{"id":20829,"date":"2019-01-11T15:57:29","date_gmt":"2019-01-11T20:57:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=20829"},"modified":"2019-01-11T16:46:41","modified_gmt":"2019-01-11T21:46:41","slug":"an-expert-class-and-the-grassroots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=20829","title":{"rendered":"an expert class and the grassroots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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(Menlo Park, CA) Here I am at Facebook, posting on Facebook. I’m with about 160 other people, and we’re having a valuable conversation about how to measure and assess civic education. (The space is leant to us by Facebook, but the organizers, CivXNow,<\/a> are fully independent from Facebook.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The participants bring highly diverse expertise, professional backgrounds, and opinions of relevant topics–from the nature of a good citizen to the appropriate role of testing. They are somewhat diverse racially and culturally, but much less so than the nation or our nation’s students. They are the kinds of people who can get their flights to California reimbursed from an organization’s budget, who can put titles on their name tags, and who can be asked to address specific issues as experts. Even if they perfectly represented America’s students and parents in terms of race and ethnicity, they would be sociologically different. This is a slice of the professional class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speakers have named that problem, as they should. Any group concerned with enhancing democracy should ask whether it is operating democratically. Democratic values include representation, voice, and accountability. If a bunch of adults with titles on their name tags talk about<\/em> kids, they do not represent youth, give youth voice, or make themselves accountable to youth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I think it’s important to be realistic about the challenge. A defining feature of modernity–possibly the <\/em>defining feature–is specialization. In socialist and capitalist societies alike, roles are differentiated and assigned to people who demonstrate and build specialized experience and training over years. Per Wikipedia<\/a>, Max Weber’s definition of a “bureaucracy” is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n