Monthly Archives: September 2009

civic engagement in recessions

I am going to DC today very briefly for the release of the 2009 Civic Health Index by the National Conference on Citizenship. As in past years, we did most of the technical work for the NCoC’s Index. The title of their report is “Civic Health in Hard Times,” and the main finding is that engagement has really fallen this year.

The following graph didn’t make the final report, for appropriate reasons–it seemed a bit ambiguous and not necessarily persuasive. But I think it’s interesting enough for a blog, if not for a shiny national report.

It graphs the NCoC’s Index of Civic Health–composed of our favorite 40 indicators, from volunteering to following the news–along with the unemployment rate. In general, the relationship is positive (a healthy .59 correlation). When unemployment gets worse, people engage more–perhaps to meet increased need, or possibly because some of them have time on their hands. But there was an exception. When unemployment reached and surpassed 10% in the 1980-82 recession, civic engagement fell pretty sharply, driven in large part by a decline in volunteering.

We think we’re seeing a similar dip in 2009. My best guess is that modern civic engagement depends on a funded infrastructure. You can’t tutor kids if the school lays off its literacy coordinator. You can’t read to kids if the library branch is closed. Thus, when the economy really gets bad, even though the need for engagement is high, opportunities suddenly dry up and civic health falls.

(I should note that the NCoC’s report makes this suggestion, but not by using the graph shown above.)

Facebook, Social Networking, and Community Organizing

Tomorrow (after a very quick trip down to DC and back for the National Conference on Citizenship), I’ll start teaching a course at Tufts called “Facebook, Social Networking, and Community Organizing.” It is a practical project course that will engage the students in mapping Somerville’s civil society. The course website — which will include a blog, a network map, and other interactive features — is here. The syllabus is here.

Parallel to the project will be seminar on relevant theory. The biggest theoretical question in my mind is the relationship between new social networks–which are entirely voluntary and non-hierarchical–and traditional civic networks, which often involve structures. One thread in our class will pursue that question by looking at an enormously important social change in Boston’s recent past, the struggles between working class whites and people of color and the resulting shifts of population.

Gerald H. Gamm, in Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed, argues that institutional structure is destiny. Jewish communities moved out of Boston because synagogues are independent voluntary associations. When individual members make choices to move, their congregations die and new ones form where the individuals have relocated. In contrast, Irish Catholic communities stayed in Boston because the hierarchical church was able to provide resources and set rules that kept their churches in place. The value judgments we draw from Gamm’s book are debatable (for instance, was it bad that Jews moved out of Mattapan and African Americans moved in?), but the causal argument is clear: hierarchical structures are more resilient than voluntary ones.

On the other hand, parts of Boston’s South End have been able to form new social organizations that promote the welfare and stability of the neighborhood and include people from different cultures and classes. These examples suggest that institutional structure isn’t destiny; you can change it. Peter Medoff and Holly Sklar tell one such story in Streets of Hope: The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood. Like Gamm’s, their book implies that we need order and structure; it’s just that we can make new organizations.

The syllabus also includes books like Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks that celebrate the increase of “practical individual autonomy” that the Internet has given us. The Internet is more like a set of synagogues than a single community organization, let alone a global church. But what kinds of problems can a decentralized voluntary network solve? What problems or vulnerabilities does it create? And how can we achieve both autonomy and resilience?

precedents for presidential speeches to schoolchildren

There is a huge controversy about whether President Obama should make a speech to students (and whether schools should show it). I don’t dismiss the criticisms as merely partisan or paranoid; I can understand that direct speech by the nation’s most powerful man would provoke concerns, especially for people who trust and admire this president much less than I do. Still, I favor the speech. If you assume it will have some political significance because an elected official will speak, you might consider the evidence that statements by authority figures do not persuade kids to agree, but rather provoke them to have critical conversations.* Too often, we keep civic and political issues out of schools because they offend some parents, and then we create zones free of civic discourse.

At the same time, Obama’s speech is likely to have minimal political content. It will mostly be an exhortation by the head of state to study hard. Barack Obama has some potential to motivate students academically, which seems beneficial if it works.

Whatever you think about this particular case, you should know that there is absolutely nothing new about such an address. Before TV, presidents often issued proclamations to American school children that were intended to be read in all schools. For instance, Teddy Roosevelt proclaimed in 1907:

    To the School Children of the United States … If you neglect to prepare yourselves not for the duties and responsibilities which will fall upon you later, if you do not learn the things which you will need to know when your school days are over, you will, suffer the consequences. So any nation which in its youth lives only for the day, reaps without sowing, and consumes without husbanding, must expect the penalty of the prodigal, whose labor could with difficulty find him the bare means of life.

Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation to be read to American schoolchildren at the beginning of the school year, Sept. 15, 1917. He said, “every pupil in the United States can find a chance to serve our country. The school is the natural centre of your life. Through it you can best work in the great cause of freedom to which we have all pledged ourselves.”

I assume many more such speeches could be found–I located these two in 15 minutes of web searching.

More recently, in the age of modern communications, Ronald Reagan made a speech that was nationally broadcast on TV and radio and intended for students in American classrooms. The first president Bush made a speech intended to be watched in schools that also boosted his administration’s education policy. And the second president Bush provided “parents and teachers’ guides” that encouraged students to read his biography and that of Dick Cheney.

We seem to have survived all this–not just the power of the presidency reaching into our humble schoolhouses, but also the use of instructional time for anodyne messages from our heads of state. If this particular controversy creates a precedent, it will not be the idea that presidents can address the nation’s children. (They have done that for at least a century.) It will rather be the principle that irate citizens can block elected officials whom they don’t like from being seen or heard in schools–and that would be another blow to civic education.

*E.g., Yates and Youniss find that a powerful dose of Catholic social doctrine does not convert predominantly Protestant African American students, but provokes them to reflect on their own values. McDevitt and colleagues (in a series of papers including this one) find that political debates in school stimulate critical discussions in the home. Colby et al. find that interactive political courses at the college level, although taught by liberal professors, do not move the students in a liberal direction but deepen their understanding of diverse perspectives.

in the news

Mary Ann Zehr has a piece in EdWeek, unfortunately behind a firewall, that’s headlined, Celebrities Lend Weight to Promote Civics Education . She begins, “Actor Richard Dreyfuss, former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, two retired U.S. Supreme Court justices, and several nonprofit organizations are each working on a piece of the puzzle of how to ensure that civics education gains a bigger foothold in the K-12 curriculum.” She quotes me about the trends in civic education. I say that it’s a myth we once taught civics and have since dropped it–but there are big disparities in the quality of civic experiences that different kids get.

Elia Powers has a piece on St. Louis Beacon entitled, “Engaging Young People’ (Part I)” It begins, “The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) is a regular stop on my morning web search. Based out of Tufts University near Boston, the nonpartisan research center puts out a lot of national reports on young voter trends and volunteering statistics – just the kind of snapshots that help convey an impression of how engaged (or not) young people are in civic life. Those snapshots are bound together in an album of sorts in a new book (have I given away the name already?), “Engaging Young People in Civic Life ,” out this month from Vanderbilt University Press. The book’s thesis is that young people are already largely engaged, and that too much attention has historically been paid to their shortcomings.” Powers then interviews the two editors, Jim Youniss and me.

ethical reasoning as a scale-free network

All of us have many ethical thoughts–about this person, that activity, and also about general concepts like virtues and principles. Some of our ethical thoughts are linked to other ones. One entails another, or trumps it, or incorporates it. So you could make a diagram of my moral or ethical worldview that would consist of my thoughts and links among them.

What kind of network would it be? And what kind of network should it be? These are, respectively, an empirical/psychological question (the answer to which might differ for individuals) and a moral/philosophical question (which probably has one correct answer). By the way, instead of asking these questions about individuals, one could pose them for cultures or institutions.

Ethics might turn out to involve one of three kinds of networks:

1. An ordered hierarchy. This kind of network map would resemble the organizational flowchart of the US Army. At HQ would be some very general, core principles, mutually consistent: like Kant’s Categorical Imperative or the utilitarian principle of the greatest good for the greatest number. Division commanders would be big principles like “no lying” or “spend government money to reduce suffering.” The footsoldiers would be particular judgments. The chain of command would ideally be clear. Real people might have confused structures, but then we should try to rationalize them. The purpose, for example, of trolley problems is to identify the core principles of people’s ethics so that inconsistencies can be reduced.

2. A random-looking network. In a truly random network, any node has an equal chance of being linked to any other. As in a bell curve, the node with the most links would not be that different from the mean node. Our ethical map would not be truly random, because there are reasons that one moral thought entails another. But the links among concepts and opinions might be distributed so that they were mathematically similar to those in a randomly-generated network.

I doubt that this is good description of morality. David McNaughton and Piers Rawling are correct to say that some ethical concepts are “central.” They are not just more weighty than other concepts (as rape is more weighty than jaywalking). They are also more central in the sense that they turn up more often and we rely on them more for judgments (“Unprincipled Ethics,” in Hooker and Little, eds., Moral Particularism, p. 268.)

3. A scale-free network: This is a mathematical phrase for a network in which just a few nodes have enormous numbers of links and basically hold the whole thing together. Scale-free networks have no “scale” because there’s no typical number of links that can be used to create a scale of popularity on the y-axis. Instead, popularity rises asymptotically according to a “power law.” From wikipedia:

“An example power law graph, being used to demonstrate ranking of popularity. To the right is the long tail, to the left are the few that dominate (also known as the 80-20 rule).”

 

In the case of ethics, we might find that equality, freedom, self-improvement, and compassion were power hubs with enormous numbers of links. Gratitude, fidelity, etc might appear in an important second tier. (I am drawing here on W.D. Ross’s list of prima facie duties.) Not cutting ahead in line would be out on the “long tail” of the distribution, along with reading Tolstoy and smiling at bus drivers.

Empirically, I think we could find out whether people (some or all of them) had scale-free moral network maps in their heads. One method would be to obtain a lot of text in which they reasoned about ethical issues–say, interview transcripts. One would identify and code concepts and connections among them, justifying each addition to the map with a quote. Whether the network is scale-free then becomes a mathematical question.

Philosophically, I like the idea of morality as a scale-free network. It means that some concepts are much more important than others, but everything needn’t rest on a consistent and coherent foundation. The network can be strong even though it accommodates tensions. Further, since there is no foundation, doubting any one premise doesn’t undermine morality as a whole. It just knocks out one hub and the traffic can be redirected. Finally, this metaphor helps us to think about differences in ethical thinking among individuals and among cultures. It’s not that we have incommensurable perspectives, but that our network maps have (somewhat) different hubs. That suggests that dialog is possible even though disagreement should be expected (which sounds to me like the truth).