Teaching America: The Case for Civic Education

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Teaching America coverTeaching America is a new book organized and edited by David Feith with chapters by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Senators Kyl and Graham, former Education Secretary Rod Paige, “Instapundit” Glenn Reynolds, and more than a dozen other authors. I contribute the last chapter, “Letter to Persident Obama: A Policy Approach for the Federal Government.”

As might be expected, the chapters are richly diverse. There are implicit debates about, for example, the centrality of factual knowledge versus democratic skills or values. (Which values are desirable is also a running question.) Some authors are upset that the government takes too little responsibility for civic education, while others are more concerned about the dangers of indoctrination.

I’m not sure how consistent my policy recommendations are with the preceding chapters of diagnosis and critique. I argue that we already require civic education–with a strong focus on concrete facts about the American political system. As a result, students don’t perform badly on tests of that material. But we tolerate vast gaps in civic knowledge and skills by socioeconomic status, and many of our courses and curricula are ineffective at boosting active, responsible, independent citizenship. Thus the important functions of government are to invest in innovation and evaluation and to develop new forms of assessment that encourage students to collaborate and deliberate–not just record their individual knowledge on a test. Two specific proposals for assessment are worth trying: (1) requiring students to show what they can do on a computerized, game-like simulation of a social problem, and (2) asking students to record the opportunities for civic learning that their schools make available to them.

how the new media landscape actually shifts power to government

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In an interesting talk yesterday, Steven Waldman drew attention to a study of the changing news environment in Baltimore, MD conducted by The Pew Research Center. In that city, the number of news outlets has proliferated to 53 “radio talk shows, … blogs, specialized new outlets, new media sites, TV stations, radio news programs, newspapers and their various legacy media websites.”  But the number of reporters has fallen–fast. That means that there is more written and spoken text about the news, but it is highly repetitive. A search of six major news topics found that 83% of the articles and blog posts repeated the same material–perhaps sometimes with commentary–and more than half of the original text came from paid print media such as the Baltimore Sun.

Because the Sun and the local TV stations have cut reporters, they produce many fewer articles than they did ten years ago. They also have smaller budgets for what is called “enterprise reporting” (digging to find new information not already in the public domain). This trend has the somewhat surprising result that city governments and other official institutions now have more, rather than less, control over the news.

As news is posted faster, often with little enterprise reporting added, the official version of events is becoming more important. We found official press releases often appear word for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such.

You might think that with 53 news outlets in a city like Baltimore, the news environment would have become more diverse and free. But if most of the text in these news outlets comes verbatim from government press releases, the public sphere is actually weaker. It’s not much help if many of the 53 outlets adopt critical, skeptical, or even hostile editorial stances. They are still allowing the government to set the agenda and define the facts. They are just adding some commentary.

A.R. Ammons: Corsons Inlet

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A.R. Ammons’ long poem “Corsons Inlet” reports a morning’s walk near a beach in New Jersey. It begins matter-of-factly, “I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning,” and the first stanza summarizes the itinerary. Although it reads like a diary entry, the poem is also a manifesto for a particular kind of free verse in which there will be:

… no forcing of image, plan,
or thought:
no propaganda, no humbling of reality to  precept.

The American city, with its rectangular blocks and buildings, represents thought as organized, articulated, and linear. In the city, nature has been humbled to design. Similarly, in a sonnet or a villanelle, language has been forced into a form. But Ammons reports that on the Jersey shore,

I was released from forms,
from the perpendiculars,
      straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds
of thought
into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends
               of sight:

 

The narrator offers precise observations about changes that occur gradually. For instance, a dune is really different from a creek, but there is no point where one turns to the other. The “transition is clear / as any sharpness: but ‘sharpness’ spread out … ”

The poem’s layout–with its ragged margins and sudden blank lines–resembles the shapes of nature on a sandy coastline on a muggy, hazy day. On the dunes, and elsewhere “in nature there are few sharp lines.”

If the poem were all about vagueness, it would be dull. And if nature were truly formless, it could not be captured in words, no matter how loose and free. But Ammons detects tight order at small scales. The order turns blurry only from further away–a model for his own poetic form.

in the smaller view, order tight with shape:
blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab:
snail shell:
            pulsations of order
            in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed,
broken down, transferred through membranes
to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no
lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together
            and against, of millions of events: this,
                         so that I make
                         no form of
                         formlessness:

 

“Carapace of crab” is a fragment of tightly observed, onomatopoeic, self-conscious verse, but it is adrift in a larger poem whose form is loose and impressionistic.

I have cited examples of vagueness in space. Ammons is also interested in  vagueness over time.

thousands of tree swallows
               gathering for flight:
               an order held
               in constant change: a congregation
rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable
          as one event,
                      not chaos: preparations for
flight from winter, …

 

As someone who once wrote a whole long poem about entropy, I am especially interested in this passage. I had treated disorder as problematic, both morally and aesthetically. For Ammons’ narrator, receptivity to vagueness and resistance to distinctions are not just valid aesthetic choices, but also moral imperatives. He identifies structure with “propaganda” and even “terror” (political words) but reports his acceptance of nature:

I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,
shutting out and shutting in, separating inside
          from outside: I have
          drawn no lines:
 …
so I am willing to go along, to accept
the becoming

thought

the chasm between public opinion and scholarly discourse

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Via Kevin Drum, here is a table from the Pew Research Center that shows how much scientific consensus Americans perceive on the subject of climate change:

As Drum notes, there is a correct answer to this question. It is not a question about global warming, but about the proportion of climate scientists who believe that the climate is changing (for whatever reason). In reality, that proportion is very close to 100%. Yet only 14% of American adults chose the 81%-100% category. The median respondent thought that scientists are split about evenly regarding the very existence of climate change. Drum writes, “Hell, if it were really true that 60% of climate scientists believed in global warming and 40% didn’t, I probably wouldn’t believe in it either. But nationally, that’s what a large majority of Americans think. They think that within the scientific community, there’s roughly an even split among believers and deniers.”

To me, this kind of statistic raises a very basic question about how the university functions in the modern world. To be sure, participating in public debates and informing policies are not our only roles. If you are a pure philosopher, for example, then you are engaging in an activity of intrinsic value. But climate science is not about pure knowledge. Like most of the university’s work, climate science is an expensive, labor-intensive enterprise ultimately meant to advise human beings. So if we employ many thousands of highly trained experts, spend many millions of public dollars on this activity, and agree upon at least the fundamental facts, yet only 14% of our own fellow citizens recognize the consensus, there is a problem.

I do not claim that the problem is worse than it used to be, although I think it has novel features and causes. Forty years ago, most people watched Walter Cronkite and/or read the daily newspaper. So the challenge for concerned academics was to persuade the broadcast networks and print reporters to pay attention to and understand scholarship. Now the media landscape is fragmented, and all forms of substantive news reporting reach niche audiences. That is a different problem.

One common proposal is to teach our core findings better in k-12 schools. For instance, in my field, survey results of adults’ civic knowledge look abysmal, and the typical response is to demand civics classes in high schools. But 97% of American high school seniors already report taking American government or civics courses, thanks in part to standards that exist in all the states except Iowa (where most students nevertheless take the courses). Some states require difficult civics tests for graduation. The textbooks, tests, and standards are written or heavily influenced by academics–like me.  We could do a better job, but it’s folly to assume that by teaching a bunch of material to 16-year-olds, we can solve all the communications and knowledge problems for their subsequent seven or eight decades of life.

I don’t have solutions, but I believe the academy most “own” this problem. It is ours. We might start by lamenting the poor performance of the mass media, but we cannot stop with that. We have more than 2,000 institutions distributed across the nation’s communities, three percent of GDP, large endowments, skilled employees, and a generally accepted right to decide who enters the middle class. Those are assets that we must deploy to address the communications problem.

how 9/11 is taught in public schools

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Today, CIRCLE releases new research by Jeremy Stoddard and Diana Hess on how 9/11 is treated in state standards and textbooks. More than 20 states require the event to be discussed, but usually in superficial ways. My quote in the release: “9/11 was an event of enormous significance, but we must get away from putting everything important in state standards until they are unmanageably long lists … If we are going to list specific events that must be covered, the point should be to teach skills, concepts, or ideas rather than just requiring students to identify the event.”