Alan Singer has written a strong and (in its own way) valid critical review of my recent book with Jim Youniss, Engaging Young People in Civic Life. Singer begins:

Former Congressional Representative Lee Hamilton, director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University, makes the purpose of this book clear in the preface. Civic education means moderated discussions in classrooms, encouraging participation in student government, preparing students to volunteer in their communities and enlist in the armed forces, and promoting participation in electoral politics. Civic engagement, as represented in this book, is polite. Unstated, but clear from its absence in the preface and throughout the text, it does not mean passion, and it does not mean questioning authority, challenging social inequality, and organizing protests against government policies.

The Civil Rights Movement is briefly mentioned on page 7 and Martin Luther King, Jr. on page 273. NOW, abortion rights, the labor movement, student rights campaigns, community control, and anti-Vietnam war and anti-draft protests are never mentioned. It is hard to believe, but in a book that claims to explore engaging young people in civic life, the movements that successfully engaged them when I was a teenage activist in the 1960s are completely ignored. That is because this book, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation as part of its promotion of democracy in the United States, is not about civic engagement at all. It is about service-learning, electoral politics, and assimilating young people into the mainstream political

culture.

There is definitely some truth to this. I’m pretty pro-regime. I don’t like a lot of current policies and leaders, but I think the system is valuable, fragile, and liable to get worse if we don’t care for it. I don’t presume by the way, that all my co-authors would share that position; some are more radical. It does seem to me that preserving a system counts as “civic engagement,” so I can’t accept Singer’s claim that we’re “not about civic engagement at all.” We address several varieties of it, but we don’t define it as left-radicalism.

A major goal of the book is to benefit young people by giving them positive roles in their communities. We summarize research showing that such opportunities lead to better lives for the young people who participate. Although I also defend their right to protest and criticize, contributing to their communities pays off for them best–and that is a valuable outcome.

Singer writes:

Young people have played major roles in transformative social movements throughout the 20th century and the first decade of the new century. In the United States, they were at the center of the civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, and bravely desegregated schools in the face of hostile mobs. In Soweto, South Africa, a student strike precipitated the campaign

that brought down the apartheid regime. In the 1960s and early 1990s high school and college students were major participants in mass anti-war movements and protests that helped to bring down the Soviet Union. In Europe and the United States immigrant rights campaigns have mobilized young people. There is much to report, if this is what you believe is important.

This is all true, but four caveats apply. First, the valuable outcomes of such participation were the social changes they achieved. For instance, young people played an important role in overturning Jim Crow in the American South, and that was a great achievement. But it didn’t benefit them directly. Doug McAdam shows in Freedom Summer that the elite, predominantly white college student participants who went to Mississippi in 1964 were worse off than a comparison group in terms of their happiness, tangible welfare, and satisfaction in the 1980s. They paid a steep price for their activism. Their sacrifice was commendable, but our book is mostly about something else: helping disadvantaged young people to do better in life.

Second, the outcomes of youth political participation are not inevitably good. European fascism had a strong youth component. The American Civil Rights movement had distinguished elders. If you want to change the world for the better, the key questions are: What kind of change is desirable? And how can we get it? Whether and how youth should participate is a subsidiary issue.

Third, student activism was relatively rare even at the height of what we call “the sixties.” In 1968, according to the HERI College Freshmen Survey, just 29.9% of first-year college students frequently talked about politics. This was during a year of assassinations, a momentous presidential election, the draft, riots, and war. In 1970, 3.1% of college freshmen considered their views “far left.” Another 33.5% considered themselves liberals, leaving the majority as moderate, conservative, or unwilling to say.

Finally, imitating the radical movements of the 1960s might be welcome, but it isn’t what most contemporary young people seem to want. If your commitment is not to particular social outcomes but to authentic youth voice, you have to listen to their priorities. Of course, today’s young people are diverse and disagree among themselves, but the proportion who want to move the country in a radically leftward direction is small. For example, in many of the programs that encourage young urban students of color to choose their own issue for activism, the stance they choose is basically defensive and–in a Burkean sense–conservative. They fight against school closings, privatization, and budget cuts. In other words, they seek to preserve the status quo. That may not be anyone’s favorite kind of civic engagement (including theirs), but it surely counts.

Educational “standards” are general guidelines for what should be taught and assessed. They can have the force of law, and policymakers can be held publicly accountable for them. I think the general concept of explicit educational standards is good, because deciding what should be taught is a core democratic task, a matter of establishing values and priorities. The standards that govern our schools should be transparent. Of course, bad standards are worse than none, and many actual state standards are weak, miscellaneous and arbitrary, hopelessly unrealistic, or otherwise misguided. If Texas continues on its course to rewrite its social studies standards, Texas children would be better off with none.

A related question is who should set standards, and for whose kids? Most of the nation’s governors and state school superintendents are now proposing a set of uniform state standards that would be voluntarily–but widely–adopted. The goal is to provide one set of good standards (streamlined, thoughtful, and ambitious but not onerous). This effort threatens local autonomy and citizen participation, but also promises to improve existing standards in many states. And the authors have tried to reduce the damage by proposing truly “core” standards in only two disciplines–English/language arts and science math–while leaving much to be decided at the state and local level.

My professional concern is democratic education or education for active citizenship. From that perspective, it could be problematic that the proposed standards are not for social studies or civics. National standards for only English and math could narrow the curriculum even further. On the other hand, streamlining standards in those two disciplines could actually increase space and time for civics.

Besides, English skills are civic skills, if they are well designed. I have read the proposed standards for English/language arts and see many openings for improving civic education.

That seems to be an intention. On p. 2, the document says, “Students who meet the Standards … reflexively demonstrate the cogent reasoning and use of evidence that is essential to both private deliberation and responsible citizenship in a democratic republic.”

Some specific objectives seem especially useful for civic purposes. For example, students in grades 11 and 12 are supposed to “Analyze how various authors express different points of view on similar events or issues, assessing the authors’ assumptions, use of evidence, and reasoning, including analyzing seminal U.S. documents (e.g., The Federalist, landmark U.S. Supreme Court majority opinions and dissents).”

Another example is the standard that says, “Present claims and findings with relevant evidence that is accessible and verifiable to listeners, and use appropriate eye contact, adequate volume, and clear pronunciation.” That is a very important skill for civic participation. By 11th grade, students are also supposed to “Cooperate with peers to set clear goals and deadlines, establish roles, and determine ground rules for decision making (e.g., informal consensus, taking votes on key issues, presentation of alternate views).”

The general thrust of the proposed Standards is to define outcomes, not methods or approaches, which are left to schools. But sidebars provide advice about methods, and sometimes that advice would be favorable to civic learning. For instance: “To become college and career ready, students must have ample opportunities to take part in a variety of rich, structured conversations—whole class, small group, and with a partner—built around important content in various domains.”

The standards do not mandate a curriculum or syllabus, but they suggest readings, including “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, Jr. (1964) and America’s Constitution: A Biography by Akhil Reed Amar (2005)–good choices.

I wish education reform today emphasized constructive ways to get communities involved in education, and this effort is very different: top-down. Yet I would acknowledge that the ideas in the document are thoughtful, not burdensome, and sensitive to democratic values,

I’ll be talking today to a bunch of Boston-area high school students who have been part of Generation Citizen, a program that “emphasizes grassroots community building strategies and effective advocacy” by youth. These are some notes toward my speech. …

We have serious problems as a country right now.

We have put 2.3 million of our own people in prison, far more than any other nation in the world. (China comes second with only 1.5 million incarcerated people.) That is incredibly expensive, and it represents millions of tragedies for all those convicts and their victims. Yet imprisoning all those Americans doesn’t make us safe. Our homicide rate remains at least three times as high as the rate in any other wealthy nation in the world.

We spend more per kid on education than almost any other country, yet one third of our young people drop out before they complete high school. Considering that almost all stable and well-paying jobs today require more than a high-school diplomat, the dropout crisis is a human disaster.

We spend far more on health care per citizen than any other country in the world, yet unlike any other wealthy nation, we provide no health insurance at all for many of our people. Something like 45,000 Americans die every year for lack of medical care. Even if Congress passes a reform bill this year, we will still have the most expensive system in the world, with some of the worst outcomes for poorer people.

Most scientists believe that humans are causing the atmosphere to warm by taking stored carbon out of the earth in the form of oil, gas, and coal and burning it. The consequences of global warming may range from intense human suffering in the poorest parts of the globe, plus the extinction of animal and plant species, to a worldwide catastrophe. The United States burns more carbon per person by far than any country in the world except the tiny kingdoms of the Persian Gulf.

Plainly, our institutions do not work. Their failure is not just wasteful; it is deadly. They are not just broken; they are corrupt–making some people rich and comfortable while failing the rest of us. These are the institutions that we older people are handing over to you.

Can’t we adults fix these institutions with better laws? For example, couldn’t we slap a tax on carbon and cause people to burn less of it? Couldn’t we use that money to make every American eligible for Medicare? Couldn’t we reform criminal sentencing laws and cut the prison population?

Well, maybe–but I wouldn’t count on us adults to solve these problems with laws and reforms.

First of all, we adults don’t have the political will to do anything difficult. Just look how hard it is to get even a very modest health reform bill through Congress.

Second, we don’t necessarily know the answers. I just mentioned some radical ideas, like enacting a huge new tax on carbon. In the past, a lot of great ideas–liberal, conservative and otherwise–have failed because they didn’t turn out as expected in the real world. Especially when institutions are broken and corrupt, you can’t count on even great laws to be implemented well.

Finally, we can’t always use laws to make people and institutions work better. Some of our school systems have plenty of money, yet they still produce high proportions of dropouts. We could change our criminal penalties, but that wouldn’t stop individuals from committing violent crimes and victimizing others. We can provide better health insurance by law, but if our doctors don’t want to provide primary care to low-income residents, the insurance won’t help.

To make schools and neighborhoods and hospitals work better, you have to get inside them and change people’s hearts and minds–not reform just the rules or provide more cash.

You have to do this work because you have the motivation. You’re the ones who may be living with climate change for the next 50 years and with a health system that has collapsed from uncontrolled costs. Just because you’re young, you have different self-interests from older people, and if you don’t advocate for your long-term interests, they will be ignored in favor of short-term gain.

You’re the ones who have the knowledge and skills to tackle some of our major problems. For example, how are we going to understand and fix the causes of the high school dropout crisis unless we have high school students’ help? You’re the ones who know what it’s like day-to-day in our schools.

And by the way, by participating in service, or activism, or civic engagement, you can gain skills and motivations and values that will serve you in life. Students who volunteer are dramatically less likely to drop out of high school than those who don’t. So the simple act of being engaged can be part of the solution to a serious social problem.

Of course, we older people must back you up, guide you, and give you opportunities for service and activism. That’s the point of City Year, where we’re meeting, and Generation Citizen, which has recruited you. It’s the point of our work at Tufts and CIRCLE.

We may be doing this work for you, but we’re certainly doing it for ourselves as well. Strengthening youth civic engagement is our way to create a better form of politics for everyone. Projects like Generation Citizen provide alternatives to the politics we are saddled with today.

In general, we treat young people as baskets of problems or potential problems. But high-quality civic education treats young people as assets and contributors. That approach models a better way of treating citizens of all ages.

In general, we see education as the job of teachers and principals in schools (public or private). It’s a specialized task to be measured by experts. Success then boils down to passing tests. But education should be a community-wide function, the process by which a whole community chooses and transmits to the next generation appropriate values, traditions, skills, practices, and cultural norms. Civic education at its best crosses the lines between schools and communities and reflects a more inclusive definition of “education.”

In general, our politics is governments-centered. Liberals want the government to accept new tasks, such as health insurance; whereas conservatives believe that problems would be mitigated if the state were shrunk.

Governments are important, but they are not the only institutions that matter. Furthermore, a state-centered view of politics leaves citizens little to do but inform themselves and vote. Generation Citizen is an example of citizen-centered politics, in which people form relationships with peers, express their interests and listen to others, and then use a range of strategies, some having little to do with the state.

In general, our politics is manipulative. Experts—politicians, pundits, consultants, marketers, leaders of advocacy groups, and the like—study us, poll us, focus-group us, and assign us to gerrymandered electoral districts; they slice-and-dice us; and then they send us tailored messages designed to encourage us—or to scare us—into acting just how they want.

This is true of liberal politicians as well as conservative ones. It is true of public interest lobbies as well as business lobbies. It is true of big nonprofits as well as political parties.

Americans know they are being manipulated, and they resent it. They want to be able to decide for themselves what is important, what should be done, and then act in common to address their problems. They are interested in what other people think; they want to get out of what students call their “bubbles.” They want an open-ended, citizen-centered politics in which the outcomes are not predetermined by professionals.

Programs like Generation Citizen model open-ended politics. We don’t try to manipulate our students or neighbors into adopting opinions or solutions that we think are right—-at least, we shouldn’t. We give them opportunities to deliberate and reflect and then act in ways that seem best to them. In a time of increasingly sophisticated manipulative politics, these opportunities are precious.

Thank you for being part of this essential work. I’m looking forward to hearing about your projects and achievements, now and in the future.

The Center for Civic Education, a national nonprofit organization that is mostly funded by the United States Department of Education, was recently audited. In USA Today, Matt Kelley’s article is headlined, “Audit: Civic education group misused $5.9M.” The Center is responding aggressively, disputing most of the accusations and asserting that the media coverage (which I think means only the USA Today story so far) “contain[s] numerous inaccuracies.” Their full response is here (PDF).

The Center is correct to note that the “audit is the first step in a process that could take several months and will result in a resolution made by the Department of Education.” We should hope that this process ultimately vindicates the Center and the charges turn out to be inaccurate or merely technical. I have read the full report but have neither the expertise nor the standing to assess it.

I am concerned that the fallout from this news may damage federal support for civic education, which is already very weak. Public schooling was originally established in the United States in order to prepare Americans for democratic participation. Even before the launch of universal public schools, during the founding era, Congress decided that since schools were “necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind,” “education shall forever be encouraged.” That statement is from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which provided for the creation of public schools in the new territories of the west. Founders like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush advocated more ambitious schemes of public education–not to improve students’ employment prospects or to boost the economy, but to help Americans to participate in self-government.

Today, the federal investment in civic education is minuscule: about 0.06% of federal education spending. Civic education was absent from No Child Left Behind and has a marginal place in the federal bureaucracy. In schools and classrooms across America, actual civic education is often scarce, or dry and alienating, or reserved for more successful students (who also tend to be more affluent). There are severe gaps in opportunities for civic learning. Those gaps reinforce unequal outcomes. The voting and volunteering rates are twice as high for young people on a college track as for their non-college-bound peers.

Thus the federal government has a fundamental responsibility, not to provide civic education to American youth, but to help develop and encourage effective methods that can educate and motivate all students, including marginalized ones. At present, almost all of the federal investment for that purpose takes the form of subsidies to the Center for Civic Education. There are arguments for and against that strategy. I have argued against it, but I acknowledge that the Center’s earmark has helped keep civic education alive in dark times and has created a durable, national network of civic educators. Whatever happens to the Center now, Congress and the Administration must increase–not drop–their support for civic education.