Monthly Archives: September 2004

civic learning in dark times

(On the shuttle to New York): I gave a speech this morning to the state directors of Youth for Justice programs. These are federally-funded initiatives to teach young people about the law, through courses, classroom visits by lawyers and judges, and youth courts?among other methods. I spoke about civic education. I hesitate to blog about my comments, because we are in the middle of an intense presidential campaign, terror and war are all around us, and I?m sure that many readers will click right past a blog entry about ?civic ed.? But maybe this is a good time to remind ourselves that our Republic will endure, no matter who wins the presidency, and we need to get on with the perpetual work of preparing the next generation. Possibly the election is more important than civic education (or possibly it isn?t); but in any case I would rather discuss and try to make positive change in a limited domain, rather than play the role of a tense and horrified spectator of national politics.

So, in my speech, I began by offering a personal definition of ?civic learning.? This is a phrase that, according to our recent focus group research, is more politically palatable than ?civic education.? (The latter phrase connotes boring lectures about ?how a bill becomes a law.?) In any case, ?learning? is the point; formal instruction is just one opportunity to learn.

In my view, ?civic learning? means learning to work together on common problems, whether through government, private voluntary associations, or even informal networks such as those that develop in neighborhoods. It may seem communitarian or statist to emphasize the importance of working together. Not so. Even libertarians, the staunchest defenders of individual liberty and uncoordinated private behavior, must value civic learning. That is because:

  • they want some public institutions, such as juries and a volunteer military, to work very well?or else criminals and foreign enemies will threaten our liberty;
  • they want many people to value freedom, diversity, and tolerance for all?or else their fellow citizens will constrain their liberty; and
  • they want people to solve most of their problems through voluntary action in local communities?or else the demand for government will rise.

    • Progressives favor civic learning for somewhat different reasons, but there is a lot of overlap. (Progressives also need people to solve most problems through voluntary action, because government can only do so much.) And all sides should want there to be an informed, thoughtful, public-spirited debate about how best to address public problems: through the state, market competition, or voluntary collaboration.

    Civic learning should build:

  • knowledge, of government, of non-governmental organizations, of local communities., of social issues and processes, of other people?s beliefs, values, and needs;
  • skills, such as discussing and analyzing issues, persuading other people, participating in meetings, running organizations; and
  • attitudes, such as some concern for the common good, some sense of ?efficacy,? tolerance, trust.

    • It is not in individuals? self-interest to develop these attributes, nor do they come naturally. For example, many of the skills needed for working together in groups are counter-intuitive and must be learned through experience or as a result of deliberate instruction. This is why associations have always taught each rising generation civic skills. Given the weaker associations we have today, we need better civic learning in schools.

    Streetlaw, Inc.

    Today I was named to the Board of Streetlaw, Inc., a nonprofit that produces the nation’s most popular high school textbook for “law-related education,” conducts an annual teacher’s institute at the Supreme Court, supports youth courts (in which adolescents actually sentence their peers), and runs various international programs, among many other services. Streetlaw is 32 years old and is one of the important independent associations that provide materials and training for civic education. (The Center for Civic Education, the Constitutional Rights Foundation, and the Bill of Rights Institute are other examples.) In general, there is no shortage of good curricula, textbooks, electronic simulations, program guides, and other materials. The bigger challenges are getting those materials used in schools and providing teachers with adequate training and support to use them.

    the decline of reading

    On July 8, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released a report entitled “Reading at Risk” which uses Census Bureau data to track a substantial decline in the percentage of Americans who read any books, but especially works of “literature” (defined simply as all forms of fiction, drama, and poetry, without regard to quality).

    For those of us who are concerned about civic engagement, it is interesting that regular volunteers are more likely to read than other people. In fact, according to the NEA’s fairly sophisticated statistical model, volunteering turns out to be an independent predictor of literary reading. In other words, if you compare two people of the same race, income, age, employment, etc., if one volunteers and the other doesn’t, the volunteer is more likely to read fiction or poetry.

    This is only a tidbit of information. I would love to know whether literary reading also predicts other forms of civic engagement, such as voting, joining and leading associations, and protesting. And I would be interested in qualitative research (such as in-depth interviews) that shed some light on why volunteers read–and readers volunteer. In any case, this is an important empirical question. I’m a philosopher, trained in normative (moral or ethical) reasoning, and I have written two books arguing for the moral and civic value of the humanities. But empirical questions are also important. For example, if we argue–in the tradition of Greek Sophists and Renaissance humanists–that stories teach moral lessons, then we should see some behavioral differences between avid readers and non-readers. Apparently, we do.

    Rivka, author of the excellent “Respectful of Otters” blog, raises a series of doubts about the NEA study. Unfortunately, I think she’s wrong.

    First, she cites a Gallup release entitled “Poll Shows Continuing Strong American Reading Habits.” That survey does present some good news and should be taken seriously. However, it’s not strictly comparable to the NEA/Census report, because it includes non-fiction, whereas the NEA focusses on fiction, drama, and poetry. Moroever, in the Gallup poll, the percentage of Americans who did not read books at all doubled between 1978 and 1990, then remained pretty stable until the last poll was conducted in 1999. This is consistent with the NEA/Census trend. I haven’t find other studies that go back several decades, but the Ipsos surveys show the same distribution of book-buyers by age, income, and region as the NEA/Census.

    Second, Rivka notices readers all around her and recalls huge positive changes, such as the expansion of Barnes & Nobles franchices into towns that were previously without bookstores. How do those observations fit with the NEA study? One answer is that all concrete, personal observations are selective and need to be checked against representative data. How many independent bookstores have gone out of business while B&N expanded? For every commuter train full of readers, how many houses are there without any books? Besides, there is a pretty simple explanation for the evident quantity of readers today–population growth. There are more people, but the average person reads less, so the number of readers has remained flat since 1982: about 96 million people.

    Third, Rivka detects a tone of elitism in the study and the New York Times’ coverage of it:

    I’m suspicious of arguments that the majority of people are stupid, uninformed, evil, or immoral, ranged up against a tiny minority of the righteous. In the circles in which I move, the claim that ‘most people don’t read’ is often cited as evidence for this worldview. One of the most vicious online arguments I ever had was with a man who maintained that ‘only one or two percent of Americans read anything at all,’ and I see that similarly extreme claims have even made it into published books.

    Fair enough, but the NEA study doesn’t call people stupid and immoral, and it doesn’t claim that no one reads. Ninety-six million adult readers are a lot of human beings by any standard. The question is: compared to what? It seems that we are less likely to read literature today than we were in the past, and that’s a bad trend. We Americans seem to be more likely to read than Belgians and Portuguese, but less likely than Canadians, Swedes, and Brits. So there is no call for rending our clothes and putting sackcloth on our loins, but we ought to ask why the rate of reading is down.

    Fourth, Rivka wonders about “literature.” As she says, it’s “a word with highbrow associations,” and she wonders “how the average person applies it. If the Census Bureau asks a voracious consumer of Harlequin Romances about her tastes in ‘literature,’ will she consider that it applies to her daily reading, or will she deny that she reads any literature at all?” Actually, Census didn’t use the word “literature”: the survey asked about novels, short stories, plays, and poetry. Only the report uses “literature” as a catch-all. Perhaps some people don’t know that the romances they read are “novels,” but I would think that’s a small problem.

    One final point: in an effort to bridge the “two cultures” of math/science and the arts/humanities, the NEA provides a pretty clear and succinct discussion of statistical modeling at the end of the full report (pdf). I’ve never seen an explanation of logit models before in an arts report.

    Boyte in the blogosphere

    Harry Boyte, whom I have often mentioned on this site, has contributed a substantial and interesting comment. Apparently, this is his “first blog posting ever,” and I am honored that it’s here. It’s a nice, brief statement of Harry’s views about U.S. party politics. (He also has a lot of insight into other kinds of politics in the United States and in countries like South Africa.)

    on Minnesota Public Radio

    I was a guest this morning on a Minnesota Public radio call-in show, Midmorning with Kerri Miller. The topic was civic education and the civic and political behavior of young people. The other guests were Harry Boyte from “the U” (that’s the University of Minnesota), who has been a huge influence on me for more than ten years, and Michael Kuhne from Minneapolis Community and Technical College, whom I had the pleasure to meet this spring in the Twin Cities. Since Michael and I are Boyte fans, we didn’t disagree about anything.

    The call-in questions were good and various. There was one surprising theme: three callers argued that American politics has been so corrupted by special-interest cash that no one should participate. I don’t think that that’s a very widespread view, but it’s held by some Minnesota public radio listeners, who are ready to cite examples and statistics at the drop of a hat. I once wrote a book largely arguing for campaign-finance reform, so I believe in it. However, I don’t think it’s the full story–for two reasons. First, despite some corruption in American politics, ordinary citizens are doing very positive and significant political work all across the country. So we don’t need to tell students that they have been rendered powerless by big money. Second, even if we could clean up the formal political system, Americans wouldn’t automatically begin to participate. Many of us need better skills, knowledge, and attitudes before we can influence government or address social problems. So campaign finance reform is a good idea, but it’s no panacea.