I am spending six hours of every day co-teaching the Summer Institute of Civic Studies (syllabus here). The course covers roughly 18 separate topics, and I will blog about half of those. Today, I focus my blog notes on Public Work and Democratic Professionalism. The readings are:
I am co-teaching the Summer Institute of Civic Studies and blogging about roughly half of the 18 topics on our syllabus. Today, I focus my blog notes on John Dewey’s book, The Public and its Problems (1927). In the same session, we also discussed Philip Selznick’s The Moral Commonwealth, on which I posted notes in 2009. (Selznick developed his own views but acknowledged a pervasive debt to Dewey; you might call him Dewey 2.0.)
The John Dewey/Walter Lippmann debate in the 1920s
These two major American intellectuals rejected the classic (“civics class”) view of democracy, which holds that masses of people know what’s going on, vote according to their principles and interests, and thus steer the ship of state. They agreed that this was impossible in a complex and huge society.
Lippmann was particularly acute in diagnosing the problem, which he first recognized as he worked on propaganda during World War I. He coined the term “stereotype” (in its modern use) and explored other cognitive biases and limitations as he argued that the “phantom public” could not know what is going on, did not have coherent values or interests, was very easily manipulated, and never seriously affected the government. He concluded that the only role of the public was to use the blunt force of popular voting to unseat extremely incompetent or tyrannical leaders.
Dewey’s theory of democracy and the public
Dewey basically shared the diagnosis but couldn’t accept the outcome because of his core normative premises, which were what? (p. 147-8)
I am co-teaching the Summer Institute of Civic Studies and using this blog to share my notes for roughly half of the 18 topics we cover. Yesterday morning’s discussion focused on Jürgen Habermas. The readings for that module were:
I am spending these two weeks co-teaching the Summer Institute of Civic Studies. We will cover 18 separate topics, and I will blog about roughly half of them.
Yesterday afternoon’s discussion focused on children and youth, civic education, and human development, more generally. We had assigned the following readings on those topics:
Why does youth and education require attention in a course that is about how citizens can improve the world? I would say we need to give special attention to youth because:
In 1999, the great political scientist Sir Bernard Crick lamented that “there is no political Piaget.” He meant that there was no major theorist who provided a framework for understanding children’s development into citizens. Such a theory would help institutions to educate children civically, which, in turn, would strengthen democracy.
Although we don’t have a “political Piaget,” several major thinkers offer valuable theoretical frameworks. Before we turn to a few of those thinkers, I’d like to introduce a distinction that is often used when interpreting data on youth engagement:
When we observe that only 24% of eligible young people voted in 2o10, we can ask whether that is an historical effect, an age effect, or a cohort effect. The answer will make a lot of difference to how we respond.
For our purposes today, we are not interested in historical effects. For age effects, a classical theorist is the Freudian psychologist Erik Erikson (1902-1994). Generational effects were invented and explored by the sociologist Karl Mannheim (1893-1947).
For the next two weeks, I will be spending six hours of every day co-teaching the Summer Institute of Civic Studies (syllabus here). We will cover roughly 18 separate topics, and I will blog about just a few of those.
Near the beginning of the first session, I always read this quote:
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Was Margaret Mead right?
A cynic might counter: “Never doubt the capacity of large groups of ignorant and selfish people to squelch good ideas and make the world worse.”
We need to ask …
Citizens need a combination of facts, strategies, and values relevant to their own discretionary action. This combination is rare because …