This week and all of next week, my colleague Karol Soltan and I will be leading the fifth annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies, an intensive seminar for scholars, practitioners, and graduate students. I love the atmosphere of the class every year. I attribute it in part to the serious subject matter and in part to the fact that we charge no tuition and give no grades. People attend because they really care about the material.

Over the past 10 years, I have blogged about almost all of the voluminous readings. We begin with “inspirations and provocations.” One is the magnificent poem “The Republic of Conscience” by Seamus Heaney, which confronts you with the question: are you a citizen of the republic of conscience? We read it in a style pioneered by my friend Elizabeth Lynn of the Project for Civic Reflection. Our list of guiding questions is here.

I also like to use this as a provocation: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” It’s attributed to Margaret Mead, but I like to provoke people by suggesting that it is wrong on several levels. A brief definition of “civic studies” would be the discipline that provides more accurate and valid theories than this one.

Still on Day One, we move to our first actual theorist, the late and much lamented Elinor Ostrom. She essentially defined “good citizenship” as solving problems of collective action, such as free-riding and the tragedy of the commons. She showed that people can solve those problems, but they must design rules and norms well.

We alternate between theorists (in the mornings) and “venues” of civic action (in the afternoons). The first venue is the individual person in development. During the session devoted to that venue, we consider civic education and youth (not otherwise prominent themes in the course). We consider the individual in development because what it means to be a “good citizen” depends on how old you are—the answer is different if you are 8 or 80. Also, people don’t automatically learn to be good citizens; that has to be taught, which raises difficult issues: Who has a right to decide that they should learn? How should the state relate to parents if they have different goals? See the “civic education” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a summary.

As new and unexpected issues arise in discussion, I may blog about them here.