(Wingspread, near Racine, Wisconsin) I’m here for a meeting of Mobilize.org, which is working with various partners to try to construct a declaration or manifesto on behalf of the Millennial Generation. Young Americans from across the country will have a substantial role in creating this declaration; we are talking about how to organize the process. That question raises many complex and interesting issues. My head is so full of conflicting thoughts and echoes of other people’s speech that I do not feel ready to write anything here.

Instead, let me recommend the current issue of CIRCLE’s newsletter (PDF here; or free copies are available by request to Dionne Williams). Four years ago, CIRCLE and Carnegie Corporation of New York published the report entitled The Civic Mission of Schools. Since then, we at CIRCLE have helped launch a lobbying campaign to fight for the report’s recommendations and funded additional research to address questions that the report raised–using $1 million in research support from Carnegie. Our latest newsletter summarizes the policy changes and the new research, showing the benefits of commitment and sustained focus.

(Durham, NC): My colleagues and I argue that civic experiences in adolescence make young people into active, effective, and responsible citizens–participants in politics and civil society. However, most students, parents, teachers, administrators, and policymakers are less concerned about civic education than about getting kids successfully through high school and college. Their priorities are understandable. One third of adolescents do not graduate from high school, and those who drop out face very bad prospects. Thus I’m delighted to announce new research showing that two civic experiences–service-learning and student government–substantially increase the odds that students will complete high school and college on time. Presumably, we can enhance adolescents’ motivations and sense of connection to school by giving them opportunities to serve and lead. (These are results from two new CIRCLE working papers by Alberto Dávila and Marie T. Mora.)

Annapolis, MD: We at CIRCLE helped to plan the State of Maryland’s Summit on Civic Literacy, which occurred today. The Summit was funded and charged by an act of the State Assembly. There were representatives present from the State Senate and House, the judiciary (including the Chief Judge), the State Department of Education, and various key nonprofits. We heard a great keynote talk by my University of Maryland colleague James Gimpel, the lead author of one of the best books about how young Americans develop into citizens, Cultivating Democracy: Political Environments & Political Socialization in America (Brookings, 2003). Jim was quite eloquent about the enormous educational disparities between inner-city Baltimore and the suburbs of Washington, DC. See his book for vivid details.

The afternoon’s session was devoted to deliberation. We formed policy recommendations for the Assembly to consider. I moderated the discussion. Participants were supposed to vote electronically using touchpads, but the equipment didn’t work. No matter; we still deliberated and recorded everyone’s preferences. My two favorite ideas (but not the top vote-winners) were:

1) Collect data about the after-school opportunities that are available to our students throughout the state. I suspect that this research would identify big disparities and thus make the case for significant legislation.

2) On a pilot basis, create a few new positions in select schools. These new employees would connect students to external opportunities–field trips, special programs, internships, service projects, etc. (It can be very hard for outside institutions to navigate schools, and vice-versa; but museums, courts, colleges, environmental organizations, churches, and many other groups have educational opportunities to offer.)

Below the fold is a speech I gave on November 1 at the annual convention of the grantees of Learn & Serve America, the federal program that supports community service tied to education. I used the opportunity to make some pretty broad points about evaluation (both pro and con) and about civic renewal in America.

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John Dewey and his contemporaries in the Progressive Era invented many of the standard forms of civic education, including social studies courses, student governments, service clubs, scholastic newspapers, and 4-H. Dewey rightly argued that “Formal instruction … easily becomes remote and dead–abstract and bookish, to use the ordinary words of depreciation.” He favored experiential education for democracy and tried to “reorganize” American education “so that learning takes place in connection with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful activities.” A good example would be a school newspaper, which requires sustained, cooperative work, promotes deliberation, and depends upon perennial values such as freedom of the press.

As Diane Ravitch writes in The Troubled Crusade (1983), Dewey saw educational reform as a “vital part” of a broader “social and political reform movement” that aimed at richer and more equitable political participation. Thus Dewey and his fellow progressives sought better civic education while they also battled corruption, pursued women’s suffrage and civil rights, and launched independent political journals for adults. They saw civic experiences in school as means to help students begin participating in the serious business of democracy, which also needed to be reformed.

Unfortunately, the specific innovations that the progressives introduced into schools–scholastic newspapers, debate clubs, social studies courses, and the like–could easily lose their original connection to democracy. When that purpose was forgotten or ignored, extracurricular activities and social studies classes became means to impart good behavior, academic skills, or “social hygiene”–not ways to begin changing society.

Soon, Ravitch writes, “the progressive education movement became institutionalized and professionalized, and its major themes accordingly changed. Shorn of its roots in politics and society, pedagogical progressivism came to be identified with the child-centered school; with a pretentious scientism; with social efficiency and social utility rather than social reform; and with a vigorous suspicion of ‘bookish’ learning.”

Today, there is a serious risk that we could repeat the same pattern. For example, excellent service-learning programs enhance students’ civic capacity: they increase skills and motivations for self-government. The best programs allow students to tackle problems that really matter, sometimes provoking controversy. But service-learning is being widely advocated as a way to reduce teen pregnancy or drug abuse and as an alternative to “bookish” academic curricula for students who are not succeeding in school. There is merit in both rationales, but there is also the danger that service-learning will be watered down and depoliticized. To use Ravitch’s terms, service-learning can be shorn of its connection to politics, made overly “child-centered” (instead of academically challenging), and used to enhance “social efficiency” (e.g., to lower rates of delinquency) as recommended by behavioral scientists.

The alternative is to recall that schools are public spaces in which young people begin the serious business of self-government and have early opportunities to pursue social change. Although it is helpful to consult scientific studies, students and other community members must decide for themselves what social causes they favor. (No “pretentious scientism”!) Service-learning, civics courses, and extracurricular activities are useful means for democratic education, but they are not ends in themselves. The point of the whole business is democracy, which begins in school and not after graduation.