a civic approach to local history

The Civic Mission of

Schools, our report on civic education, has been getting

quite a lot of press—most of it positive. But Chester Finn wrote

a critical review

that has been provoking some discussion in the civic engagement world.

Over lunch today, my colleagues and I planned a deliberative Website

on the history of desegregation in Prince George’s County. We’re thinking

that the "intro" will show class photos from Northwestern

High School, each year gradually morphing into the next as the school

moves from segregated white, to white with one black student in 1955-8,

to today’s mosaic of ethnic groups. Next, visitors will be invited to

explore a page that our high school students have already constructed,

with a timeline of County history and interviews of participants in the

integration stuggle. Visitors will then be able to move to a page that

presents three contrasting answers to the question: "What should

the County have done in 1955 to address school segregation?" Finally,

they will be transferred to an online discussion forum to post their opinions.

A major goal is to help our students see history not only as the record

of state actions, powerful people, and downtrodded victims, but also as

a story of communities making difficult decisions.

what Dante knew about Francesca

Notwithstanding all this civic engagement stuff I try to do, I’m actually

a moral philosopher. I have an incomplete manuscript of several hundred

pages on the story of Paolo and Francesca and what it means for moral

theory. (See this webpage.) It occasionally bothers

me that I have left so much material untouched for so long. Today I sensed

a lull and took out chapter one. It’s a mess, but I enjoyed starting to

reorganize it.

Dante ended his life in the household of the lord of Ravenna, one Guido

Novello da Polenta. Dante was Guido’s close friend and courtier. Guido’s

aunt was Francesca do Rimini, one of the most famous damned souls in Dante’s

Inferno. So it’s intriguing—although not profoundly important—to

ask whether Dante was already close to Guido when he wrote about Francesca.

I spent this morning organizing the available (scanty) evidence: a nice

break from more current concerns.

community-based discussion

I spent almost all of today at a good Democracy

Collaborative conference on "engaged," or "collaborative,"

or "community-based" research (i.e., research in which academics

and members of a community work together, at least to frame a common research

agenda and sometimes to conduct the whole project.) There was a lot of

talk about potential research involving University of Maryland faculty

in our own community, Prince George’s County, although many of the speakers

came from elsewhere. (One of the best was Gary Cunningham, who runs the

Hennepin

County African American Men Project in and around Minneapolis, MN.)

I was generally impressed and inspired, although a couple of worries stick

with me.

First, this was the kind of conference in which everyone quickly feels

comfortable with one another and starts to talk as "we." For

example: "We need to convince young people to work in the World Bank,

so that they can bring our perspective inside that place." But no

one ever exactly says what defines "us." I suspect this is partly

because everyone in the room is on the left, and that’s their most fundamental

identity. That’s why they all feel confortable with one another. But the

agenda and purpose of the meeting are officially non-partisan and non-ideological:

we’re supposed to be talking about research in partnership with communities.

The fact that everyone is on the left is an unacknowledged but crucial

fact.

Second, one graduate student gave a presentation on an extremely disadvantaged

group that she had studied. No one asked the kind of questions that would

routinely arise after a presentation at a regular academic event. For

example, individuals had volunteered to participate in her focus groups,

and no one asked whether these volunteers were representative of the whole

population being studied. Also, many of the individuals claimed to have

given up drugs, but no one asked whether this claim was tested or credible.

I wondered why these questions didn’t come up. (I didn’t ask them, either).

Here are three guesses:

  • She made a good presentation about a terribly oppressed group, and

    everyone was moved and sympathetic and didn’t want to appear skeptical

    in any respect. or

  • People who do action-research are not primed to think about such matters

    as the representativeness of their samples. or

  • This was a middle-aged, female, African American graduate student

    and no one wanted to ask the tough questions that they would naturally

    pose of a young, white student who was starting on the standard academic

    career path.

If the last hypothesis is true, than I worry about what one of my least

favorite presidents calls "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

In other words, I hope we are not afraid to ask tough questions of middle-aged,

black, female graduate students because we think that they will be unable

to answer effectively.

civic work

I participated in an interesting conference call with members of the

.

Although I’m a bit embarrassed because I haven’t done any work on it,

I’m listed as the co-editor of a proposed book that would describe recent

experiments in real-world citizens’ deliberations. The Consortium, meanwhile,

is committed to holding a conference for researchers and practitioners

during 2003. The purpose of today’s call was to explore the possibility

of using the conference to create the book—by inviting authors to

present preliminary drafts of their chapters. There are potential advantages

to collaboration for both the Consortium and those of us who are working

on the book.

I also met with the two students and two professors who are conducting

a project on journalism, funded by the Kettering

Foundation (I am Principal Investigator). Their project is to create

a website with material drawn from political theory that’s of practical

value for working journalists. The more fundamental goal is to explore

ways that political theory could be more useful to journalism, and vice

versa. They have decided to focus for now on two pressing issues: the

role of the press in covering a war; and arguments in favor of conscription.

They are finding more good political theory relevant to the second question,

but more news coverage of the first.

the high school rat race

A day spent frantically working on grant proposals for CIRCLE and the

Prince George’s Information Commons—three proposals in all. I did

have an interesting phone conversation about the degree to which high

school students volunteer in order to improve their chances of being admitted

to college. This is very common, apparently. I don’t necessarily draw

cynical conclusions about the kids’ characters. Instead, I’d tend to blame

an increasingly efficient system of sorting the whole national student

body by "merit," which causes everyone to compete on a common

scale, whether they aspire to Harvard or the local public college. More

and more people know how to play the game of college admission. As a result,

I fear that kids are waiting until after high school for their real lives

to begin, and much of what they do as adolescents feels hollow.