the philosophical foundations of civic education

Leave a reply

Ann Higgins-D’Alessandro and I have published an article under this title in Philosophy & Public Policy Quarterly. It is actually a version (with due permission) of a chapter we published in The Handbook of Research on Civic Engagement in Youth, edited by Lonnie Sherrod, Judith Torney-Purta, and Constance A. Flanagan (John Wiley & Sons, 2010). Here it is online.

We note that educating young people for citizenship is an intrinsically moral task. Even among reasonable people, moral views about citizenship, youth, and education differ. We describe conflicting utilitarian, liberal, communitarian, and civic republican conceptions and cite evaluations of actual civic education programs that seem to reflect those values. We conclude:

    With a few exceptions, such as Facing History and Just Communities, one cannot find much explicit moral argumentation in either the justifications or the evaluations of civic programs. Disclosing one’s own ethical judgments as facts about oneself is relatively straightforward. Defending them is harder, especially if one does not resort automatically to utilitarianism. Moral argumentation requires a shift out of a positivist framework, as one gives non-empirical reasons—reasons that go beyond observable facts— for one’s positions. Moral philosophy and normative social theory—as we have argued—provide rich resources for arguments about the values that society should hold and that it ought to try to transmit through civic education to future generations.

    Alas, references to influential and relevant schools of philosophy, such as the capabilities approach of Sen and Nussbaum, are entirely missing in the empirical literature on youth civic engagement. The problem, however, goes both ways. Recent academic philosophy in all of its schools has not benefited enough from reflecting on innovative youth programs, a method that Plato, Erasmus, Rousseau, Dewey, and others found generative in earlier times.

Matt Leighninger on a vital moment

Leave a reply

You should read Matt Leighninger’s paper for the Bertelsmann Foundation, “Vitalizing Democracy Through Public Participation: A Vital Moment” (pdf). Here are some quotes to give a flavor, but the whole argument is important:

    Obama was educated in the same community organizing tradition that has influenced the broader evolution of democratic governance and local politics. His campaign speeches were full of civic language. “I won’t just ask for your vote as a candidate; I will ask for your service and your active citizenship when I am president of the United States,” Obama said while campaigning in Iowa. “This will not be a call issued in one speech or program; this will be a cause of my presidency.”

But …

    The confusion and unexplored questions about the Obama administration’s approach to governance have been evident from the beginning. Soon after the 2008 election, tensions arose around the fate of Obama for America, the campaign?s vast infrastructure of organizers and volunteers (and the massive database of email addresses they built). Amidst strident objections from people like Marshall Ganz, the longtime community organizer who helped direct the campaign, Obama for America was renamed Organizing for America (OfA) and incorporated into the Democratic Party.

    This shift in the mission of OfA reflected one vision of active citizenship: At least some leaders within the White House saw participation activities primarily as a vehicle for encouraging citizens to support the president?s legislative agenda. …

    While the fate of OfA was being debated in the months after the election, another set of administration staffers was experimenting with online tools to solicit ideas for how the president should govern. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) initiated an online brainstorming session aimed at producing a “Citizen’s Briefing Book,” engaging thousands of people in developing and prioritizing policy proposals. The effort generated negative publicity when the two policy ideas with the most votes turned out to be the legalization of marijuana and a request for an investigation into whether Obama had in fact been born abroad (which would make him ineligible to serve as president). …

    These online participation efforts embody a somewhat different vision of citizenship: the citizen as a consumer and analyst of online data, who then uses that information to formulate new proposals for how government should function.

    A third conception of citizenship evident in the White House is the vision of the citizen as volunteer. Soon after taking office, the president signed the Kennedy Serve America Act, which tripled the size of AmeriCorps and provided opportunities for 250,000 Americans – mostly young people – to serve for one year as volunteers in various charitable causes. …

    These three visions of citizenship – as legislative supporter, as online data-consumer and as volunteer – are being advanced by three different sets of people within the Obama administration, and their formulas for democracy reform rarely seem to intersect. One reason for the success of the Obama campaign may have been that it offered all three opportunities for active citizenship, combined in the same structure and the same experience. Without that holistic appeal, the administration has lost much of the power of its message about democracy, and much of the civic momentum it generated during the campaign.

the folklore of communications and messaging

Leave a reply

“If three Americans were dropped from an airplane at 10,000 feet, by the time they had reached the ground they would probably have formed an association and elected themselves president, vice president, and secretary-treasurer,” wrote E. Digby Baltzell years ago. Today, the plummeting Americans would turn themselves into a communications committee and brainstorm “messages” to “get the word out” or “raise awareness” of their plight before they hit the ground.

Messaging is second nature. If you ask kids to pick an issue that concerns them and do something about it, very often they will choose a bad behavior and develop a communications plan against it. They have learned that style of engagement from their elders.

“Strategic communication” (trying to get other people to do something by sending them some kind of message) has its own folklore. We assume that effective messages are short, simple, and memorable. They stress benefits and don’t complicate matters by mentioning any drawbacks. If a message mentions opponents, it disparages them. Ideally, the message comes from famous and cool supporters. The more repetition, the better.

We borrow these techniques from commercial advertising, the medium in which we swim. But commercial advertisers want people to do things that are (1) conceptually simple, (2) available, (3) normally free of organized enemies, and (4) of tangible value. Tropicana, for example, wants us to fork over cash for an available good that affords some pleasure and health benefits and that may have competitors, but that no one is advertising against. To be sure, the value of the Tropicana brand is non-tangible, and the cost of their product may be too high. They address those challenges by appealing to emotions.

Political campaign face a similar situation and borrow most of the same techniques. Like buying orange juice, voting is conceptually simple and available. Most candidates are in zero-sum struggles for votes, a situation that encourages far more negative advertising than we see in the commercial world. Also, the benefits of voting are non-tangible, which is why candidates either resort to nebulous sentiments or try to make their impact appear more concrete than it is. But most of the principles of commercial advertising apply.

The principles apply, too, if you want people to buckle up or not to drink and drive. Those are concrete choices, available to all who have cars in the first place.

But the normal forms of strategic communication cannot work if:

  • What you want people to do is unavailable. Individuals cannot join labor unions if there aren’t any, for example.
  • What you want them to do is complex and requires experience to grasp and to value. For example: “Understand American history” means nothing unless one understands something about American history already.
  • What you want to communicate is complex, ambiguous, or sensitive to context, and a simple message is worse than none.
  • People don’t trust you. OR
  • You can only afford to purchase a tiny slice of the public’s attention, and competing or even contrary messages occupy much more time

Most of the things that I care about–civic engagement, deliberation, literature and the humanities, effective public institutions, social justice–face all of the challenges listed above, which is why I am generally skeptical about the advantages of a “communications” strategy. Organizing and recruiting people to have tangible and rewarding experiences is much more promising.

working-class people versus elites on education

Leave a reply

(Dayton, OH) I have been listening to preliminary qualitative research: focus groups of working class adults from several communities (almost all people of color). Asked to discuss “youth,” they identify behavioral problems: violence, crime, lack of respect for adults and for themselves. Asked to propose solutions, they cite family and community, not schools or government. When one of the researchers explicitly asked them about the government, the respondents (in this case, African Americans between 18 and 25) uniformly said that the government was irrelevant. Finally, despite some economic anxiety, many said they were optimistic that young people would have good economic futures because they are savvy about technology.

Meanwhile, there is a whole official debate about youth that focuses on schools (which are government-run or government-funded institutions) and their graduates’ inadequate preparation for economic competition. This is the expert or elite discourse of tests, standards, teacher quality, “the achievement gap,” charters, vouchers, and unions.

A hypothesis: It is bad for progressive politics that core Democratic constituencies do not see the government as the solution to the problems that matter most to them. And the reason they don’t see the government as a solution is that the government has defined a different set of problems from the ones that concern them. That doesn’t mean that working people are right and elites are wrong; but the gap creates a serious problem for both.

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

1 Reply

Wolf Hall was my favorite book of 2010. It is a miraculously sympathetic story about Thomas Cromwell, the man most famous for engineering Henry VIII’s divorce, dissolving the English monasteries, making Henry head of the English church, passing legislation requiring everyone to swear that those acts were just, and executing people who failed to swear. The standard punishment was to be hanged, drawn, and quartered–just about the worst way to go. Yet in Wolf Hall, Cromwell emerges as a practical, reasonable man of the world, trying to hold his family, business, and country together in a humane fashion.

Mantel vividly conjures early 16th-century England. The narration is present-tense, and the environment is economically and unpretentiously but sensuously described. The language is consistently modern. Sometimes, we can presume that we are reading translations of dialogues actually conducted in Latin or French; but even the chatter of English commoners is rendered in modern idioms–heightening the feeling of proximity and naturalness. The narration is third person, and Mantel goes to great lengths to avoid using the proper nouns “Thomas” or “Cromwell.” “He” is the subject of most sentences, or else the narration slips into “free indirect speech” (with Cromwell’s thoughts and style coloring the third-person voice.) At first, the device of avoiding Cromwell’s name confused me. There may be four men in the room, but “he” always refers to the hero. I got used to the technique, which allows Mantel to stay very close to her protagonist’s consciousness without using the first person singular. (For how could Thomas Cromwell write a 21st-century narrative?)

I think there might be a handful of anachronisms in Wolf Hall. At one point, Cromwell observes that Homer’s existence is doubtful, yet my quick scan of recent scholarship suggests that the “Homeric Question” was not raised in Cromwell’s time. (E.g., Philip Ford, “Homer in the French Renaissance“; and Filippomaria Pontani, “From Budé to Zenodotus: Homeric Readings in the European Renaissance.”) The fact that I could find a couple of slips just reinforces the verisimilitude of this long and wide-ranging story.

Above all, it is fun: full of humor, vivid characters, and dramatic events. Representation affords pleasure, as Aristotle noted two thousand years ago. Difficult feats of representative art can be especially pleasurable, and what could be more difficult than to represent the inner state of a long-dead lawyer best known for judicially murdering St. Thomas More? I enjoy representation most of all when the author treats her subjects with affection, and Mantel is humane toward virtually all her creations, even the ones who hate one another.