A perfect citizen would know an enormous range of facts, concepts, and skills, from macroeconomics to how to chair a meeting, from the contents of the Federalist Papers to the principles of statistics. (See my list in this HuffingtonPost article.) In practice, schools must decide what is most important to teach in the limited hours available to them. I value facts about politics and government and related academic concepts, but my highest priority would be the arts and habits of association that De Tocqueville thought were the basis of successful democracy in America. Unless citizens can successfully manage projects and groups, we are left to the mercies of the state and market. Further, by co-managing our own associations, we develop reasonable ideas about how to address larger public issues.

I find good news and bad news in a new American Enterprise Institute report entitled Contested Curriculum: How Teachers and Citizens View Civics Education. Good news: teachers, especially in public schools, generally share my goals and priorities. Bad news: American citizens do not.

In the following graph, snipped from that report, “Public School” means the opinions of social studies teachers in public schools. “Private School” refers to social studies teachers in private schools. “Citizens” means a representative sample of 1,000 adult Americans. The bars bear simplified labels. For example, “Teaching facts” is short for: “It is absolutely essential [for students] to know facts (e.g., the location of the 50 states) and dates (e.g., Pearl Harbor).”

Look at the last cluster of columns, showing that while teachers think it is important to promote civic behaviors, citizens do not.

That first graph reveals one political obstacle for people who share my priorities: we are in the minority. Another–equally familiar–problem is the partisan split. Basically, Republicans are considerably more supportive of facts and academic concepts than Democrats are. But Democrats are more sympathetic to values. For instance, teaching students “To be tolerant of people and groups who are different from themselves” (one component of the bar shown below as “Internalizing core values”) seems “absolutely essential” to 31% of Republicans and 69% of Democrats.

Standards (official guidelines for what should be taught) tend to include all of the above priorities. That is the path of least resistance for policymakers: just add everything to the list. But the emphasis in classrooms is not determined by standards; it is much more shaped by tests. To the extent that states require tests of civics, almost all the content involves facts and academic principles.

In short, citizens, and especially Republican citizens, are getting an educational policy closer to what they want than to what teachers (and I) would prefer.

The idea of giving badges to people who can demonstrate specific skills is taking off rapidly.  A “badge” is shorthand for a portable credential, rather like the merit badges traditionally used in Scouting. (See the Boy Scouts’ badge for backpacking as an example.) In the modern, adult world we could have badges for being able to schedule meetings of more than four people, being able to write an effective op-ed piece, or being able to set up a social network.

Mozilla (which builds Firefox and other prominent software tools), the MacArthur Foundation, and Peer 2 Peer University have launched an explicit “badges” project. Meanwhile, the US. Commerce Department is leading a federal effort to promote digital literacy that may, I am told, soon generate recognized credentials that are similar to badges.

As the old song says, “This could be the start of something big.” We are used to credentials that come only with the completion of whole courses of study. For instance, a high school diploma signifies that you have successfully completed four years of high-school-level courses (or the equivalent). That system creates dilemmas:

• You can obtain the credential without necessarily knowing anything relevant or useful: it can just measure years spent in the institution. Or …
• Its value can be more “objectively” measured by means of some kind of high-stakes test, such as an exam that is required for graduation. But heavy use of tests encourages test-prep instead of real education. Also …
• If we want to know whether a prospective employee or student can do something specific (such as participate effectively in a meeting), the available standardized test scores may be of no use.
• Many people fail to obtain general credentials. About a third of our young people reach age 19 without a high school diploma. A substantial majority reach age 25 without a bachelors degree. Yet many possess particular skills that would have market value if they were recognizable.
• You can develop valuable concrete skills in school or on the job and (if the institution works well) can be recognized for your skills while there. But no one in a different school or job will know what skills you have: they aren’t portable. Recommendation letters are devices for transmitting information about skills, but they are highly imperfect.

Hence the idea of defining specific skills and providing portable credentials to people who can demonstrate them. The main advantages are solutions to the dilemmas noted above, i.e., better measurement, better incentives for learning, more portability, and less waste of skills that people already have.

But there’s also a practical opening here for anyone who thinks we haven’t been teaching the right things. I, for example, believe that we haven’t been teaching the skills and arts of association–of group-membership and collective action–that de Tocqueville saw as the foundation of democracy in America. We can advocate for those skills to be included in our curriculum requirements or standardized tests, but all the above-mentioned dilemmas stand in the way. Instead, I am tempted to jump on the “badges” bandwagon and advocate for civic badges (at all levels).

This is a supply-side strategy: trying to increase the number of people who have civic skills by providing relevant credentials. We could also pursue a demand-side strategy: persuading admissions offices and employers to seek individuals who possess specific badges. For example, the federal government will need to find 91,000 new employees each year for jobs defined as “mission-critical.” Imagine if they sought employees who had civic badges, like interviewing fellow citizen to determine their values and needs; or moderating public meetings. Advertising a need for those badges would have a powerful effect on curriculum.

By the way, I am very far from believing that the only objective of education is a set of concrete skills to which we can award badges. A liberal education is supposed to result in a coherent mentality that encompasses a sensitive appreciation of a wide variety of perspectives, moral grounding, aesthetic appreciation, and analytical rigor. But that is the outcome that a diploma ought to signify. By reserving badges for more concrete attainments, perhaps we can restore the appropriate meaning to degrees.