Joey Cheek (age 26), the winning speedskater, has decided to donate his whole Olympic prize to Right to Play, a nonprofit that serves poor kids in the developing world. He also took the opportunity to speak out on an issue. “In the Darfur region of Sudan, there have been tens of thousands of people killed,” Cheek said. “My government has labeled it a genocide. I will be donating it specifically to a program to help refugees in Chad, where there are over 60,000 children who have been displaced from their homes.”

This is just an anecdote about one American athlete who pays attention to social issues and takes action. His story helps to balance all the anecdotes about bad behavior by athletes. But what happens if we move from anecdotes to data? Today, CIRCLE releases two studies on the relationship between athletics and civic engagement. We find that sports participants are much more likely than other youth to volunteer, vote, and follow the news. That correlation does not prove that sports causes civic participation. However, the correlation remains after we control for all the other variables measured in the survey, including academic success and participation in other groups.

This is suggestive evidence that sports makes people into more active citizens. That could be because athletics teaches discipline and teamwork, or because it exposes kids to others who are (somewhat) unlike themselves, or even because athletes sometimes talk about issues on their way to practice.

Today’s release is getting quite a bit of interest. I did interviews this morning for national CBS radio news and local drivetime radio in Washington (WTOP). Also, that’s my hand on the bottom of the basketball.

Thanks to Brett Marston for directing me to Robert P. George’s essay, “What Colleges Forget to Teach.” This a thoughtful comment by a major conservative scholar. In essence, George objects to the balance of political ideas and materials that college students experience as undergraduates and before they arrive on campus. They should, he thinks, understand the importance of limiting the powers of the federal government, of restraining judges, and of empowering the states. They should understand the lasting virtues as well as the vices of the American constitutional order.

I agree with all this and find it useful–especially George’s conclusion that “the reform and renewal of civic education in our nation is a noble cause. We must make it an urgent priority.” My agreements with George are more important than my disagreements. However …

1. I’m not convinced that the balance of ideas that students experience is so far from what George would prefer. Generally, when either liberals or conservatives decry the content of social studies classes, they do so innocent of any statistical evidence about what is actually taught and discussed in schools. There are anecdotes about egregious teaching that can incense people across the spectrum from Howard Zinn to Robert George himself, but no one knows how common these stories are. In 2004, we asked a national sample of young Americans to recall two major themes from their social studies classes:

29.8% recalled “great American heroes and virtues of the political system”

38.6% recalled “The Constitution or U.S. system of government and how it works”

7.8% recalled “racism and other forms of injustice”

14.8% recalled “wars and military battles”

5.2% recalled “problems facing the country today”

These results should make George happy (and lefties unhappy), although I admit that George might not like some of the details of what students learn. For instance, it’s possible that they are exposed to a liberal interpretation of the Constitution rather than the views of the Federalist Society–but who knows?

Second, what students are taught is only part of the issue. There’s also the question of how they are taught. Do they sit in large lecture halls being informed about the Constitution (from a radical, liberal, or conservative perspective)? Do they debate constitutional principles in small groups, moderated by a well-informed teacher? Do they conduct ambitious projects of research, service, or advocacy that involve constitutional principles? I’m not wedded to any one approach, but I suspect that the way we teach has much more impact than what values we try to convey in lectures.

3. George is no doubt sincerely committed to civility and to an open-ended, ideologically diverse discussion of principles. He is perhaps right that his own perspective is undervalued in the academy. But the difficult part is not agreeing on civility or diversity as abstract principles–the hard part is making concrete judgments. For instance, George describes the situation in academia as “dire” and provides some illustrative “horror stories,” such as Princeton’s decision to give a “distinguished chair in bioethics to a fellow who insists that eating animals is morally wrong, but that killing newborn human infants can be a perfectly moral choice.” That fellow is, of course, Peter Singer. His view is a coherent application of utilitarianism, which is a 200-year-old position with roots in ancient thought and much influence on modern conservatism. I’m no utilitarian, but I don’t see how a university can regret attracting one of the most original and influential philosophers of the current era.

In conversations about civic education, service-learning, and youth civic engagement, people often ask whether the purpose of what we’re doing is “social justice.” Lately I’ve been responding as follows:

1. The phrase social justice (which has roots in Catholic thought) has been claimed by the Left. In politics, phrases are often seized by one side or the other–occasionally, they even switch their valence over time. At the moment, “social justice” has a lefty ring. Therefore, there will be a predictable consequence if you say that your service-learning program or civics class “promotes social justice.” You will attract leftish students, and perhaps alienate conservatives. If you speak on behalf of a public school or state university, I think you should avoid that outcome. Individual adults who work with young people are free to promote ideologies; but state institutions should be leery of doing so.

2. Although the left has claimed the phrase “social justice,” true conservatives seek social justice. They just define it somewhat differently, they endorse alternative strategies for obtaining it, and they tend to call it by other names. It’s important that the students who sign up for service-learning be exposed to serious conservative arguments about justice. One of the risks of using the phrase “social justice” is to narrow the range of debate about justice by keeping conservatives out from the beginning.

I often hear a (probably apocryphal) story about a student who so enjoys volunteering in a soup kitchen that he blurts out, “I hope this place still exists when my kids come along, so that they can serve, too.” The standard rejoinder is that the student should investigate the “root causes” of hunger and advocate solutions.

True, but the root causes may not necessarily be capitalism or discrimination, and the best solutions may not include Food Stamps or a higher minimum wage. I’d like to see students grapple with root causes but be challenged to consider whether government intervention is the basic problem and freer markets could help. That’s not usually my own view, but it’s educational to consider it.

Markets may have advantages for education, but they pose special problems for civic education. The civic development of young people will be undervalued in any market system, unless we take deliberate and rather forceful efforts to change that pattern.

The degree to which markets govern education varies according to the type of institution. At one extreme, competitive research universities fight tooth-and-nail for faculty and students who have enormous choice about where to work or study. Community colleges and local universities are somewhat more insulated from markets, although they do compete with more distant institutions, for-profit colleges, and the workforce. Independent private schools compete fiercely for students, less so for faculty. Charter schools and schools funded by public vouchers have been deliberately placed in markets in which parents are the “consumers.” Finally, even a large, standard, urban public school system is in a kind of market. To the extent that parents have resources, they can choose to move away or to enroll their children in private or parochial schools. Likewise, public school teachers often have some degree of choice about where to work.

To see why the market undersupplies civic education, consider what parents want schools and colleges to do for their own children. First, they may want their children to learn the skills, values, and knowledge necessary to be good citizens who can keep track of public issues, deliberate with others, build consensus, and take appropriate action. In a 2004 poll, 71% of adults said that it was important to “prepare students to be competent and responsible citizens who participate in our democratic society” (pdf).

It benefits everyone if these attributes are widespread. However, if most people are good citizens, then it doesn’t matter much whether one’s own kid has civic skills and values: he or she will benefit anyway. And if most people are not prepared for active and responsible citizenship, then there is not much that an individual can do to improve a democratic society. Thus there are reasons for parents–and their children, once they enter adolescence–to make civic education a low priority. I heard a teacher in a focus group say that if you ask parents whether schools have a civic mission, they will agree, because they know it’s the right thing to say. But they really want their own kids to get an education that will help them to get ahead; “civic education is for other people’s kids.”

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