NACE Website <\/a>so that it works for<\/p>\nolder Web browsers. In between things, I’ve been writing a proposal for<\/p>\n
a new kind of high school civics textbook<\/b>. If I ever found a publisher<\/p>\n
interested in it, I’d have to shelve a lot of other writing projects,<\/p>\n
but it would be worthwhile.<\/p>\n
The leading texts for high school government classes are basically political<\/p>\n
science primers written at the tenth- or twelfth-grade level. They describe<\/p>\n
the mechanics of the federal government as if from a distance, without<\/p>\n
explaining how an ordinary citizen can play important roles in community<\/p>\n
affairs, without addressing complex ethical and moral questions; without<\/p>\n
helping students to reason about contemporary issues, and without describing<\/p>\n
civic and political institutions other than the federal government (which<\/p>\n
is remote from students’ lives).<\/p>\n
Because textbooks deal mainly with the structure of the national government,<\/p>\n
government classes have little connection to students’ direct experience<\/p>\n
of civic and political issues, which they gain through community service,<\/p>\n
membership in groups outside the school, and extracurricular participation.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, students’ practical experiences are largely separate from their<\/p>\n
academic work, despite evidence that community service best encourages<\/p>\n
civic development when it is combined with learning in the classroom.<\/p>\n
In short, there is a profound need for a textbook that combines analysis<\/p>\n
of political institutions; guidance about how to think about complex public<\/p>\n
issues at all levels from the school to the world; a thorough and challenging<\/p>\n
treatment of ethics; and practical instructions for meaningful community<\/p>\n
service projects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m working ineffectively on lots of separate projects, including trying to fix the NACE Website so that it works for older Web browsers. In between things, I’ve been writing a proposal for a new kind of high school civics textbook. If I ever found a publisher interested in it, I’d have to shelve a lot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advocating-civic-education"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}