In the Alliance for Civics in the Academy, we say:

Civic education should be a shared intellectual activity, grounded in texts, aimed at building a practical capacity for listening to and acting together with others, including those of differing beliefs.

I believe that citizenship or civic engagement is about more than texts and spoken words. It is also about work–and sometimes, sacrifice. We can learn to be effective citizens by serving or fighting or working instead of talking. Acts of citizenship can literally be silent.

Still, authentic words are scarce today. Despite the torrent of gigabytes of characters and sounds that human beings–and now also machines–circulate every second, we are at risk of losing considered words, the words of embodied human beings who have memories and hopes and the capacity to suffer and who speak or write to engage other people. Hence I believe that today’s civic education should emphasize slow, attentive reading and the creation of new words.

In Our Declaration, Danielle Allen recalls teaching working-class students in night school in Chicago. She writes,

To my embarrassment, however, I never read the Declaration slowly, the way I had been taught to read, until I did so with my night students. It’s a cliché to say that we fell in love, but we did. Its words became necessary for us; they became our Declaration. Through reading them slowly, we came into our inheritance: an understanding of freedom and equality, and of the value of finding the right words.

Here is a proposal for a program that could be adopted across a college or university as part of its civic mission. It builds on existing “common read” or “common book” programs, but it is a bit different. Those programs tend to encourage every student–or every incoming student–to read a recent book. Often, the author visits, and the book is incorporated in various courses and special events.

There is suggestive evidence that these programs bring academic and psychological benefits (Soria 2015). But they would not necessarily enhance civic learning. And I am skeptical that most students will actually read and discuss an assigned book, especially post-COVID and in the era of AI.

I would propose the following tweaks:

The chosen text should be concise yet very rich, so that it is possible to read it (possibly aloud) before discussing it and producing a response–all in real time.

It should address the core civic question, the question of collective agency. In other words, the text should be about groups discussing “What should we do?” and acting accordingly.

The text should generally be old enough that it has generated criticism and creative responses or echoes from various perspectives. These responses can be recommended along with the main assigned text.

Students would produce their own responses to the text in the form of words (written or spoken), images, music, or performances, either as individuals or in teams. With exceptions, such as the use of recording devices, they would make these products without the assistance of machines.

This program would include all students, from incoming undergraduates to residents in a medical school. Whether to require or merely encourage participation would depend on the institution’s rules and culture, and might vary within an institution.

The institution would produce a discussion guide and offer professional development opportunities for teachers, but instructors and facilitators could approach the text in their own ways, grounded in their own disciplines, professions, methods, and interests.

Since a new text would be chosen each year, a student in a multi-year academic program would experience a diversity of texts. Here are some illustrative examples:

• Addams, Jane, “The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements”
• Arendt, Hannah, “Prologue” to The Human Condition
• Auden, W.H, “September 1, 1939”
• Brecht, Bertolt, “To Future Generations”
• Brooks, Gwendolyn, “The Lovers of the Poor”
• Dewey, John, The Public and its Problems, chapter 5 (selection)
• Douglass, Frederick, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
• Du Bois, W.E.B., “The General Strike,” chapter 4 of Black Reconstruction in America (selection)
• Hall, Prince, “A Charge, delivered to the African Lodge”
• Heaney, Seamus, “From the Republic of Conscience”
• King, Martin Luther, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
• King, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”
• Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (2026)
• Lincoln, Abraham, The Second Inaugural
• Lord, Audre, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”
• Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, The Book of Nehemiah
• Reagan, Ronald, Speech at Pointe du Hoc, France (June 6, 1984)
• Thucydides, The Melian Dialogue, from The Peloponnesian War (5.84-116)
• Tocqueville, Alexis de, “Of the Use Which the Americans Make of Public Associations In Civil Life”
• The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy’s Great Binding Law
• The Declaration of Independence
• The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights

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See also: Seamus Heaney, The Republic of Conscience (questions for a discussion); “Signal“; the papal encyclical on AI; etc.