Category Archives: advocating civic education

federal leverage as an employer, and higher education

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The federal government provides full-time employment for 2.8 million civilians. In a given month, the feds may hire 50,000 new employees. Imagine if they said: “We are looking for people who have civic skills, who can analyze complex public or social issues and problems in collaboration with other people, including lawyers, scientists, and laypeople. Moreover, we propose to measure those skills in our potential employees–either by giving evaluations to individuals, or by evaluating the educational programs that they have completed.” The result would be a scramble to provide more effective civic education at the college level. Private employers might also take the government’s lead, since many civic skills are also job skills useful in the private sector.

the philosophical foundations of civic education

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Ann Higgins-D’Alessandro and I have published an article under this title in Philosophy & Public Policy Quarterly. It is actually a version (with due permission) of a chapter we published in The Handbook of Research on Civic Engagement in Youth, edited by Lonnie Sherrod, Judith Torney-Purta, and Constance A. Flanagan (John Wiley & Sons, 2010). Here it is online.

We note that educating young people for citizenship is an intrinsically moral task. Even among reasonable people, moral views about citizenship, youth, and education differ. We describe conflicting utilitarian, liberal, communitarian, and civic republican conceptions and cite evaluations of actual civic education programs that seem to reflect those values. We conclude:

    With a few exceptions, such as Facing History and Just Communities, one cannot find much explicit moral argumentation in either the justifications or the evaluations of civic programs. Disclosing one’s own ethical judgments as facts about oneself is relatively straightforward. Defending them is harder, especially if one does not resort automatically to utilitarianism. Moral argumentation requires a shift out of a positivist framework, as one gives non-empirical reasons—reasons that go beyond observable facts— for one’s positions. Moral philosophy and normative social theory—as we have argued—provide rich resources for arguments about the values that society should hold and that it ought to try to transmit through civic education to future generations.

    Alas, references to influential and relevant schools of philosophy, such as the capabilities approach of Sen and Nussbaum, are entirely missing in the empirical literature on youth civic engagement. The problem, however, goes both ways. Recent academic philosophy in all of its schools has not benefited enough from reflecting on innovative youth programs, a method that Plato, Erasmus, Rousseau, Dewey, and others found generative in earlier times.

youth civic engagement and economic development in the Global South

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I will be talking later today about this topic. Since I am far from an expert on the subject, I intend to facilitate a conversation rather than lecture. I will put some points on the table for discussion:

1. According to the World Bank (2007), “Today, 1.5 billion people are ages 12–24 worldwide, 1.3 billion of them in developing countries, the most ever in history.” Incorporating that enormous population into political and civic life represents a challenge and an opportunity. (“Civic and political life” means voting, activism, service, belonging to groups, deliberation, careers in the public and nonprofit sectors, production of media and culture–and I would not exclude revolution or war under extreme circumstances.)

2. Among those 1.3 billion young people are many millions who have been involved in criminal gangs or conscripted as child soldiers. The challenges and opportunities are particularly dramatic in those cases.

3. In countries where the age distribution is skewed toward the young, investing adequately in children and teenagers is very difficult. The older generations lack sufficient cash, and even time, to provide for youth when the youth/adult ratio is too high. This is a vast and probably insoluble problem, but it’s important to look for high-impact strategies.

4. From evaluations of youth development programs, we know that when “at risk” young people are given opportunities to deliberate, serve, and act politically, they learn, develop healthy personal behaviors, and integrate successfully into society. A moving example from the United States: On entering YouthBuild, the participants–young American adults without high school diplomas–estimate their own life expectancies at 40, on average. Upon completing the program, they have raised the average estimate to 72: evidence that they have gained a sense of opportunity, optimism, and purpose by working together, building houses and studying and discussing social issues.

5. Older people make political decisions that are far from optimal for youth. They pour public money into retirement benefits and health care at the end of life while under-investing in education and preventive health care. Also, entrenched elites (who are, by definition, older) tend to make corrupt decisions. Many countries are experimenting with “social accountability” as a tool for more equitable and less corrupt policy. That means giving the power to make decisions to citizens, organized in deliberative forums. In some places, youth are specifically included in social accountability. For instance, in Fortaleza, Brazil, 50 young people helped shape the municipal budget (PDF, p. 53). Hampton, VA has created a whole pyramid of engagement for its young people, capped by empowered youth councils. Although I don’t think we yet have evidence that youth participation produces dramatically better social outcomes, that is highly plausible given (1) the persuasive evidence for social accountability, plus (2) examples in which young people have participated effectively in public processes.

6. Other policies that affect youth civic engagement, for better or worse, include: the extent and content of primary and secondary education; conscription and national service (which sometimes includes civilian alternatives); the criminal justice system and how it treats juvenile offenders; and the rules of the electoral system (including when the voting age is set). These policies can be deeply harmful: for example, when young Americans are permanently stripped of the right to vote because of felony convictions. Or they can be helpful–as when universal schooling supports civic learning.

7. There is nothing intrinsically good about youth civic engagement. Fascism was basically a youth movement. But some societies create a healthy dynamic in which young people introduce new energies, interests, and ideas, while older people maintain institutions and transmit values and experience. Other societies discourage constructive engagement, and the consequences are almost always harmful.

Three C-s of Education Petition Campaign (College, Career and Citizenship)

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From the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools:

    The Campaign is sponsoring a petition campaign to remind all policymakers of the essential and historic role schools play in providing the knowledge, skills and disposition for informed and engaged citizenship. The goal of education is more then preparing students for higher education and a successful career; equally important is the role schools play in providing civic participation skills. We are calling this the “Three C-s of Education Petition Campaign.” This petition is designed to remind policymakers and the public of the essential civic mission of schools. The petition language is attached. We ask you all to sign the petition. We also ask all associated with CMS to publicize the petition widely through your communication networks. We encourage those with websites to place the petition ‘widget’ on your site, providing a link to the petition page. The petition drive was launched at the annual conference of the National Council for the Social Studies where well over 1,500 signatures were gathered. This petition will be presented to local, state and federal education policymakers in 2011.

Click to sign:

what our social studies teachers think

The American Enterprise Institute has released a new survey called “High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship: What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do.” I know four of the authors and respect their work in general as well as this particular survey.

Ideology is inescapable when we consider civic (a.k.a. political) education. AEI is generally seen as a conservative organization, but that does not mean that the report is biased or designed to reach conclusions convenient to conservatives. On the contrary, it rebuts the kind of sharp conservative critique represented by Chester Finn and colleagues in a 2003 Thomas B. Fordham Institute report entitled Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong?. Finn claimed that students emerged “from K-12 education and then, alas, from college with ridiculously little knowledge or understanding of their country’s history, their planet’s geography, their government’s functioning, or the economy’s essential workings.” The underlying problem, he asserted, was that social studies teachers had bad values. By the year 2001, he wrote:

    in the field of social studies itself, the lunatics had taken over the asylum. Its leaders were people who had plenty of grand degrees and impressive titles but who possessed no respect for Western civilization; who were inclined to view America’s evolution as a problem for humanity rather than mankind’s last, best hope; who pooh-poohed history’s chronological and factual skeleton as somehow privileging elites and white males over the poor and oppressed; who saw the study of geography in terms of despoiling the rain forest rather than locating London or the Mississippi River on a map; who interpreted ‘civics’ as consisting largely of political activism and ‘service learning’ rather than understanding how laws are made and why it is important to live in a society governed by laws; who feared that serious study of economics might give unfair advantage to capitalism (just as excessive attention to democracy might lead impressionable youngsters to judge it a superior way of organizing society); and who, in any case, took for granted that children were better off learning about their neighborhoods and ‘community helpers’ than amazing deeds by heroes and villains in distant times and faraway places.

This assertion was not based on any data whatsoever. In contrast, the new AEI survey finds:

    83 percent of the teachers surveyed [see] the United States as a unique country that stands for something special in the world. At the same time, 82 percent of survey respondents say students should be taught to ‘respect and appreciate their country but know its shortcomings.’ Despite all of the concerns about anti-American sentiment in schools of education, just 1 percent of teachers want students to learn ‘that the U.S. is a fundamentally

    flawed country.’ This sounds, to our ears, like a near pitch-perfect rendition of what parents, voters, and taxpayers would hope for–schools where students learn that America is exceptional even as they learn about its failures.

In the AEI survey, 60% of teachers think it is “absolutely essential” to teach students to “follow rules and be respectful of authority.” Many fewer (37%) think it’s absolutely essential to teach students “to be activists who challenge the status quo of our political system and seek to remedy injustices.” Four out of five consider it absolutely essential to know the components of the Bill of Rights and to have “good work habits such as being timely, persistent, and hardworking.” One in five think that education professors are overly critical of the US; eight percent think those professors are overly appreciative.

The AEI results are consistent with our own finding that many more young Americans recall studying “great American heroes and virtues of the political system” than “racism and other forms of injustice.” I don’t necessarily object to the balance that exists in most American classrooms, but I do think leftists critics have more empirical basis for their complaints than conservatives have. If the ideological valence in our schools is wrong, it’s not that students receive an overly cynical account of American history but rather than real injustices are ignored.

On most of the questions about values and goals, public school and private school teachers respond similarly. But their actual practices are different. For example, 86% of private school students say they expect their students to keep up with the news, compared to 44% of public school teachers. That could be in part because laws and policies that govern public schools make no place for current events. Forty-five percent of public school teachers in the survey–but only 9 percent of private school teachers–say that “social studies has been deemphasized” because of No Child Left Behind.