution, service, and responsibility. It would recognize military service, including ROTC and the National Guard, as forms of civic participation. And it might favor public funding for faith-based social services.

A progressive version might favor unions, community development corporations, land trusts, co-ops, and other alternative economic institutions that encourage popular participation. It would emphasize electoral reform and “alternative” (i.e., non-commercial) media. This progressive version would support civic education that emphasizes critical thinking, political skills, and social justice.

A deliberative version would be resolutely neutral about ideology but might support investing public funds in public deliberation (both online and face-to-face), granting power to citizens’ advisory panels, and providing civic education that emphasizes deliberative skills.

If I were asked why most universities do not put a lot of effort into civic education or civic work in their own communities, I would say that it’s because they compete for students. Prospective students and their parents want credentials that are valuable in the job market. What affects the value of a diploma is not what the student learns in college, but how competitive it was to enter the university in the first place. Thus admissions offices do most of the economic work of universities, by selecting and sorting applicants.

However, to attract top students, universities need the assets that enhance their reputations, which include famous and sought-after faculty and well endowed facilities. Universities do whatever it takes to draw top faculty and donors, and neither group is particularly concerned about civic education or engagement. In any case, institutions make few important decisions about their own priorities. The critical decisions are made elsewhere in the academic labor market. For example, faculty are promoted when other institutions try to lure them away. Thus, even if a university decided to reward professors for civic engagement, the actual rewards would go to those with high market value.

Thorstein Veblen already recognized this situation in 1918 (see The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men). But conditions are worse in a globally competitive economy wherein risk has been individualized and each student feels that his or her economic future will be determined by credentials–not by family networks, unions, welfare systems, or even genuine learning.

Why then do I not argue, at least in passing, that the problem for civic engagement is contemporary capitalism? (Or I could say “globalization,” or “neoliberalism”.)

First, because I think we can fight the problem I have outlined above without battling capitalism. We can organize faculty who are dissatisfied with a life shorn of civic or public significance. We can bring colleges and universities together in consortia such as Campus Compact to resist competitive pressures. We can develop forms of civic education that appeal to prospective students because they may confer job skills. And we can press for changes in goverment policies, such as the proportion of federal work study grants that are reserved for community-based jobs.

Second, I am not willing to call capitalism “the problem,” because it seems to me to combine a mix of positive and negative features. Global capitalism undermines traditional cultures and democratic sovereignty (see last Tuesday’s post), but it also unleashes human creativity and freedom. A university insulated from the market might be a refuge for high culture, critical thought, and civic engagement. Or it might just consume public funds and tuition dollars without any accountability for outcomes.

(Dayton, OH) Today the Immigration and Naturalization Service issued a new citizenship exam. This is the test that immigrants must pass to become US citizens. The revision is being reported as a big improvement. The Washington Post says,

Want to become a citizen? Get a copy of the Bill of Rights. The U.S. government is revising the new citizenship exam so that it emphasizes applicants’ grasp of American democracy over their knowledge of trivia — such as the name of the president’s house or the colors of the flag.

The old exam was problematic. Instead of asking questions that tested people’s capacity to be active and responsible members of the political community–“citizens”–it posed nitty-gritty factual questions that you could memorize without any understanding. For instance, you had to be able to state the date on which the Constitution was written, without knowing what the Constitution said.

On a memorable evening in 2001, I helped a Hmong immigrant in St. Paul to memorize answers from the INS’s practice book. He had no idea what the answers meant, nor could he ever use the information he had memorized in his own interest or to help the United States.

Also in the Twin Cities, immigrant students from the Jane Addams School made a video about this problem. They asked shoppers in the Mall of America (i.e., “Middle America”) to answer questions from the citizenship exam. The rate of correct answers was low.

We should probably congratulate the INS for rewriting the test, but I’m not sure how much progress has been achieved. Sample questions from the pilot version are online. I like these: “Name one right or freedom from the First Amendment.” “Name two ways that Americans can participate in their democracy.” And “What group of people was taken to America and sold as slaves?” However, I’m not sure it’s useful to ask: “The House of Representatives has how many voting members?” Or “How old must a President be?”

We know that people who know this kind of fact are also more engaged in politics and civic life. However, I suspect that’s because they have gleaned knowledge from discussions, meetings, and using the news media. It’s not clear that making people memorize such facts would increase their engagement.

We also know, from CIRCLE’s recent survey, that younger American adults would mostly fail the new exam if they had to take it.

(en route to Dayton, OH) According to a fascinating article by Nicholas Orme in Oxford Today, medieval and renaissance English schoolboys spent most of their time translating passages into Latin. Latin was a practical, living language, and medieval teachers must have seen the research about motivating students by assigning culturally appropriate materials. They made up lists of highly topical sentences for their pupils to render into Latin.

In 1506, a teacher who was also Master of Oxford’s Magdalen College published a translation textbook that included such useful schoolroom phrases as: “Thou stinkest,” “Turd in thy teeth!” “I am almost beshitten,” and “He is the veriest coward that ever pissed.” A different text provided opportunities to translate the phrases, “Sit away, or I shall give you a blow” and “He hath taken my book from me.”

Another teacher expected his students to translate his complaint about their behavior:

As soon as I am come into the school, this fellow goeth to make water, and he goeth out into the common draft [toilet]. Soon after another asketh license that he may go drink. Another calleth on me that he may have license to go home. These and such other layeth my scholars for excuse oftentimes, that they may be out of the way.

In 1346, the Oxford schoolmaster John Cornwall asked his pupils to translate the warning: “If I go to Carfax, I may be met by misdoers.” That remains reasonable advice 660 years later, for Carfax is still a street in Oxford with a somewhat scruffy clientele.

I could write a long post criticizing “neoliberalism” for widening gaps between rich and poor, undermining local cultures, damaging the biosphere, and restricting the sovereignty of democratic governments. I’d vote for the democratic left if, for example, I lived in Latin America. Yet I’m haunted by the example of India, where people who shared my values set the nation’s course from 1949 until the mid-1980s. Nehru and his fellow leaders of the Congress Party were democratic, civil libertarian, secular, nonviolent, pluralist, deliberative, and egalitarian. Opposing “globalization” before that word was coined, they tried to make India self-reliant and to help the least advantaged of their compatriots. It is at least possible that their well-intentioned policies caused hundreds of millions of people to live shorter, harsher, and narrower lives than they might have otherwise.

The following passage from Shashi Tharoor’s India: From Midnight to the Millennium (pp. 166-8) has stuck with me for several years:

The government’s indifferent attitude [in the 1970s] was epitomized by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s communications minister, C.M. Stephen, who declared in Parliament, in response to questions decrying the rampant telephone breakdowns in the country, that telephones were a luxury, not a right, and that any Indian who was not satisfied with his telephone service could return his phone–since there was an eight-year waiting list of people seeking this supposedly inadequate product.

Mr. Stephen’s statement captured perfectly everything that was wrong about the government’s attitude. It was ignorant (he clearly had no idea of the colossal socioeconomic losses caused by poor communications), wrong-headed (he saw a practical problem only as an opportunity to score a political point), unconstructive (responding to complaints by seeking a solution apparently did not occur to him), self-righteous (the socialist cant about telephones being a luxury, not a right), complacent(taking pride in a waiting list the existence of which should have been a source of shame …), unresponsive (feeling no obligation to provide a service in return for the patience, and fees, of the country’s telephone subscribers), and insulting.

Although some blame for this unresponsiveness should be assigned directly to Mrs. Gandhi and her ministers, the example surely illustrates a more general problem. Centralized state bureaucracies that deny market preferences tend to become arrogant. Of course, mid-20th century state-socialism and neoliberalism are not our only alternatives. There are various Third Ways, including efforts to decentralize democratic governance. Nevertheless, it’s sobering to consider the enormous waste that good intentions can cause.