seeing Paris in chronological order

Leave a reply

Here is a plan for visiting major sites of Paris chronologically.

1. Roman Lutetia to the high Middle Ages

This itinerary can be completed entirely on foot. Start at les Arènes de Lutèce (a Roman amphitheater off rue Monge). Walk from there to the Cluny Museum, whose basement is in the old Roman baths and whose main floors were once a medieval monastery. Explore the collection, noting the development from Roman sculpture through barbarian jewelry to Romanesque sculpture to the moving and sophisticated unicorn tapestries, which evoke the late medieval ideals of chivalry and gentility.

Walk north to the church of Saint-Séverin, noting the medieval street plan in that vicinity. Visit the church’s interior, focusing on the forest of Gothic columns in the apse. View Notre Dame across the Seine. Cross the bridge and visit the Conciergerie, the medieval royal palace. (You are allowed to see the exhibitions having to do with the Revolution of 1789, even though this is out of order.) Then enter the Sainte-Chapelle, whose walls of stained glass make it one of the finest displays of Gothic civilization in Europe. Finally, visit the heavily restored interior of Notre Dame and climb to the towers, bearing in mind that most of what you are seeing here (such as the famous gargoyles) dates only to the 1800s.

2. The Renaissance

If convenient, start at the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, which was constructed continuously while the prevailing style shifted from Gothic to Renaissance. Even though the architectural vocabulary is all mixed up, the colors and scale are consistent, making the church interior a harmonious and lovely space.

Then ride the metro to the Marais and start in the Place des Vosges, a grand late-Renaissance planned space. Visit Victor Hugo’s house, just so you can get into one of the buildings of the Place. Exit through the Hotel Sully and consider visiting either the Musée Carnavalet or the Musée Cognac-Jay, each inhabiting a palace built while the Marais was at the height of its popularity, in the early 1600s. This is the Paris of the three musketeers. Walk toward the Louvre, whose eastern portion represents the late Renaissance. Visit the Renaissance painting and sculpture collections inside.

3. Louis XIV to Napoleon

This would be a good day to go out to Versailles. If you don’t want to make that trip, here is an itinerary for Paris proper: Start at the Invalides to get a flavor of grandeur, Louis XIV style. Walk along the Seine embankment to the Place de la Concorde, originally the Place Louis XV, whose architecture epitomizes the mid-1700s. (It then became the site of the guillotine during the Terror). Explore the Palais-Royale, which played a crucial role in the Revolution. Cross the river and walk to the Panthéon by way of the Sorbonne. Three classical domes, three Baroque or neoclassical interiors, and a lot of grand vistas.

4. The Industrial Revolution to Postmodernism

Start at the Musee d’Orsay and enjoy both the building (formerly a great train station) and the art collection. Make a detour to the Eiffel Tower. You could get a sense of the Paris of Boulevards and the haute bourgeoisie by taking a bus to the Parc Monceau and the Musée Jacquemart-André. Next stop is the Orangerie, which houses Monet’s Water Lillies from 1918 (a bridge from impressionism to abstraction). End at the postmodern Pompidou Center. Ride the external escalators to the top for the view, and look at the permanent collection of modernist art.

the Internet’s role in making engaged citizens

Leave a reply

Below is my own summary of an important new study by Joe Kahne and colleagues. The original research is here. Or read Joe’s Huff Post piece.

Drawing on a unique panel survey of the online practices and the civic and political engagement of youth (ages 16–21), the new study, partially funded by CIRCLE, addresses broad and timely questions:

  • Does interacting online cause young people to drop out of their real-world communities? The study suggests that this is not a concern. On the contrary, young people who become heavily involved in online communities tend to increase their offline volunteering, charity, and work with neighbors.

  • Do young people spend their time in online "echo chambers"? For more than a decade, many authors and observers have worried that people go online to find their own political and ideological views confirmed, causing society to become more polarized. But the new study finds that young people who see any political opinions online tend to see diverse opinions. (A larger concern is the substantial proportion, 34%, who don’t see political opinions at all when they are online.)

  • Can we teach media literacy? It is difficult to use the Internet and other new media effectively and responsibly. The new study suggests that young people can be taught to do so. Studying digital media literacy dramatically increases the odds that students will be exposed to diverse perspectives online and will engage online with civic and political issues.

Joseph E. Kahne is an education professor at Mills College and CIRCLE Advisory Board member.

public sector unions and the public interest

Leave a reply

I can imagine a just society without public sector unions. Democratically elected officials, accountable to the whole public, would decide how much money to invest in the civil service and how to run it. Public employees, like everyone else, could vote to affect those decisions. Individuals could decide whether to work for a given municipality or state. Governments would not bargain with unions as collectivities, and unions would not make campaign contributions.

I can also imagine a just society in which business corporations were permitted to operate in the marketplace but were forbidden to lobby or make political contributions of any type. Governments would not negotiate or even meet with corporations as such. Individuals who owned stakes in corporations could exercise their individual civil rights, but corporations would be treated as potentially corrupting special interests, and their charters of incorporation would forbid them from acting politically.

I can also imagine a society in which politicians and judges could not accept money from any private organizations or individuals. In this society, reasons and votes would be the only political currency. While we are dreaming, we might even imagine that turnout was high in this society and that all groups were represented equally in elections.

Our actual political system is driven by organized interest groups. In its 2010 Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court officially endorsed, as a matter of constitutional interpretation, the principle that corporations and other interest groups are free to use unlimited money in politics. No one even complains when corporations negotiate with political leaders on matters like where to locate and invest.

If we had a discussion about the influence of interest groups, it would tap into a deep vein of public dissatisfaction. In the 2008 American National Election Study, 70 percent of respondents said the government was “run by a few big interests”; 30 percent said it was “run for the benefit of all.” But the influence of public sector unions would hardly top the list of concerns in any reasonable discussion of “big interests.” Unions’ power (whether measured in inputs such as money, or in outputs such as favorable policies) would look puny compared to the power of for-profit corporations.

If we had a discussion about what causes some state programs to perform badly (or what swells state budget deficits), reasonable people could lob some criticisms in the direction of public employee unions. The California prison guards union, for example, fought hard for “three strikes” laws and other draconian sentencing policies so that the state of California would build almost one new prison per year for decades–with devastating effects on the state budget and communities.

But any damage that unions do would have to be put in context. Just before Gov. Scott Walker proposed to cut state employees’ salaries and benefits, he signed a $117.2 million tax break for corporations. Repealing tax cuts or removing business tax breaks would be alternative options for solving the problem (budget deficits) that Gov. Walker attributes to unions.

Finally, in this discussion, we would have to consider the public benefits of unions, which are not just negotiating partners but also professional associations, builders of social capital, educative institutions, and potential partners in solving public problems.

We are not having a broad discussion in which all organized interests are scrutinized and all remedies to state deficits and other public problems are on the table. Instead, we see efforts to destroy certain public sector unions while exempting the unions that vote Republican. That is a sure sign that we are talking about raw power and resistance.

In a system of virtually unlimited interest-group power, we need as much organization as possible to counteract the political influence of for-profit corporations. State sector unions are not the ideal source of countervailing power. They represent teachers but not students, prison guards but not prisoners, and state employees but not private sector workers or consumers. Still, they offer some kind of check–and that is why the newly elected Midwestern Republican governors want to destroy them.

One of the most interesting questions is how unions will react if the state of Wisconsin and its municipalities stop negotiating with them (while maintaining the existing statutory ban on strikes in the public sector). Since the New Deal, labor law has envisioned officially recognized–some would say co-opted and bureaucratized–unions. Since the 1950s, public sector unions in many states have been granted the legal right to negotiate with state agencies but have also been denied what some would call an intrinsic moral right to organize and strike. One possibility is that we will now enter an era in which organized groups of state workers simply withhold their labor and dare the state to replace them all–or negotiate. Some local observers “now fear [that] Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to eliminate almost all collective bargaining for most public employees will lead to gut-wrenching strikes.” Indeed, strikes would be gut-wrenching, because teachers and other public employees could lose. But they could also win.

the civic value of extracurriculars

Leave a reply

The evidence is very strong that extracurricular activities enhance democracy, yet there is little explicit advocacy for extracurricular participation. Some adult groups support and defend student groups that specifically interest them, whether that means Christian bible clubs or Gay, Lesbian and Straight Alliances. Civil libertarians defend students’ legal rights to associate. But nobody is organized to say that there should be adequate funding, support, space, and time for a whole range of voluntary associations in all of our schools.

All students should have opportunities to join voluntary groups that have serious functions and that are adequately supported with money, equipment, and adults’ time. Many studies have found lasting relationships between participation in such school groups and membership and service in adulthood. In some studies, membership in school groups turns out to be a better predictor of adult engagement than is education or income.

In turn, adult membership is valuable because voluntary associations do important public work, and their members also tend to read the newspaper, vote, and otherwise engage. Thus to recruit students into satisfying extracurricular activities may help make them civic activists, news consumers, and voters—even thirty or fifty years later. Presented with this argument at a meeting of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recalled that she had been a shy high school student until she joined a school group. She was then on a path to become an attorney, an influential state legislator, and the first woman Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Almost any school houses a “civil society” composed of organized groups and various informal networks and interest groups. In CIRCLE’s 2006 national survey of youth, 62 percent of high school students said that they were “currently participating in any organized groups or clubs in high school such as sports teams, band or chorus, language clubs, or the like.” Unfortunately, the most common types of groups (athletics, cheerleading, music, drama, debate, newspaper, yearbook, student government, subject matter clubs, and vocational clubs) shrank between 1972 and 1992, attracting smaller proportions of our young people.

There are several plausible reasons for the link between extracurricular participation and lifelong civic engagement. Belonging to school groups may build confidence, or it may be sufficiently satisfying that members develop a taste for participation. People may form networks in school groups that keep them connected to associations as they age. Not least is the educational value of extracurricular activities. In the terminology of University of Illinois psychology professor Reed Larson, students can obtain opportunities for “initiative” by participating in voluntary, purposive, collective activities such as publishing a school newspaper or organizing a dance. [See also Eccles and Barber.]

Further, as the Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom notes, people must learn how to overcome the problems that beset all collective human enterprises. She writes, “At any time that individuals may gain from the costly action of others, without themselves contributing time and effort, they face collective action dilemmas for which there are coping methods. When de Tocqueville discussed the ‘art and science of association,’ he was referring to the crafts learned by those who had solved ways of engaging in collective action to achieve a joint benefit.” Ostrom has found that we do not automatically know how to address the problems that beset all voluntary associations, so we must learn strategies from experience. Solutions “must be taught to each generation as part of the culture of a democratic citizenry.”

Extracurricular participation can teach people, among other things, how to keep records and chair meetings, how to respond when some members shirk their duties, how to handle a budget, how to persuade groups of peers, and how to advertise the benefits of an association to outsiders. Once these skills are learned, they enhance participation in civil society.

I have been arguing that extracurricular participation helps make students into active and responsible democratic citizens. It is also worth noting that active and responsible civic participation in school helps young people succeed in other aspects of life. Alberto Dávila and Marie T. Mora found [pdf] that “involvement in student government between 1990 and 1992 increased the odds of being a college graduate by 2000 by nearly 18 percentage points.” Jacquelynne S. Eccles and Bonnie L. Barber also found strong and lasting correlations between participating in school groups and healthy development: namely, completing high school, succeeding in college, and avoiding drugs and alcohol. They found somewhat ambiguous results for sports, but the advantages of volunteering and church attendance were strong.

In a 2010 study, Reuben Thomas and Daniel McFarland found that participation in extracurricular groups (as a general category) boosted students’ voting rates. In their study, high school performing arts were especially helpful for encouraging voting. That may seem surprising since the purpose of a school play has little to do with elections. Perhaps students who bond during a school production also talk about politics and gain a sense of confidence and commitment that encourages them to vote.

In the Thomas and McFarland study, sports stood out—in a bad way. Athletic participation was associated with lower voter turnout. On the other hand, Mark Hugo Lopez and Kimberlee Moore found statistically significant, positive relationships between team sports (on one hand) and volunteering, registering to vote, voting, watching the news, and feeling comfortable making statements at public meetings (on the other hand). Overall, the evidence for the civic impact of sports is mixed—perhaps because students’ experience with athletics varies so much. The civic impact of other extracurriculars is unambiguously positive.

A wide range of student associations is valuable, and we should not merely support those whose missions are explicitly civic or political. People who participate in extracurricular activities are more likely than others to engage in community service (even once we adjust for background characteristics), which again suggests that being involved is a good thing, almost without regard to the form of involvement.

In some schools, every student has a roughly equal opportunity to participate; in others, most are left out. In some schools, voluntary groups bridge race, ethnicity, culture, and class; in others, they divide students along those lines. In a given institution, the biggest and most influential groups may emphasize athletic competition, school pride, service, artistic creativity, cultural diversity, or political activism. I am not aware of research that allows us to assess the impact of the overall “ecosystem” of extracurricular groups.

However, if we treat a school’s collection of clubs as a microcosm of civil society, then some propositions about the adult nonprofit sector ought to apply. For adults, pluralism and choice are valuable; people cannot be “shepherded” into groups that others may consider most valuable. Even more than adults, adolescents must experiment in order to develop their interests and identities; they should be able to try various roles even if we might not fully approve of them. But even if individuals must be allowed to choose their groups, it is better when civil society cultivates what the Bowling Alone author, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, calls “bridging social capital.” That is, people ought to learn to work together with those different from themselves and develop trust and useful networks that “bridge” differences; they should not merely use associational membership to differentiate in-groups from out-groups. In American schools, voluntary associations tend to be exclusive. Without being overly manipulative, adults should foster “bridging” activities and groups.

Finally, certain student groups have explicitly civic purposes and they seem to be especially important for promoting discussion and collaboration across the whole student body. Those include student newspapers (and other publications) and student governments.