Right now, my email inbox contains announcements of three important civic initiatives:
Community news services housed in local nonprofits, “information commons” based in libraries, large-scale deliberations on important issues … this could be the beginning of a true civic revival.
Excellent education in history and civics is necessary to achieve the reading goals of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). That was a theme in today’s discussions of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, which I chaired. The argument goes like this:
1. You can prepare kids to achieve “basic” levels on the fourth grade reading assessment by teaching them skills such as phonics and decoding. But you cannot get them past “basic” at fourth grade, or to any level of competence at the eighth and twelfth grade, without giving them lots of good texts to read and comprehend. They need experience in comprehension. And they need a store of knowledge derived from reading–in other words, some form of “cultural literacy.”
2. Therefore, achieving the reading goals of NCLB requires high-quality instruction in such fields as literature, natural science, history, social science, and current events. Indeed, it requires high-quality instruction in all of those areas, because a narrow curriculum will generate readers with narrow competence.
People who like NCLB should agree with this argument, but so should people who think that NCLB is too much of an unfunded mandate or that it puts too much emphasis on high-stakes tests. These critics also want students to read.
Philosophically, one might argue that teaching civics in order to enhance reading skills is putting the cart before the horse. Public schools were founded with a civic mission, and teaching history and social studies requires no justification other than a civic one. I suppose I agree with this, but I’m a practical person who just happens to hold a philosophy Ph.D. I see an enormous practical opportunity here for people who are concerned about the future of our democracy.
Policymakers want kids to read. They measure reading with the NAEP reading assessment (which I believe to be a good instrument). Students will score at “proficient” levels on the NAEP only if they learn to comprehend historical and social texts. So we’d better invest time and effort in teaching history and social studies. As a crucial side-effect, we will produce more capable political and civic agents for the future.
The Summit Collaborative’s Marc Osten and Katrin Verclas have written an important new paper entitled “The Power of the Internet to Engage a Generation.”
The paper provides a bold vision for how to use digital networks to encourage civic participation–although the authors note that “technology alone will most often not motivate young people to become deeply engaged. Any initiative that relies upon technology as a tool for engagement requires complementary offline components as well.”
Many young people have grown up online and “staked out the Internet as an alternative space for socializing, communicating, and information sharing–away from the eyes of parents and other adults.” The voluntary network of the Net fits many young people’s “anti-institutional” ideals. In some ways, their values are new (radically libertarian), but in other ways, their “ideas are a return to earlier concepts of grassroots politics. … David Weinberger suggests, ‘That is why the web, for all its technological newsness and oddness, feels so familiar to us. And that is why it feels like a return even though it is the newest of the new. The web is a return to the values that have been with us from the beginning.”
However, the potential of the Web for reinvigorating citizens’ networks is partly unfulfilled. Various advocacy groups use data mining and tailored messages to mobilize people, but these techniques (even when entirely well-intentioned) can be manipulative and can segment people into narrow, unreflective groups. There are tools for “augmented social networks” that give users more flexibility and discretion to find others with similar–or different–views and to develop reputations for tustworthiness. However, these tools tend to be proprietary, which means that they don’t work together and they cannot be adapted for new social uses.
Thus Osten and Verclas call for a new suite of open-source tools for strengthening diverse networks among young people. These tools would help youth to create discussion spaces and self-publish; to identify other people by interest; to contribute to large stores of data (such as maps); and to meet one another offline. Osten and Verclas also discuss the need to identify and support youth who are serving as leaders or “network nodes.”
A longer paper could go into much more concrete detail, but this is a great outline for further discussion.
Last Friday, Daniel Okrent, the “public editor” of The New York Times, asked a conservative and a lefty to address charges of bias at his newspaper (link). From the left, Todd Gitlin argued that The Times is biased against Kerry because it insists on treating Republicans and Democrats as if they were equally dishonest and corrupt. Gitlin thinks that the Bush Administration is far worse, and the apparent even-handedness of the coverage actually gives the incumbents a free pass and encourages bad behavior: “The Times‘s decorous approach to the news has often helped President Bush in three significant ways: by equating his gross deceptions with Mr. Kerry’s minor lapses; by omitting or burying news of administration activities and their consequences; and by missing the deep pattern of Mr. Bush’s prejudices and malfeasances.”
From the right, Bob Kohn argued that The Times is biased against Bush because its news coverage assumes the liberal answer to social issues. Kohn lists “same-sex marriage, abortion, stem-cell research, gun control, environmental regulation, capital punishment and faith-based initiatives” as topics on which news stories in The Times always assume the liberal perspective. For example, Okrent had earlier described the tone of news articles on same-sex marriage as “cheerleading.” But Republicans are strongly against same-sex marriage. Thus “the president’s views fly in the face of what are being presented as objective facts. No technique of bias is more powerful–more useful as a means of influence–than presenting a candidate’s unadulterated views through a prism of advocacy passed off as hard news.”
A blog is for sharing what its author thinks, so here are some of my responses:
I
was wondering whether people who are more educated and wealthier are more tolerant
of homosexuality. According to the General Social Survey, the answer is yes.
I guess this result is intuitive, but I always like to check.
Education and income each correlate with tolerance. I don’t have the time right
now to figure out whether the real driver is education (which may increase both
income and tolerance). There could be a third factor underlying the relationship,
such as urbanicity, age, religious denomination, or region. But just to dramatize
the basic situation, here is a graph that contrasts upper-middle-class people
who have college degrees (in blue) and lower-income people with no more than
high school (in red). The difference in attitudes toward gays is pretty stark.