define democracy in civic education

The Role of Education in Democracy

• Posted October 8, 2020
• By Jill Anderson

Many people question the state of democracy in America. This is especially true of young people, who no longer share the same interest in democracy as the generations before them. Professor Danielle Allen , director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, has long studied what citizens need in order to succeed in democracy and how our social studies and civics education have impacted democracy.

"We have really disinvested in civic education and social studies. You can see that now in the comparison that we currently spend $54 per year per kid of federal dollars on STEM education and only 5 cents per year per kid on civics,” Allen says. “We have really ceased to lay the foundation in K–12 for young people to understand democracy, be motivated to participate in it, to have the skills and tools they need to participate effectively, and as a result, enjoy participation."

In this episode, Allen discusses how we got where we are today and what it will take to reinvest in education for democracy.

• Find ways to tell “an integrated version of U.S. history that is simultaneously honest about the crimes and wrongs of the past, but without falling into cynicism,” Allen says.
• When broaching a challenging topic in the classroom, begin from a place of inquiry. Try not to start with the instructional content or even understanding the issue, but let students think about what comes to mind about the issue and record their feelings and how they connect to it. “I think it’s really important that teachers be able to see what the starting points are – both analytically and emotionally that students have for engaging with these issues,” she says.
• To raise engaged citizens, Allen suggests bringing democratic practices of reason giving into the life of a family. “There are lots of lessons inside a family that can feed in to help the understanding of democratic practice,” Allen says.

 I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast. Harvard's Danielle Allen knows young people aren't as invested in democracy like the generations before them. Today, fewer than 30% under age 40 even consider it important to live in a democracy. Allen is a political theorist who's long studied what citizens need in order for democracy to succeed.

Education plays a big part in how we think about democracy, yet America's classrooms haven't always emphasized these subjects. With the presidential election just weeks away, I wanted to understand how education can preserve democracy and whether tensions rising in America signal a change underway.

Danielle Allen: In another moment of crisis in the country, The Cold War, the country really turned to science and technology to meet the moment. So there's the period during World War II, the Manhattan Project, for example, which really brought universities into the project of supporting national security with the pursuit of the atom bomb. That was a point in time, it was really the beginning of decades long investment in STEM education. That was important.

We needed to do that, but at the same time, over that same 50 year period, we have really disinvested in civic education and social studies. You can see that now in the comparison that we currently spend $54 per year per kid of federal dollars on STEM education and only 5 cents per year per kid on civics. So we have really ceased to lay the foundation in K–12 for young people to understand democracy, be motivated to participate in it, to have the skills and tools they need to participate effectively and as a result, enjoy participation.

Jill Anderson: We're also living in a time when teaching history is being really politicized and I'm wondering how you think we can effectively teach history and democracy to young people.

Danielle Allen: I've been really privileged over the last 15 months or so to be a part of a cross-institutional network under the banners and they call it the Educating for American Democracy Project and my center Harvard, the ethics centers participating. Jane Kamensky, who directs the Schlesinger Library for Women as a PI Tufts, Arizona state university and this group has pulled together a network of hundreds of scholars across the country with the goal of developing a blueprint, a roadmap for the integration of history and civics education K–12.

The reason I'm going through all of that is because at an early point in our work, directly thinking about the issue you just raised or polarization of our national history and polarization of education around civics, we decided that we were going to do two things on our roadmap.

One was to really structure it around inquiry to really focus on the kinds of questions that should be asked over the span of K–12 more so than on the answers and also that we would really focus on design challenges. That instead of seeing the disagreement about how to narrate our nation's history as a kind of end of the conversation, we would see it as the beginning of a conversation. So for instance, one of the design challenges we put to educators is that we have to find a way to tell an integrated version of US history that is simultaneously honest about the crimes and wrongs of the past, but without falling into cynicism and also appreciative in appropriate ways of the founding era without tipping into gamification.

So what we try to do is to say, "This is a design challenge. We don't know exactly what the answer is to meriting a history in this way that integrates clear-eyed view of the problems as well as a clear-eyed view of the goods and the potentialities, but we believe it can be done and we believe that this big country with so many committed educators is a place where we can experiment our way into solutions."

Jill Anderson: Right. One of the things I think is interesting as you look at the polls and voter turnout, and you often see young people not being as engaged, but when you look at some of the protests that have been happening around the country, it seems to be largely younger people. Is that a shift happening in our democracy where young people are maybe becoming more engaged?

Danielle Allen: It's certainly the case that young people are showing engagement through their participation in social movements and protests. In that regard, the moment is a lot like the 1960s with similar levels of engagement from young people. The question is whether or not young people who engage in the democracy tool of a social movement or of a protest can also understand themselves to have access to the tool of using political institutions. So social movements are an important part of the democracy toolkit, but they're just a part.

So it's really a question of whether or not young people see value in political institutions too, and can knit these things together. To some extent, I think that actually we really need to do work to redesign, even for example, our electoral system. So when we look around and we see that lots of people are disaffected or alienated or feel disempowered, that doesn't just mean that they're sort of haven't got enough education or don't have the right perspective.

It also means that our institutions aren't delivering what they promise. They're not responsive. They don't generally empower ordinary people and they very often don't deliver sort of equal representation. So in that regard, everybody, all citizens, civic participants have a job to do to think about redesigning our institutions so that they achieve those things.

On that front. I was again, fortunate to participate with a huge network of people through the American Academy Of Arts And Sciences, a commission on the future of the of practice of democratic citizenship and we released a report in June the 31 recommendations, a chunk of which are about redesigning our electoral system to deliver that responsive, empowering form of government that also provides equal representation.

Jill Anderson: Do you think something like this pandemic could be a tipping point because so much has moved online and I'm wondering how you think that might change civic action in education?

Danielle Allen: Well, the pandemic without any question is a huge exogenous shock, as we would say in social sciences, that it's a transformative event. Period. The magnitude is so significant. I think we're a very long way from being able to see and understand all of its impacts and consequences. For me personally, one of the things it has driven home is the weaknesses in our practices of governance. These weaknesses are partly institutional and partly cultural. Our polarization is one of the significant causes of our failure to come to grips with the current crisis. So I think for lots of people, the pandemic is really bringing our vulnerabilities to the surface. Also, for example, the disparate impacts across racial and ethnic groups of the disease and the underlying disparities in health equity has really come to the fore to visibility. So I think a lot of people are really focused in a more intensive way than in the past on addressing those problems.

I always sort of have a lot of confidence in the kind of creative energies of human beings when they really sort of see and face problems. So I believe that the moment does give us an opportunity to transform our conception of what we want for our society, what it means to name the public good, what it means to invest in the public good and my hope is that we'll be able to pull energy around a concept of the public good with us in the coming years.

Jill Anderson: We have this huge election coming up and the pandemic has somewhat overshadowed the election a little bit. I look at parents and their children and wonder are there things that parents could be doing at home to help raise their children to be more engaged and value democracy?

Danielle Allen: Well, I think there are a number of things. I mean, I actually think it matters to bring democratic practices of reason giving for example, into the life of a family. That can be very hard. Family structures are often and for very good reason, very hierarchical. So within the sort of context of hierarchical family structures, how can parents foster reason giving, hear their children's reasons for things, help their children understand what it means to engage in the back and forth around reasons, help them understand what it means for one person to lose out in one decision-making moment, but then to win out in another moment and nonetheless, even though we sort of exchange sacrifices for one another over the course of collective decision-making, our commitment to our social bond is so strong that that makes that sort of exchange of burdens tolerable. So I think there are lots of lessons inside a family that can feed into help the understanding of democratic practice.

Jill Anderson: One last final question would be if you have any thoughts or advice to share with the teachers out there who are working hard, and many of them working remotely to try to teach lessons about the upcoming election and all the things happening in the world.

Danielle Allen: So teachers really always have a hard job, and it's so hard now between the remote learning and the intensity of the external environment, the political questions and the debates and so forth. I think it's really important to remember that different students will bring different kinds of perspectives and exposures with them into the classroom. So I think when a teacher is trying to engage a hard topic, whether it's a hard element of history or a controversial issue in our contemporary debates, it's really important to start by bringing to the surface what's already in students' minds.

So maybe you use a Google doc, maybe you use a chat function, but when a topic comes up before sort of launching into the instructional content or the real digesting of the issue, just go ahead and let the students record the first thing that comes to mind for them when they hear the relevant issue and let them record the emotion that they connect to that issue. I think it's really important that teachers be able to see what the starting points are, both analytically and emotionally that students have for engaging with these [inaudible 00:10:35] issues.

Jill Anderson: Well, I want to thank you so much for taking the time and talking and sharing your thoughts today.

Danielle Allen: Thank you, Jill. Appreciate your interest.

Jill Anderson: Danielle Allen is the director of the Edmond J. Safra Center For Ethics at Harvard. She's a professor at the Harvard graduate school of education and faculty of arts and sciences. She leads the Democratic Knowledge Project, which focuses on how to strengthen and build that knowledge that democratic citizens need to operate their democracy. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast produced by the Harvard graduate school of education. Thanks for listening.

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Civic Education

Civic education, whenever and however undertaken, prepares people of a country, especially the young, to carry out their roles as citizens. Civic education is, therefore, political education or, as Amy Gutmann describes it, “the cultivation of the virtues, knowledge, and skills necessary for political participation” (1987, 287). Of course, in some regimes political participation and therefore civic education can be limited or even negligible.

Though commonly associated with schooling, civic education is not the exclusive domain of schools. A rightly famous rendition of this idea is Tocqueville's often quoted view: “Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people's reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it.” Therefore, understanding civic education, especially democratic education, can, and should, involve both formal settings (schools) and informal settings (families, communities, libraries, houses of worship, workplaces, civic organizations, unions, sports teams, campaigns and elections, mass media, and so on). [ 1 ] Indeed, it seems reasonable to suggest that, following the Athenians of the Classical Age, a sound and effective civic education will coordinate if not integrate these formal and informal settings.

The informal settings and methods are most often associated with political socialization. This entry, however, focuses largely on schooling, which, as Amy Gutmann also points out, is our most deliberate form of human instruction (1987, 15). That is, formal civic education is a term reserved for the organized system of schooling (predominantly public) that aims, as one of its primary purposes, to prepare future citizens for participation in public life. Thus civic education as currently understood is to be contrasted, for example, with paideia (See below.) and other forms of citizen preparation that are informal cultural productions.

Of course, in many significant ways, informal institutions of civic education do help prepare citizens for public participation. Yet today, as Gutmann suggests, the educative effects are often not the deliberate design or intention of those informal institutions. If one were to try to cover all those social and political institutions that had educative effects, the project would become unmanageable. Besides, if we considered civic education to be part of what goes on in any institution even remotely related to civil society, then we are no longer defining and discussing civic education, but are defining and discussing politics itself.

1.1 Ancient Greece

1.2 rousseau: toward progressive education, 1.3 mill: education through political participation.

• 1.4 Early Civic Education in the United States

2.1 Amy Gutmann: Conscious Social Reproduction

• 2.2 William Galston: Civic Education in a Representative System

3.1 Good Persons and Good Citizens

3.2 spectrum of virtues, 4.1 service learning, 4.2 john dewey: school as community, 4.3 paulo freire: liberation pedagogy, 5. cosmopolitan education, works cited, works to consult, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the good citizen [ 2 ].

At the same time that civic educators seek to impart skills, knowledge, and participatory virtues, they also seek to engrain in society's youth a felt connection to, if not an identity with, that country or society. This is no small or minor undertaking. “As far back as evidence can be found—and virtually without exception—young adults seem to have been less attached to civic life than their parents and grandparents.” [ 3 ] Hence there is a need to educate youth to be “civic-minded”; that is, to think and care about the welfare of the community (the commonweal or civitas ) and not simply about their own individual well-being. Here lies a danger, however, for many forms of civic education: Those in charge of it may wish to indoctrinate students rather than educate them, thereby abandoning the very mission that they initially undertook. As Sheldon Wolin phrased it: “…[T]he inherent danger…is that the identity given to the collectivity by those who exercise power will reflect the needs of power rather than the political possibilities of a complex collectivity” (1989, 13). For some regimes—fascist or communist, for example—this is not a danger at all but, instead, the very purpose of their forms of civic education. Nowhere, however, is this danger more insidious than in democracy and, therefore, in democratic education.

Democratic education is a subset of civic education. For philosophers it is the most important—indeed, the predominant—subset. This entry, therefore, focuses exclusively on the subset of democratic education.

There are, of course, more propitious reasons for examining civic education in the context of democracies. One significant reason, for example, can be traced to Aristotle. In The Politics Aristotle asks whether there is any case “in which the excellence of the good citizen and the excellence of the good man coincide” (1277a13-15). The answer for him is politea or the mixed constitution in which persons must know both how to rule and how to obey. Herein coincide the excellence, the virtues, of the good man and the good citizen. Thus in modern democracies society has a vested interest in preparing citizens to rule and to be ruled, as Aristotle pointed out. In democracies, therefore, and especially in civic education the virtues of the citizen are an important, and even a vital, aspect of the virtues of a good person.

In this view, a good or virtuous citizen is nothing other than a good or virtuous person acting morally in the public or political sphere. As we shall consider later, just what the virtues are that constitute, at least in part, that person is not easy to ascertain.

The pursuit of this combination or matching of virtues can be considered a central and perpetual theme of civic educators. We see, for example, John Dewey picking up this theme in the 20 th century. From the 18 th century onward, commented Dewey, states came to see education as the best means of perpetuating and recovering their political power. But “the maintenance of a particular national sovereignty required subordination of individuals to the superior interests of the state both in military defense and in struggles for international supremacy in commerce…To form the citizen, not the ‘man,’ became the aim of education” (1916, 90).

In a democracy, however, because of its combination of “numerous and more varied points of shared common interest” and its requirement of “continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations produced by varied intercourse,” which Dewey called “progress,” education could address personal development and “full and free interplay” among social groups (Ibid, 83, 79). In other words, it is in democratic states that we want to look for the preparation of good persons as well as good citizens; that is, for democratic education, which in this context, to repeat for emphasis, is what is meant by civic education.

We have already encountered Aristotle's view that politea or the mixed constitution provides the excellence of both good citizens and good men. Because that requires men to have the virtues both to rule and be ruled, we should not be surprised that ancient Greece, and especially ancient Athens, is the home of democracy. One of the requirements of any democracy is having the rule of law, because it demands, or should demand, that no one is above the law and that all are equal before the law. Thus, before they could have democracy, the Greeks had to have not only laws but also written laws. Otherwise, those in power could declare the law to be whatever they wanted it to be. So the Greeks wrote down their laws, their statutes, on wood or marble tablets and placed them for all to see in the public squares. Of course, citizens and residents of the cities had to be able to read them, and so the rule of law called for public education to teach the people to read. Thus the ancient Greeks provide one of the earliest forms of civic education.

The polis itself was thought to be an educational community, expressed by the Greek term paideia . The purpose of political—that is civic or city—life was the self-development of the citizens. This meant more than just education, which is how paideia is usually translated. Education for the Greeks involved a deeply formative and life-long process whose goal was for each person (read: man) to be an asset to his friends, to his family, and, most important, to the polis.

Becoming such an asset necessitated internalizing and living up to the highest ethical ideals of the community. So paideia included education in the arts, philosophy and rhetoric, history, science, and mathematics; training in sports and warfare; enculturation or learning of the city's religious, social, political, and professional customs and training to participate in them; and the development of one's moral character through the virtues. Above all, the person should have a keen sense of duty to the city. Every aspect of Greek culture in the Classical Age—from the arts to politics and athletics—was devoted to the development of personal powers in public service.

Paideia was inseparable from another Greek concept: arete or excellence, especially excellence of reputation but also goodness and excellence in all aspects of life. Together paideia and arête form one process of self-development, which is nothing other than civic-development. Thus one could only develop himself in politics, through participation in the activities of the polis; and as individuals developed the characteristics of virtue, so would the polis itself become more virtuous and excellent.

All persons, whatever their occupations or tasks, were teachers, and the purpose of education—which was political life itself—was to develop a greater (a nobler, stronger, more virtuous) public community. So politics was more than regulating or ordering the affairs of the community; it was also a “school” for ordering the lives—internal and external—of the citizens. Therefore, the practice of Athenian democratic politics was not only a means of engendering good policies for the city, but it was also a “curriculum” for the intellectual, moral, and civic education of her citizens. “…[A]sk in general what great benefit the state derives from the training by which it educates its citizens, and the reply will be perfectly straightforward. The good education they have received will make them good men…” (Plato, Laws , 641b7-10). Indeed, later in the Laws the Athenian remarks that education should be designed to produce the desire to become “perfect citizens” who know, preceding Aristotle, “how to rule and be ruled” (643e4-6).

But how far should that “curriculum” go? Citizens are taught to obey the laws; should they also be taught to challenge the laws and customs of the city? Was that not one accusation against Socrates? Civic education in a democracy, though not in every kind of regime, must prepare citizens to participate in and thereby perpetuate the system and at the same time prepare them to challenge what they see as inequities and injustice within that system.

What we observe, therefore, in civic education for democracy—that is, in democratic education—is a tension between the need and desire to perpetuate the roles, rules, standards, values, and institutions of the democratic system and the opposite; that is, the need and desire to challenge those very same roles, rules, standards, values, and institutions. So democratic education is be both conservative, as in “conserving” the stability and continuity of the system, and radical, as in calling into question “the roots” or the foundations of that system. The possible solution to this tension is to suggest that no democratic system that cannot withstand scrutiny of its central values, institutions, and principles deserves to be perpetuated or perpetuated in its current form.

Although ancient Athens instituted democracy, her most famous philosophers—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—were not great champions of it. At best they were ambiguous about democracy; at worst, they were hostile toward it. The earliest unadulterated champion of democracy, a “dreamer of democracy,” was undoubtedly Rousseau. Yet Rousseau had his doubts that men could be good men and simultaneously good citizens. A good man for Rousseau is a natural man, with the attributes of freedom, independence, equality, happiness, sympathy, and love-of-self ( amour de soi ) found prior to society in the state of nature. Thus society could do little but corrupt such a man.

Still, Rousseau recognized that life in society is unavoidable, and so civic education or learning to function well in society is also unavoidable. The ideal for Rousseau is for men to act morally and yet retain as much of their naturalness as possible. Only in this way can a man retain his freedom; and only if a man follows those rules that he prescribes for himself—that is, only if a man is self-ruling—can he remain free: “…[E]ach individual…obeys no one but himself and remains as free as before [society]” (1988, 60).

Yet prescribing those rules is not a subjective or selfish act. It is a moral obligation because the question each citizen asks himself or should ask himself was not “What's best for me?” Rather, each asks, “What's best for all?” When all citizens ask this question and answer on the basis of what ought to be done, then, says Rousseau, they are expressing and following the general will. Enacting the general will is the only legitimately moral foundation for a law and the only expression of moral freedom. Getting men to ask this question and to answer it actively is the purpose of civic education.

Showing how to educate men to retain naturalness and yet to function in society and participate untouched by corruption in this direct democracy was the purpose of his educational treatise, Emile . If it could be done, Rousseau would show us the way. To do it would seem to require educating a man to be in society but not of society; that is, to be “attached to human society as little as possible” (Ibid, 105).

How could a man for Rousseau be a good man—meaning, for him a naturally good man (1979, 93), showing his amour de soi and also his natural compassion for others—and also have the proper frame of mind of a good citizen to be able to transcend self-interest and prescribe the general will? How could this be done in society when society's influence is nothing but corrupting?

Rousseau himself seems ambivalent on exactly whether men can overcome social corruption. Society is based on private property; private property brings inequality, as some own more than others; such inequality brings forth social comparisons with others ( amour propre ), which in turn can produce envy, pride, and greed. Only when and if men can exercise their moral and political freedom and will the general will can they be saved from the corrupting influences of society. Willing for the general will, which is the good for all, is the act of a moral or good person. Its exercise in the assembly is the act of a good citizen.

Still, Rousseau comments that if “[f]orced to combat nature or the social institutions, one must choose between making a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same time” (Ibid, 39). There seems little, if any, ambiguity here. One cannot make both a man and a citizen at the same time. Yet on the very next page of Emile Rousseau raises the question of whether a man who remains true to himself, to his nature, and is always decisive in his choices “is a man or a citizen, or how he goes about being both at the same time” (Ibid, 40).

Perhaps the contradiction might be resolved if we emphasize that a man cannot be made a man and a citizen at the same time, but he can be a man and a citizen at the same time. Rousseau hints at this distinction when he says of his educational scheme that it avoids the “two contrary ends…the contrary routes…these different impulses…[and] these necessarily opposed objects” (Ibid, 40, 41) when you raise a man “uniquely for himself.” What, then, will he be for others? He will be a man and a citizen, for the “double object we set for ourselves,” those contradictory objects, “could be joined in a single one by removing the contradictions of man…” (Idem). Doubtless, this will be a rare man, but raising a man to live a natural life can be done.

One might find the fully mature, and natural, Emile an abhorrent person. Although “good” in the sense of doing his duty and acting civilly, he seems nevertheless without imagination or deep curiosity about people or life itself—no interest in art or many books or intimate social relationships. Is his independence fear of dependence and thus built on an inability ever to be interdependent? Is he truly independent, or does he exhibit simply the appearance of independence, while the tutor “remains master of his person” (Ibid, 332)?

Whatever one thinks of Rousseau's attempt to educate Emile—whether, for example, the tutor's utter control of Emile's life and environment is not in itself a betrayal of education—Rousseau is a precursor of those progressive educators who seek to permit children to learn at their own rate and from their own experiences, as we shall see below.

Mill argued that participation in representative government, or democracy, is undertaken both for its educative effects on participants and for the beneficial political outcomes. Even if elected or appointed officials can perform better than citizens, Mill thought it advisable for citizens to participate “as a means to their own mental education—a mode of strengthening their active faculties, exercising their judgment, and giving them a familiar knowledge of the subjects with which they are thus left to deal. This is a principal, though not the sole, recommendation of jury trial; of free and popular local and municipal institutions; of the conduct of industrial and philanthropic enterprises by voluntary associations” (1972, 179). Thus, political participation is a form of civic education good for men and for citizens.

On Liberty , the essay in which the above quotation appears, is not, writes Mill, the occasion for developing this idea as it relates to “parts of national education.” But in Mill's view the development of the person can and should be undertaken in concert with an education for citizens. The “mental education” he describes is “in truth, the peculiar training of a citizen, the practical part of the political education of a free people, taking them out of the narrow circle of personal and family selfishness, and accustoming them to the comprehension of joint interests, the management of joint concerns—habituating them to act from public or semi-public motives, and guide their conduct by aims which unite instead of isolating them from one another” (Idem).

The occasion for discussing civic education as a method of both personal and political development is Mill's Considerations on Representative Government . Mill wants to see persons “progress.” To achieve progress requires “the preservation of all kinds and amounts of good which already exist, and Progress as consisting in the increase of them.” Of what does Mill's good consist? First are “the qualities in the citizens individually which conduce most to keep up the amount of good conduct…Everybody will agree that those qualities are industry, integrity, justice, and prudence” (1972, 201). Add to these “the particular attributes in human beings which seem to have a more especial reference to Progress…They are chiefly the qualities of mental activity, enterprise, and courage” (Ibid, 202).

So, progress is encouraged when society develops the qualities of citizens and persons. Mill tells us that good government depends on the qualities of the human beings that compose it. Men of virtuous character acting in and through justly administered institutions will stabilize and perpetuate the good society. Good persons will be good citizens, provided they have the requisite political institutions in which they can participate. Such participation—as on juries and parish offices—takes participants out of themselves and away from their selfish interests. If that does not occur, if persons regard only their “interests which are selfish,” then, concludes Mill, good government is impossible. “…[I]f the agents, or those who choose the agents, or those to whom the agents are responsible, or the lookers-on whose opinion ought to influence and check all these, are mere masses of ignorance, stupidity, and baleful prejudice, every operation of government will go wrong” (Ibid, 207).

For Mill good government is a two-way street: Good government depends on “the virtue and intelligence of the human beings composing the community”; while at the same time government can further “promote the virtue and intelligence of the people themselves” (Idem). A measure of the quality of any political institution is how far it tends “to foster in the members of the community the various desirable qualities…moral, intellectual, and active” (Ibid, 208). Good persons act politically as good citizens and are thereby maintained or extended in their goodness. “A government is to be judged by its actions upon men…by what it makes of the citizens, and what it does with them; its tendency to improve or deteriorate the people themselves.” Government helps people advance, acts for the improvement of the people, “is at once a great influence acting on the human mind….” Government is, then, “an agency of national education…” (Ibid, 210, 211).

Following Tocqueville, Mill saw political participation as the basis for this national education. “It is not sufficiently considered how little there is in most men's ordinary life to give any largeness either to their conceptions or to their sentiments.” Their work is routine and dull; they proceed through life without much interest or energy. On the other hand, “if circumstances allow the amount of public duty assigned him to be considerable, it makes him an educated man” (Ibid, 233). In this way participation in democratic institutions “must make [persons] very different beings, in range of ideas and development of faculties, from those who have done nothing in their lives but drive a quill, or sell goods over a counter” (Idem).

There was no national public schooling in Mill's Great Britain, and there were clearly lots of Britons without the requisite characteristics either of good citizens or of good men. Mill was certainly aware of this. He was much influenced by Tocqueville's writings on the tyranny of the majority. Mill feared, as did Tocqueville, that the undereducated or uneducated would dominate and tyrannize politics so as to undermine authority and individuality. Being ignorant and inexperienced, the uneducated and undereducated would be susceptible to all manner of demagoguery and manipulation. So too much power in the hands of the inept and ignorant could damage good citizenship and dam the course of self-development. To remedy this Mill proposed two solutions: limit participation and provide the competent and educated with plural votes.

In Mill's “ideally best polity” the highest levels of policymaking would be reserved for nationally elected representatives and for experts in the civil service. These representatives and experts would not only carry out their political duties, but they would also educate the public through debate and deliberation in representative assemblies, in public forums, and through the press. To assure that the best were elected and for the sake of rational government, Mill provided plural votes to those with college educations and to those of certain occupations and training. All citizens (but the criminal and illiterate) could vote, but not all citizens would vote equally. Some citizens, because they were educated or highly trained persons, were “better” than others: “…[T]hough every one ought to have a voice—that every one should have an equal voice is a totally different proposition…No one but a fool…feels offended by the acknowledgment that there are others whose opinion, and even whose wish, is entitled to a greater amount of consideration than his” (Ibid, 307-8).

But education was the great leveling factor. Though not his view when he wrote Considerations on Representative Government , Mill wrote in his autobiography that universal education could make plural voting unnecessary (1924, pp. 153, 183-84). Mill did acknowledge in Representative Government that a national system of education or “a trustworthy system of general examination” would simplify the means of ascertaining “mental superiority” of some persons over others. In their absence, a person's years of schooling and nature of occupation would suffice to determine who would receive plural votes (1972, 308-09). Given Mill's prescriptions for political participation and given the lessons learned from the deliberations and debates of representatives and experts, however, it is doubtful that civic education would have constituted much of his national education.

1.4 Early Civic Education in the United States [ 4 ]

When Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 23 that the federal government ought to be granted “an unconfined authority in respect to all those objects which are entrusted to its management” (1987, p. 187), he underscored the need of the newly organized central government for, in Sheldon Wolin's words, “a new type of citizen…one who would accept the attenuated relationship with power implied if voting and elections were to serve as the main link between citizens and those in power.” [ 5 ] Schools would be entrusted to develop this new type of citizen.

It is commonplace, therefore, to find among those who examine the interstices of democracy and education views much like Franklin Delano Roosevelt's: “That the schools make worthy citizens is the most important responsibility placed on them.” In the United States public schools had the mission of educating the young for citizenship.

Initially education in America was not publicly funded. It wasn't even a system, however inchoate. Instead it was every community for itself. Nor was it universal education. Education was restricted to free white males and, moreover, free white males who could afford the school fees. One of the “founders” of the public-school system in the United States, even though his era predated the establishment of public schools, was Noah Webster, who saw education as the tool for developing a national identity. As a result, he created his own speller and dictionary as a way of advancing a common American language.

Opposed to this idea of developing a national identity was Thomas Jefferson, who saw education as the means for safeguarding individual rights, especially against the intrusions of the state. Central to Jefferson's democratic education were the “liberal arts.” These arts liberate men and women (though Jefferson was thinking only of men) from the grip of both tyrants and demagogues and enable those liberated to rule themselves. Through his ward system of education, Jefferson proposed establishing free schools to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, and from these schools those of intellectual ability, regardless of background or economic status, would receive a college education paid for by the state.

When widespread free or publicly funded education did come to America in the 19 th century, it came in the form of Horace Mann's “common school.” Such schools would educate all children together, “in common,” regardless of their background, religion, or social standing. Underneath such fine sentiments lurked an additional goal: to ensure that all children could flourish in America's democratic system. The civic education curriculum was explicit, if not simplistic. To create good citizens and good persons required little beyond teaching the basic mechanics of government and imbuing students with loyalty to America and her democratic ideals. That involved large amounts of rote memorization of information about political and military history and about the workings of governmental bodies at the local, state, and federal levels. It also involved conformity to specific rules describing conduct inside and outside of school.

Through this kind of civic education, all children would be melded, if not melted, into an American citizen. A heavy emphasis on Protestantism at the expense of Catholicism was one example of such work. What some supporters might have called “assimilation” of foreigners into an American way of life, critics saw as “homogenization,” “normalization,” and “conformity,” if not “uniformity.” With over nine million immigrants coming to America between 1880 and the First World War, it is not surprising that there was resistance by many immigrant communities to what seemed insensitivity to foreign language and culture. Hence what developed was a system of religious—namely Catholic—education separate from the “public school” system.

While Webster and, after him, Mann wanted public education to generate the national identity that they thought democracy required, later educational reformers moved away from the idea of the common school and toward a differentiation of students. The Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, for example, pushed in 1906 for industrial and vocational education in the public schools. Educating all youth equally for participation in democracy by giving them a liberal, or academic, education, they argued, was a waste of time and resources. “School reformers insisted that the academic curriculum was not appropriate for all children, because most children—especially the children of immigrants and of African Americans—lacked the intellectual capacity to study subjects like algebra and chemistry” (Ravitch, 2001, 21).

Acting against this view of education was John Dewey. Because Dewey saw democracy as a way of life, he argued that all children deserved and required a democratic education. [ 6 ] As citizens came to share in the interests of others, which they would do in their schools, divisions of race, class, and ethnicity would be worn down and transcended. Dewey thought that the actual interests and experiences of students should be the basis of their education. I recur to a consideration of Dewey and civic education below.

2. The Good Democrat

If voting and campaigns alone are the principal activities of citizenship, as Sheldon Wolin suggests, then what kind of civic education is warranted for creating worthy citizens?

Future citizens might be required only to know how, for example, a democratic system works—the functions of the different branches, the purpose and procedures of elections, the history of the country's systems of governance and governmental institutions—and to know the rights and obligations of citizenship. This is, of course, the content of much civic education today.

Along this line of thinking, one could make an argument that today's sound-bite candidates, their stump-speech “debates,” and their perpetual money-driven campaigns require little in the way of civic education for our citizens. Of course, someone else could argue that our democratic elections demand the opposite: a civic education in critical thinking, if not in resistance, to expose the nature of campaigns and elections. But if you arm citizens with a civic education that teaches them to step back reflectively and critically from our democratic systems, then, so one version could go, you should expect a critique of that system since it fails to exercise the very critical-thinking skills that they were taught.

If, therefore, we wish to educate future citizens for a different sort of participation, if we want them to challenge officials and the nature and scope of the democratic system itself—that is, if we want civic education and not civic indoctrination—then we also need to educate them to think critically about our democratic systems. Both political knowledge and critical thinking are required if citizens are to participate and share in what Amy Gutmann describes as the collective re-creation of our society or “conscious social reproduction” (1987, 14 and passim). Gutmann's arguments on how to justify democratic education are some of the best currently on offer.

Democratic society-at-large, argues Gutmann, has a significant stake in the education of its children, for they will grow up to be democratic citizens. At the very least, then, society has the responsibility for educating all children for citizenship. Because democratic societies have this responsibility, we cannot leave the education of future citizens to the will or whim of parents. This central insight leads Gutmann to rule out certain exclusive suzerainties of power over educational theory and policy. Those suzerainties are of three sorts. First is “the family state” in which all children are educated into the sole good life identified and fortified by the state. Such education cultivates “a level of like-mindedness and camaraderie among citizens” that most persons find only in families (Ibid, 23). Only the state can be entrusted with the authority to mandate and carry out an education of such magnitude that all will learn to desire this one particular good life over all others.

Next is “the state of families” that rests on the impulse of families to perpetuate their values through their children. This state “places educational authority exclusively in the hands of parents, thereby permitting parents to predispose their children, through education, to choose a way of life consistent with their familial heritage” (Ibid, 28).

Finally, Gutmann argues against “the state of individuals,” which is based on a notion of liberal neutrality in which both parents and the state look to educational experts to make certain that no way of life is neglected nor discriminated against. The desire here is to avoid controversy, and to avoid teaching virtues, in a climate of social pluralism. Yet, as Gutmann points out, any educational policy is itself a choice that will shape our children's character. Choosing to educate for freedom rather than for virtue is still insinuating an influential choice.

In light of these three theories that fail to provide an adequate foundation for educational authority, Gutmann proposes “a democratic state of education.” This state recognizes that educational authority must be shared among parents, citizens, and educational professionals, because each has a legitimate interest in each child and the child's future. Whatever our aim of education, whatever kind of education these authorities argue for, it will not be, it cannot be, neutral. Needed is an educational aim that is inclusive. Gutmann settles on our inclusive commitment as democratic citizens to conscious social reproduction, the self-conscious shaping of the structures of society. To actuate this commitment we as a society “must educate all educable children to be capable of participating in collectively shaping their society” (Ibid, 14).

To shape the structures of society, to engage in conscious social reproduction, students will need to develop the capacities for examining and evaluating competing conceptions of the good life and the good society, and society must avoid the inculcation “in children [of the] uncritical acceptance of any particular way or ways of [personal and political] life” (Ibid, 44). This is the crux of Gutmann's democratic education. For this reason, she argues forcefully that children must learn to exercise critical deliberation among good lives and, presumably, good societies. To assure that they can do so, limits must be set for when and where parents and the state can interfere. Guidelines must be introduced that limit the political authority of the state and the parental authority of families. One limit is nonrepression, which assures that neither the state nor any group within it can “restrict rational deliberation of competing conceptions of the good life and the good society” (Idem). In this way, adults cannot use their freedom to deliberate to prohibit the future deliberative freedom of children. Furthermore, claims Gutmann, nonrepression requires schools to support “the intellectual and emotional preconditions for democratic deliberation among future generations of citizens” (Ibid, 76.)

The second limit is nondiscrimination, which prevents the state or groups within the state from excluding anyone or any group from an education in deliberation. Thus, as Gutmann says, “all educable children must be educated” (Ibid, 45).

Gutmann's point is not that the state has a greater interest than parents in the education of our children. Instead, her point is that all citizens of the state have a common interest in educating future citizens. Therefore, while parents should have a say in the education of their children, the state should have a say as well. Yet neither should have the final, or a monopolistic, say. Indeed, these two interested parties should also cede some of their educational authority to educational experts. There is, therefore, a collective interest in schooling, which is why Gutmann finds parental “choice” and voucher programs unacceptable.

But is conscious social reproduction the only aim of education? What about shaping one's private concerns? Isn't educating the young to be good persons also important? Or are the skills that encourage citizen participation also the skills necessary for making personal life choices and personal decision-making? For Gutmann, educating for one is also educating for the other: “…[M]any if not all of the capacities necessary for choice among good lives are also necessary for choice among good societies” (p. 40). She goes even further: “a good life and a good society for self-reflective people require (respectively) individual and collective freedom of choice” (Idem). Here Gutmann is stipulating that to have conscious social reproduction citizens must have the opportunity—the freedom and the capacities—to exercise personal or self-reflective choice.

Because the state is interested in the education of future citizens, all children must develop those capacities necessary for choice among good societies; this is simply what Gutmann means by being able to participate in conscious social reproduction. Yet such capacities also enable persons to scrutinize the ways of life that they have inherited. Thus, Gutmann concludes, it is illegitimate for any parent to impose a particular way of life on anyone else, even on his/her own child, for this would deprive the child of the capacities necessary for citizenship as well as for choosing a good life.

Gutmann's position is that government can and must force one to participate in an education for citizenship. Children must be exposed to ways of life different from their parents' and must embrace certain values such as mutual respect. On this last point Gutmann is insistent. She argues that choice is not meaningful, for anyone, unless persons choosing have “the intellectual skills necessary to evaluate ways of life different from that of their parents.” Without the teaching of such skills as a central component of education children will not be taught “mutual respect among persons” (Ibid, 30-31). “Teaching mutual respect is instrumental to assuring all children the freedom to choose in the future…[S]ocial diversity enriches our lives by expanding our understanding of differing ways of life. To reap the benefits of social diversity, children must be exposed to ways of life different from their parents and—in the course of their exposure—must embrace certain values, such as mutual respect among persons…” (Ibid, 32-33).

2.2 William Galston: Civic Education in Representative Democracy

Yet what Gutmann suggests seems to go beyond seeing diversity as enrichment. She suggests that children not simply tolerate ways of life divergent from their own, but that they actually respect them. She is careful to say “mutual respect among persons,” which can only mean that neo-Nazis, while advocating an execrable way of life, must be respected as persons, though their way of life should be condemned. Perhaps this is a subtlety that Gutmann intended, but William Galston, for one, has come away thinking that Gutmann advocates forcing children to confront their own ways of life as they simultaneously show respect for neo-Nazis.

In our representative system, argues Galston, citizens need to develop “the capacity to evaluate the talents, character, and performance of public officials” (1989, p. 93). This, he says, is what our democratic system demands from citizens. Thus he disagrees with Gutmann, so much so that he says, “It is at best a partial truth to characterize the United States as a democracy in Gutmann's sense” (Ibid, p. 94). We do not require deliberation among our citizens, says Galston, because “representative institutions replace direct self-government for many purposes” (Idem). Civic education, therefore, should not be about teaching the skills and virtues of deliberation, but, instead, about teaching “the virtues and competences needed to select representatives wisely, to relate to them appropriately, and to evaluate their performance in office soberly” (Idem).

Because civic education is limited in scope to what Galston outlines above, students will not be expected, and will not be taught, to evaluate their own ways of life. Persons must be able to lead the kinds of lives they find valuable, without fear that they will be coerced into believing or acting or thinking contrary to their values, including being led to question those ways of life that they have inherited. As Galston points out, “[c]ivic tolerance of deep differences is perfectly compatible with unswerving belief in the correctness of one's own way of life” (Ibid, p. 99).

Some parents, for example, are not interested in having their children choose ways of life. Those parents believe that the way of life that they currently follow is not simply best for them but is best simpliciter . To introduce choice is simply to confuse the children and the issue. If you know the true way to live, is it best to let your children wade among diverse ways of life until they can possibly get it right? Or should you socialize the children into the right way of life as soon and as quickly as possible?

Yet what about the obligations that parents, as citizens, and children as future citizens, owe the state? How can children be prepared to participate in collectively shaping society if they have not received an education in how to deliberate about choices? To this some parents might respond that they are not interested in having their children focus on participation, or perhaps on anything secular. What these parents appreciate about liberal democracy is that there is a clear, and firm, separation between public and private, and they seek to focus exclusively on the private. Citizenship offers protections of the law, and it does not require participation. Liberal democracy certainly will not force one to participate.

Yet both Galston and Gutmann want to educate children for “democratic character.” Both see the need in this respect for critical thinking. For Galston children must develop “the capacity to evaluate the talents, character, and performance of public officials”; Gutmann seeks to educate the capacities necessary for choice among good lives and for choice among good societies. However much critical thinking plays in democratic character, active participation requires something more than mere skills, even thinking skills.

3. The Good Person

The qualities of the good citizen are not, then, simply the skills necessary to participate in the political system. They are also the virtues that will lead one to participate, to want to participate, to have a disposition to participate. This is what Rousseau was referring to when he described how citizens in his ideal polity would “fly to the assemblies” (1988, 140). Citizens, that is, ought to display a certain kind of disposition or character. As it turns out, and not surprisingly, given our perspective, in a democracy the virtues or traits that constitute good citizenship are also closely associated with being a good or moral person. We can summarize that close association as what we mean by the phrase "good character."

It is the absence of these virtues or traits—that is, the absence of character—that leads some to conclude that democracy, especially in the United States, is in crisis. The withering of our democratic system, argues Richard Battistoni, for one, can be traced to “a crisis in civic education” and the failure of our educators to prepare citizens for democratic participation (1985, pp. 4-5). Missing, he argues, is a central character trait, a disposition to participate. Crucial to the continuation of our democracy “is the proper inculcation in the young of the character, skills, values, social practices, and ideals that foster democratic politics” (Ibid, p. 15); in other words, educating for democratic character.

Two groups predominate in advocating the use of character education as a way of improving democracy. One group comprises political theorists such as Galston, Battistoni, Benjamin Barber, and Adrian Oldfield who often reflect modern-day versions of civic republicanism. This group wishes to instill or nurture [ 7 ] a willingness among our future citizens to sacrifice their self-interests for the sake of the common good. Participation on this view is important both to stabilize society and to enhance each individual's human flourishing through the promotion of our collective welfare.

The second group does not see democratic participation as the center, but instead sees democratic participation as one aspect of overall character education. Central to the mission of our public schools, on this view, is the establishing of character traits important both to individual conduct (being a good person) and to a thriving democracy (being a good citizen). The unannounced leader of the second group is educational practitioner Thomas Lickona, and it includes such others as William Bennett and Patricia White.

Neither group describes in actual terms what might be called “democratic character.” Though their work intimates such character, they talk more about character traits important to human growth and well-being, which also happen to be related to democratic participation. What traits do these pundits discuss, and what do they mean by “character”?

It is difficult, comments British philosopher R. S. Peters, “to decide what in general we mean when we speak of a person's character as distinct from his nature, his temperament, and his personality” (1966, p. 40). Many advocates of character education are vague on just this distinction, and it might be helpful to propose that character consists of traits that are learned, while personality and temperament consist of traits that are innate. [ 8 ]

What advocates are clear on, however, is that character is the essence of what we are. The term comes from the world of engraving, from the Greek term kharakter , an instrument used for making distinctive marks. Thus character is what marks a person or persons as distinctive.

Character is not just one attribute or trait. It signifies the sum total of particular traits, the “sum of mental and moral qualities” ( O.E.D ., p. 163). The addition of “moral qualities” to the definition may be insignificant, for character carries with it a connotation of “good” traits. Thus character traits are associated, if not synonymous, with virtues. So a good person and, in the context of liberal democracy, a good citizen will have these virtues.

To Thomas Lickona a virtue is “a reliable inner disposition to respond to situations in a morally good way” (p. 51); “good character,” he continues, “consists of knowing the good, desiring the good, and doing the good” (Idem). Who determines what the good is? In general, inculcated traits or virtues or dispositions are used “in following rules of conduct.” These are the rules that reinforce social conventions and social order (Peters, p. 40). So in this view social convention determines what “good” means.

This might be problematic. What occurs when the set of virtues of the good person clashes with the set of virtues of the good citizen? What is thought to be good in one context, even when approved by society, is not necessarily what is thought to be good in another. Should the only child of a deceased farmer stay at home to care for his ailing mother, or should he, like a good citizen, join the resistance to fight an occupying army?

What do we do when the requirements of civic education call into question the values or beliefs of what one takes to be the values of being a good person? In Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education just such a case occurred. Should the Mozerts and other fundamentalist Christian parents have the right to opt their children out of those classes that required their children to read selections that went against or undermined their faith? On the one hand, if they are permitted to opt out, then without those children present the class is denied the diversity of opinion on the reading selections that would be educative and a hallmark of democracy. On the other hand, if the children cannot opt out, then they are denied the right to follow their faith as they think necessary. [ 9 ]

We can see, therefore, why educating for character has never been straightforward. William Bennett pushes for the virtues of patriotism, loyalty, and national pride; Amy Gutmann wants to see toleration of difference and mutual respect. Can a pacifist in a time of war be a patriot? Is the rebel a hero or simply a troublemaker? [ 10 ] Can idealized character types speak to all of our students and to the variegated contexts in which they will find themselves?

Should our teachers teach a prescribed morality, often closely linked to certain religious ideas and ideals? Should they teach a content only of secular values related to democratic character? Or should they teach a form of values clarification in which children's moral positions are identified but not criticized?

These two approaches—a prescribed moral content or values clarification—appear to form the two ends of a character education spectrum. At one end is the method of indoctrination of prescribed values and virtues, regardless of sacred or secular orientation. But here some citizens will express concern about just whose values are to be taught or, to some, imposed. [ 11 ] At the same time, some will see the inculcation of specified values and virtues as little more than teaching a “morality of compliance” (Nord, 2001, 144).

At the other end of the spectrum is values clarification, [ 12 ] but this seems to be a kind of moral relativism where everything goes because nothing can be ruled out. In values clarification there is no right or wrong value to hold. Indeed, teachers are supposed to be value neutral so as to avoid imposing values on their students and to avoid damaging students' self-esteem. William Damon calls this approach “anything-goes constructivism” (1996), for such a position may leave the door open for students to approve racism, violence, and “might makes right.”

Is there a middle of the spectrum that would not impose values or simply clarify values? There is no middle path that can cut a swath through imposition on one side and clarification on the other. Perhaps the closest we can get is to offer something like Gutmann's or Galston's teaching of critical thinking. Here students can think about and think through what different moral situations require of persons. With fascists looking for hiding Jews, I lie; about my wife's new dress, I tell the truth (well, usually). Even critical thinking, however, requires students to be critical about something. That is, we must presuppose the existence, if not prior inculcation, of some values about which to be critical.

What we have, then, is not a spectrum but a sequence, a developmental sequence. Character education, from this perspective, begins with the inculcation in students of specific values. But at a later date character education switches to teaching and using the skills of critical thinking on the very values that have been inculcated.

This approach is in keeping with what William Damon, an expert on innovative education and on intellectual and moral development, has observed: “The capacity for constructive criticism is an essential requirement for civic engagement in a democratic society; but in the course of intellectual development, this capacity must build upon a prior sympathetic understanding of that which is being criticized” (2001, 135).

The process, therefore, would consist of two phases, two developmental phases. Phase One is the indoctrination phase. Yet which values do we inculcate? Perhaps the easiest way to begin is to focus first on those behaviors that all students must possess. In fact, without first insisting that students “behave,” it seems problematic whether students could ever learn to think critically. Every school, in order to conduct the business of education, reinforces certain values and behaviors. Teachers demand that students sit in their seats; raise their hands before speaking; hand assignments in on time; display sportsmanship on the athletic field; be punctual when coming to class; do not cheat on their tests or homework; refrain from attacking one another on the playground, in the hallways, or in the classroom; be respectful of and polite to their elders (e.g., teachers, staff, administrators, parents, visitors, police); and the like. The teachers' commands, demands, manner of interacting with the students, and own conformity to the regulations of the classroom and school establish an ethos of behavior—a way of conducting oneself within that institution. From the ethos come the requisite virtues—honesty, cooperation, civility, respect, and so on. [ 13 ]

Another set of values to inculcate at this early stage is that associated with democracy. Here the lessons are more didactic than behavioral. One point of civic education in a democracy is to raise free and equal citizens who appreciate that they have both rights and responsibilities. Students need to learn that they have freedoms, such as those found in Bill of Rights (press, assembly, worship, and the like) in the U. S. Constitution. But they also need to learn that they have responsibilities to their fellow citizens and to their country. This requires teaching students to obey the law; not to interfere with the rights of others; and to honor their country, its principles, and its values. Schools must teach those traits or virtues that conduce to democratic character: cooperation, honesty, toleration, and respect.

So we inculcate in our students the values and virtues that our society honors as those that constitute good citizenship and good character. But if we inculcate a love of justice, say, is it the justice found in our laws or an ideal justice that underlies all laws? Obviously, this question will not arise in the minds of most, if any, first graders. As students mature and develop cognitively, however, such questions will arise. So a high-school student studying American History might well ask whether the Jim Crow laws found in the South were just laws simply because they were the law. Or were they only just laws until they were discovered through argument to be unjust? Or were they always unjust because they did not live up to some ideal conception of justice?

Then we could introduce Phase Two of character education: education in judgment. Judgment is based on weighing and considering reasons and evidence for and against propositions. Judgment is a virtue that relies upon practical wisdom; it is established as a habit through practice. Judgment, or thoughtfulness, was the master virtue for Aristotle from whose exercise comes an appreciation for those other virtues: honesty, cooperation, toleration, and respect.

Because young children have difficulty taking up multiple perspectives, as developmental psychologists tell us, thinking and deliberating that require the consideration of multiple perspectives would seem unsuitable for elementary-school children. Additionally, young children are far more reliant on the teacher's involvement in presenting problem situations in which the children's knowledge and skills can be applied and developed. R. S. Peters offers an important consideration in this regard:

The cardinal function of the teacher, in the early stages, is to get the pupil on the inside of the form of thought or awareness with which he is concerned. At a later stage, when the pupil has built into his mind both the concepts and the mode of exploration involved, the difference between teacher and taught is obviously only one of degree. For both are participating in the shared experience of exploring a common world (1966, 53).

The distinction between those moving into “the inside” of reflective thinking and those already there may seem so vast as to be a difference of kind, not degree. But the difference is always one of degree. Elementary-school students have yet to develop the skills and knowledge, or have yet to gain the experience, to participate in phase- two procedures that require perspectivism.

In this two-phased civic education teachers inculcate specific virtues such as patriotism. But at a later stage this orientation toward solidifying a conventional perspective gives way to one of critical thinking. The virtue of patriotism shifts from an indoctrinated feeling of exaltation for the nation, whatever its actions and motives, to a need to examine the nation's principles and practices to see whether those practices are in harmony with those principles. The first requires loyalty; the second, judgment. We teach the first through pledges, salutes, and oaths; we teach the second through critical inquiry.

Have we introduced a significant problem when we teach students to judge values, standards, and beliefs critically? Could this approach lead to students' contempt for authority and tradition? Students need to see and hear that disagreement does not necessarily entail disrespect. Thoughtful, decent people can disagree. To teach students that those who disagree with us in a complicated situation like abortion or affirmative action are wrong or irresponsible or weak is to treat them unfairly. It also conveys the message that we think that we are infallible and have nothing to learn from what others have to say. Such positions undercut democracy.

Would all parents approve of such a two-phased civic education? Would they abide their children's possible questioning of their families' values and religious views? Yet the response to such parental concerns must be the same as that to any authority figure: Why do you think that you are always right? Aren't there times when parents can see that it is better to lie, maybe even to their children, than to tell the truth? This, however, presupposes that parents, or authority figures, are themselves willing to exercise critical judgment on their own positions, values, and behaviors. This point underscores the need to involve other social institutions and persons in character education.

4. Civic Education as Political Action

Civic education as political action is to be contrasted with the more traditional form or teacher-centered education. This is not to suggest that those teaching political action will shirk or short-change knowledge and instruction in favor of exercises, simulations, and projects. Instead, knowledge and instruction arise out of the students' own experiences and interests. That is the point of student-centered in place of teacher-centered education.

Putting students into the community-at-large is today called “service learning,” which is a form of civic education that integrates classroom instruction with work within the community. This is not a combination of classroom and community, as if students undertake two different kinds of work side-by-side. Rather, the work done in the community has a learning objective related directly to what the students are studying in the classroom.

Service learning is in keeping with Dewey's emphasis on students' linking learning with real-world experiences found in their communities. Dewey warned of the “standing danger that the material of formal instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject matter of life experience.” This could be countered by immersing students in “the spirit of service,” especially by learning about the various occupations within their communities (1916, 10-11, 49). [ 14 ]

A variation of service learning, highly popular in the U.S. during the 1970's, is experiential learning, which was thought of as a species of civic education. Jerome Bruner, the renowned educator and psychologist, proposed that some classroom learning ought to be devoted to students creating political-action plans addressing significant social and political issues such as poverty or race. He also urged educators to get their students out into the local communities to explore the occupations, ways of life, and habits of residence. Bruner is here following Dewey, who criticized traditional education for its failure to get teachers and students out into the community to become intimately familiar with the physical, historical, occupational, and economic conditions that could then be used as educational resources (Dewey 1938, 40).

We live in an age of high-density electronic technology—for example, television, DVD players, cell phones that serve as cameras and computers, computer and video games. In this climate face-to-face interaction seems in decline as people isolate themselves in their homes and offices and disconnect themselves more and more from public, and thus political, interaction. As a result, the need for experiential education, service-learning, and activist civic education may never have been greater.

Activism in this sense is nothing other than students taking an active role in their own learning and doing so in contexts within and outside the classroom. It is experiential and cooperative learning. William Damon concludes that the most effective moral education programs “are those that engage students directly in action, with subsequent opportunities for reflection” (2001, 144). Community service is touted, almost universally, as one such avenue of reflection. But that is really just the beginning.

We can think of political action as participation that can involve far more than voting, working on a campaign, or writing a letter to the editor. It can take many other forms: attending and participating in political meetings; organizing and running meetings, rallies, protests, fund drives; gathering signatures for bills, ballots, initiatives, recalls; serving without pay on local elected and appointed boards; starting or participating in political clubs; deliberating with fellow citizens about social and political issues central to their lives; and the like. If we include service-learning as part of civic education, then we can broaden the concept of civic education even further to include various kinds of voluntarism and community work. Action here could include participation in the sphere of civil society, the network of non-governmental and private organizations differentiated from the family, the market, and the state. Students could be encouraged to volunteer in a soup kitchen, take part in a walkathon, clean up a neighborhood, or organize a basketball tournament to benefit homeless children. Such action exercises the skills that can be associated with political action.

Thus, one argument for activist civic education is that it meets the criteria of cultivating both good persons and good citizens. When students take responsibility for their own learning, when they work together cooperatively, when they deliberate about how to proceed on a project in the community or in their classrooms, and when they actually work in the community, they exercise the skills and values that we associate with democracy and effective, moral social interaction. They exhibit the values, or virtues, of toleration of differences, mutual respect, listening, reasoning, criticizing, empathy, and acceptance of responsibility.

Why does action work so well as a form of moral or character education? “The reason, again, is that students respond to experiences that touch their emotions and senses of self in a firsthand way” (Damon, 2001, 141). There is also a “negative” reason, which is really a compensatory reason: As Conover and Searing point out, “while most students identify themselves as citizens, their grasp of what it means to act as citizens is rudimentary and dominated by a focus on rights, thus creating a privately oriented, passive understanding” (2000, 108). To bring them out of this private and passive understanding, nothing is better, as Tocqueville noted, than political participation. The kind of participation here is political action, not simply voting or giving money.

Nowhere is there a better site for political or democratic action than the school itself, the students' own community. This is Dewey's insight (1916). Creating a democratic culture within the schools not only facilitates preparing students for democratic participation in the political system, but it also fosters a democratic environment that shapes the relationships with adults and among peers that the students already engage in. “Students learn much more from the way a school is run,” comments Theodore Sizer, “and the best way to teach values is when the school is a living example of the values to be taught” (1984, 120, 122).

Real problems, and not hypotheticals or academic exercises, are, Dewey argued, always of real concern to students. So in addition to activities of writing and classroom discussion, typical of today's public schools, students should engage in “active inquiry and careful deliberation in the significant and vital problems” that confront their communities, however defined but especially their schools (1910, 55). Book lessons and classroom discussions rarely connect with decision-making on issues that affect that community. In fact, Dewey comments that traditional methods of instruction are often “foreign to the existing capacities of the young…beyond the reach of [their] experience…[T]he very situation forbids much active participation by pupils” (1938, 19).

As a core of learning Dewey wanted “an experiential continuum” (1938, 28, 33). The experiences that he wanted to promote were those that underscored healthy growth; those, in other words, that generated a greater desire to learn and to keep on learning and that built upon prior experiences. “[D]emocratic social experiences” were superior in providing “a better quality of human experience” than any other form of social or political organization (Ibid, 34).

One logical, and practical, possibility was to make the operations of the school part of the curriculum. Let the students use their in-school experiences to make, or help make, decisions that directly affect some of the day-to-day operations of the school—student discipline, maintenance of the grounds and buildings, problems with cliques, issues of sexism and racism, incidents of ostracism, and the like—as well as topics and issues inside the classrooms. Make the school itself part of the curriculum.

Dewey thought of schools as “embryo communities” (1915, 174), “institution[s] in which the child is, for the time…to be a member of a community life in which he feels that he participates, and to which he contributes” (1916, 88). We need not become sidetracked in questioning just what Dewey means by, or what we should mean by, “community” to grasp the sense that he is after. It is not surprising that Dewey wanted to give students experience in making decisions that affect their lives in schools. What is surprising is that so little democracy takes place in schools and that those who spend the most time in schools have the least opportunity to experience it.

The significance of democratic decision-making within the schools and about the wider community—the making of actual decisions through democratic means—cannot be overstated. As a propaedeutic to democratic participation, political action of this sort is invaluable. Melissa S. Williams comments: “…[L]earning cooperation as a practice is the only way to develop individuals' sense of agency to reshape the world they share with others. It teaches moderation in promoting one's own vision, and the capacity of individuals to see themselves as part of a project of collective self-rule” (2005, 238; emphasis in original).

Of course, not everything in school should be decided democratically. There are some areas in which decisions require expertise—a combination of experience and knowledge—that rules out students as decision-makers. Chief among such areas is pedagogy. Because the teachers and administrators know more about the processes of education and about their subjects, because they have firsthand and often intimate knowledge of the range and nature of abilities and problems of their students—a point emphasized by Dewey (1938, 56)—as well as the particular circumstances in which the learning takes place, they and not the students should make pedagogical decisions.

At the same time, because many students are still children, the decisions that they are to make should be age-appropriate. Not all democratic procedures or school issues are suitable for all ages. Differences in cognitive, social, and emotional development, especially at the elementary-school level, complicate democratic action. While all students may have the same capacity as potentiality, activating those capacities requires development, as noted in the discussion of a two-phased form of civic education.

In his critique of traditional pedagogy Paulo Freire refers to teacher-centered education as the “banking concept of education” (1970, 72). This for Freire is unacceptable as civic education. Too often, observes Freire, students are asked to memorize and repeat ideas, stanzas, phrases, and formulas without understanding the meaning of or meaning behind them. This process “turns [students] into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher” (Idem). As a result, students are nothing but objects, nothing but receptacles to receive, file, and store deposits—that is, containers for what the teacher has deposited in their “banks.”

Like Dewey, Freire thinks that knowledge comes only from invention and reinvention and the perpetual inquiry in the world that is a mark of all free human beings. Students thereby educate the teachers as well. In sharp contrast, then, to the banking concept is “‘problem-posing’ education” (Ibid, 79), which is an experiential education that empowers students by educing the power that they already possess.

That power is to be used to liberate themselves from oppression. This pedagogy to end oppression, as Freire writes, “must be forged with , not for , the oppressed” (1970, 48; emphases in original), irrespective of whether they are children or adults. Freire worked primarily with illiterate adult peasants in South America, but his work has applications as well to schools and school-aged children. It is to be a pedagogy for all, and Freire includes oppressors and the oppressed.

To overcome oppression people must first critically recognize its causes. One cause is people's own internalization of the oppressor consciousness [or “image,” as Freire says at one point (Ibid, 61)]. Until the oppressed seek to remove this internalized oppressor, they cannot be free. They will continue to live in the duality of both oppressed and oppressor. It is no wonder, then, as Freire tells us, that peasants once promoted to overseers become more tyrannical toward their former workmates than the owners themselves (Ibid, 46). The banking concept of education precludes the perspective that students need to recognize their oppression: “The more students [or adults] work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world” (Ibid, 73).

Having confronted the reality of the dual nature of her consciousness, having discovered her own internal oppressor and realized her actual situation, the person now must act on her realization. She must act, in other words, in and on the world so as to lessen oppression. Freire wanted his students, whether adult peasants or a country's youth, to value their cultures as they simultaneously questioned some of those cultures' practices and ethos. This Freire referred to as “reading the word”—as in ending illiteracy—and “reading the world”—the ability to analyze social and political situations that influenced and especially limited people's life chances. For Freire, to question was not enough; people must act as well.

Liberation, therefore, is a “praxis,” but it cannot consist of action alone, which Freire calls “activism.” It must be, instead, action combined with “serious reflection” (Ibid, 79, 65). This reflection or “reflective participation” takes place in dialogue with others who are in the same position of realization and action.

This “critical and liberating dialogue,” also known as “culture circles,” is the heart of Freire's pedagogy. The circles consist of somewhere between 12 and 25 students and some teachers, all involved in dialogic exchange. The role of the “teachers” in this civic education is to participate with the people/students in these dialogues. “The correct method for a revolutionary leadership…is, therefore, not ‘libertarian propaganda.’ Nor can the leadership merely ‘implant’ in the oppressed a belief in freedom…The correct method lies in dialogue” (Ibid, 67).

The oppressed thereby use their own experiences and language to explain and surmount their oppression. They do not rely upon others, even teachers, to explain their oppressed circumstances. “Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers” (Ibid, 80). The reciprocity of roles means that students teach teachers as teachers teach students. Dialogue encourages everyone to teach and everyone to create together.

Because Freire worked with illiterate adult peasants, he insisted that the circles use the ways of speaking and the shared understandings of the peasants themselves. In the circles the learners identify their own problems and concerns and seek answers to them in the group dialogue. Dialogue focuses on what Freire called “codifications,” which are representations of the learner's day-to-day circumstances (Ibid, 114 and passim). Codifications may be photographs, drawings, poems, even a single word. As representations, codifications abstract the daily circumstances. For example, a photograph of workers in a sugar cane field permits workers to talk about the realities of their work and working conditions without identifying them as the actual workers in the photograph. This permits the dialogue to steer toward understanding the nature of the participants' specific circumstances but from a more abstract position. Teachers and learners worked together to understand the problems identified by the peasants, a process that Freire calls “decoding,” and to propose actions to be taken to rectify or overturn those problems.

The circles therefore have four basic elements: 1) problem posing, 2) critical dialogue, 3) solution posing, and 4) plan of action. The goal, of course, is to overcome the problems, but it is also to raise the awareness, the critical consciousness (conscientization), of the learners so as to end oppression in their individual and collective lives. The increased critical awareness enables learners to appropriate language without being colonized by it. [ 15 ] Decoding allows participants “to perceive reality differently…by broadening the horizon of perception…[It] stimulates the appearance of a new perception” that allows for the transformation of the participants' concrete reality (Ibid 115).

“Finally,” comments Freire, “true dialogue cannot exist unless the dialoguers engage in critical thinking…thinking which perceives reality as process, as transformation, rather than as a static activity” (Ibid, 92).

True dialogue is for Freire what civic education must be about. If civic education does not include it, then there is little hope that the future will be anything for the oppressed but a continuation of the present. “Authentic education is not carried on by ‘A’ for ‘B’ or by ‘A’ about ‘B,’ but by ‘A’ with ‘B’…” (Ibid, 93; emphases in original). Essential to such education are the experiences of the students, whatever their ages or situations. Naively conceived humanism, part and parcel of so much traditional education, tries “to create an ideal model of the ‘good man,’” but does so by leaving out “the concrete, existential, present situation of real people” (Idem). Therefore, traditional civic education, non-experiential civic education that overlooks the importance of Freire's praxis, fails for Freire to raise either good persons or good citizens.

The Brazilian government has recognized Freire's culture circles as a form of civic education and has underwritten their use for combating illiteracy among youth and adults (Souto-Manning, 2007).

Cosmopolitanism is an emerging and, because of globalization, an increasingly important topic for civic educators. In an earlier iteration, cosmopolitan education was multicultural education. According to both, good persons need to be aware of the perspectives of others and the effects their decisions have on others. While multicultural good citizens needed to think about the perspectives and plight of those living on the margins of their societies and about those whose good lives deviated from their own, good citizens in cosmopolitanism need to think, or begin to think, of themselves as “global citizens” with obligations that extend across national boundaries. Should and must civic education incorporate a global awareness and foster a cosmopolitan sensibility?

Martha Nussbaum, for one, thinks so. Nussbaum argues that our first obligation must be to all persons, regardless of race, creed, class, or border. She does not mean that we ought to forsake our commitments to our family, friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens. She means that we ought to do nothing in our other communities or in our lives that we know to be immoral from the perspective of Kant's community of all humanity (1996, 7). We should “work to make all human beings part of our community of dialogue and concern” (Ibid, 9). Civic education should reflect that (Ibid, 11).

Philosopher Eamonn Callan, however, thinks otherwise. Callan wants to avoid a civic education, and the pursuit of justice that underlies it, “that gives pride of place to a cosmopolitan sensibility at the cost of particularistic affiliations” (1999, p. 197). In Callan's view our civic education should be constructed ideally around the concept of “liberal patriotism.” Although liberal patriotism is an “identification with a particular, historically located project of political self-rule”—that is, American liberal democracy—it nevertheless also “entails a sense of responsibility to outsiders and insiders alike….” (Ibid, 198).

Of course, the danger here is that a liberal patriot may well feel a sense of obligation or responsibility only when her country is committing the injustice. Callan points out that it is “precisely the thought that ‘we Americans’ have done these terrible things that gave impetus [during the Vietnam war] to their horror and rage” (Idem). This thought is to be contrasted with our feelings and sense of responsibility when, as Callan suggests, Soviet tanks rolled through Prague. Because, according to Callan, our politico-moral identity was not implicated in the Soviet action, we somehow do not have to have a similar sense of horror and rage. Perhaps we do not have to, but should we? Nussbaum's point is that we certainly should.

What, therefore, should civic education look like? Callan provides two examples: Should we “cultivate a civic identity in which patriotic affinities are muted or disappear altogether and a cosmopolitan ideal of ‘world citizenship’ is brought” to the forefront? Or should we cultivate a kind of patriotism “in which identification with a particular project of democratic self-rule is yet attuned to the claims of justice that both civic outsiders and insiders” will make (1999, 198). It appears that Nussbaum would favor the first, while Callan favors the second.

Perhaps these two are not the only options. In her metaphor of concentric identity circles Nussbaum argues that we ought to try to bring the outer circles of our relationships, the circle of all humanity, closer to the center, to our selves and to our loved ones (1996, 9). By doing so, we do not push out of our identities those particular relationships of significance to us. Instead, we need to take into consideration the effects that our moral and political decisions have on all of humanity. If our civic education helps us extend our sympathies, as Hume proposed, and if we could do so without paying the price of muting or eliminating our local and national affinities, then would Nussbaum and Callan agree on such a civic education?

Additionally, we need to consider that patriotism itself seems to have its own version of concentric circles. For example, Theodore Roosevelt warned against “that overexaltation of the little community at the expense of the great nation.” Here is a nod toward Roosevelt's “New Nationalism” as opposed to what he called “the patriotism of the village.” [ 16 ] If we move from the village to the nation, then can't we move from the nation to the world? As Alexander Pope wrote in “An Essay on Man”: “God loves from Whole to Parts; but human soul/Must rise from Individual to the Whole/…Friend, parent, neighbor first it will embrace/His country next, and next all human race.”

Is it ever too early to begin educating children about the cultures, customs, values, ideas, and beliefs of people from around the world? Will this undercut our commitment and even devotion to our own family, neighborhood, region, and nation? No civic education must consist exclusively either of love of one's community and a patriotic affiliation with one's country or of preparation for world citizenship—a term that implies, at the least, a world state. There ought to be a composite that will work here.

If the purpose of civic education is to generate in the young those values that underscore successful participation in our liberal democracies, then the task facing educators, whether in elementary school, secondary school, or post-secondary school, might be far easier than we imagine. There seems to be a direct correlation between years in school and an increase in tolerance of difference (Nie et al., 1996). An increase of tolerance can lead to an increase of respect for those holding divergent views. Such increases could certainly help engender a cosmopolitan sensibility. But does the number of years in school correlate with a willingness to participate in the first place? For example, the number of Americans going to college has increased dramatically over the past 50 years, yet voting in elections and political participation in general are still woefully low.

Perhaps public schools should not teach any virtue that is unrelated to the attainment of academic skills, which to some is the paramount, if not the sole, purpose of schooling. But shouldn't all students learn not just the skills but also the predispositions required to participate in the “conscious social reproduction” of our democracies, as Gutmann argues? If our democracies are important and robust, then do our citizens need such predispositions to see the value of participation? And if we say that our democracies are not robust enough, then shouldn't our students be striving to reinvigorate, or invigorate, our democratic systems? Will they need infusions of patriotism to do that? If tolerance and respect are democratic virtues, then do we fail our students when we do not tolerate or respect their desires as good persons to eschew civic participation even though this violates what we think of as the duties of good citizens?

As stated earlier, civic education in a democracy must prepare citizens to participate in and thereby perpetuate the system; at the same time, it must prepare them to challenge what they see as inequities and injustices within that system. Yet a civic education that encourages students to challenge the nature and scope of our democracies runs the risk of turning off our students and turning them away from participation. But if that civic education has offered more than simply critique, if its basis is critical thinking, which involves developing a tolerance of, if not an appreciation for, difference and divergence, as well as a willingness and even eagerness for political action, then galvanized citizens can make our systems more robust. Greater demands on our citizens, like higher expectations of our students, often lead to stronger performances. As Mill reminds us, “if circumstances allow the amount of public duty assigned him to be considerable, it makes him an educated man” (Ibid, 233).

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character, moral | citizenship | cosmopolitanism | democracy | -->Dewey, John --> | ethics: virtue | Mill, John Stuart | -->Rousseau, Jean Jacques -->

A Journal of Ideas

Symposium | bipartisanship reinvigorated, educating for democracy: the case for a new civics, tagged civics education.

Tenth-grader Emma Preston listens intently during civics class at Chatham Central High School in Bear Creek, North Carolina, on Tuesday, November 5, 2019. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)

The ongoing period of democratic backsliding in the United States and around the world, characterized by pernicious polarization, declining trust in democratic institutions, and a troubling openness of citizens to non-democratic alternatives, highlights an urgent need for a renewed focus on civic education. As defined by political scientist Nancy Bermeo in 2016 , democratic backsliding involves the state-led debilitation or elimination of political institutions that sustain democracy, which can occur not just when military strongmen or unelected dictators impose their will by fiat, but through a diverse set of processes and actors. Reducing voter access, politicizing election administration, eroding trust in election results, restricting criticism of government, and lessening civil service independence have all contributed to democratic backsliding in the United States, and consequently to historically low levels of public confidence in democratic processes and institutions and to a rise in the potential for political violence​​.

Even more alarming, multiple studies have shown that younger Americans are losing faith in democracy , and a significant number of them are no longer convinced that it should endure, given the political failure to address issues that they care about. A 2023 Harvard Youth Poll found that a significant majority of 18- to 29-year-olds (58 percent) agreed with the statement that “Politics today are no longer able to meet the challenges our country is facing.” This aligns with broader findings that show public confidence in the federal government has been low for decades. According to the Pew Research Center, as of April 2024, fewer than a quarter of Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” (2 percent) or “most of the time” (21 percent)—among the lowest levels in trust recorded over nearly seven decades of polling.

This situation urgently calls for excellent civic education to foster informed and engaged citizens prepared to uphold democratic values and processes​​. A decades-long reduction in civic education investment, however, has led to significantly less funding for civics compared to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education. The U.S. government allocates over 100 times more funding to STEM programs in public schools—about $54 per student annually—than to civic education programs, which receive less than 50 cents per student each year. This underinvestment has contributed to a decline in civic knowledge and engagement among Americans, particularly among young people. And it is partly to blame, too, for young Americans’ disillusionment with democracy and alarming levels of interest in illiberal forms of governance.

Reimagining and reinvesting in civic education can help reverse these trends by preparing individuals to participate responsibly and effectively in democratic processes and institutions. High-quality civic learning fosters reflective patriotism , understanding of democratic principles, and engagement in civic activities. The result will be a more informed, active, and resilient citizenry capable of sustaining democratic institutions and values. Congress has a crucial role to play in addressing this need by prioritizing and funding civic education initiatives that can counteract the negative trends and strengthen the foundation of American democracy​.

Revitalizing Civic Education

For most U.S. students, civic education consists of an incongruous variety of classes or units that may only scratch the surface. Only five states have a standalone civics requirement in middle school. Only 37 have a standalone civics requirement in high school. Of these, most states require only a one-semester high school civics course, giving students only about three and a half months of instruction to acquire essential civic knowledge and skills. This is a decline from previous eras, when as many as three courses were required. Standards can also vary greatly, creating gaps in access to quality civic education. In a 2021 review of K-12 civics and U.S. history standards , a group of specialists and educators rated only five jurisdictions “exemplary” (Alabama, California, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and the District of Columbia), while ten states were deemed “good.” In contrast, 15 states were labeled “mediocre” in at least one subject, and 20 states were rated “inadequate” in both.

Fortunately, some federal lawmakers are recognizing the urgent need for civic education. For instance, the bipartisan Civics Secures Democracy Act proposes an investment of $1 billion annually over five years to support a more comprehensive approach to providing high-quality civic education. Key provisions focus on reversing chronic underinvestment, expanding access to civic education, and improving and encouraging frequent administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress to track student outcomes. Funding for state education agencies, allocated based on a formula, would be distributed to districts to support civics and history programs, with an emphasis on closing civics achievement gaps. The bill also includes competitive grants for higher education institutions, nonprofits, and researchers to develop and provide access to evidence-based civics and history curricula and programs. Importantly, it would enhance and diversify the nation’s history and civics teaching workforce by offering a fellowship to recognize outstanding educators from underrepresented communities, providing them with a supplemental stipend in exchange for a five-year teaching commitment.

The Civics Secures Democracy Act has garnered broad bipartisan support, with more than two dozen co-sponsors from both major political parties, and is endorsed by nearly 200 organizations with diverse viewpoints. This bipartisan backing reflects recognition across the political spectrum of the importance of civic education and has forged a shared understanding that civic education is not a partisan issue but a national priority essential for the future of American democracy.

While lawmakers work to increase funding, educators have another important task: achieving excellence in history and civics education for all students, K-12, despite the currently high degrees of disengagement. Pedagogies that best engage students fuse together coverage of essential topics like the three branches of government, the legislative process, the Electoral College, and the philosophical foundations of democracy with opportunity to develop the skills and civic dispositions and virtues needed to become an informed, engaged, and responsible citizen. Those skills range from public speaking and participating effectively in meetings, to understanding, appreciating, and evaluating evidence and diverse perspectives, to collaborating productively across lines of ideological difference. The necessary civic dispositions and virtues include caring about others’ rights and well-being, valuing respectful conversations, and being open to different viewpoints, as well as having a sense of the common good and believing one can make a difference. Pedagogies focused on pluralism and skills like civil disagreement and constructive dialogue are also crucial. As the Educating for American Democrac y initiative—another cross-partisan endeavor grounded in a commitment to pluralism—has articulated, an inquiry-based approach to learning can fuse pursuit of core knowledge with the development of civic skills, dispositions, and virtues.

Experiential learning, which involves students directly in their own learning processes , is also an important part of an excellent civic education. Such programs nurture collaboration, discovery, and service to the community, and help learners develop a deeper understanding of policy and decision-making processes. Furthermore, through experiential learning, students can apply their content knowledge and analytical skills to problems confronting their own communities. Examples range from the Girl Scouts and Junior ROTC to Chicago’s Mikva Challenge , which gives young people the opportunity to participate in real-life democratic activities. Simulating or participating in real-world civic activities helps young people not only develop skills that are critical for a functioning democracy, but also build self-confidence and social capital, improve conflict resolution skills, and develop a sense of social belonging .

Institutions of higher education also have an essential role : to build the civic capacities of college students and support civic education initiatives nationally. They are well positioned to create new curricular practices or enhance existing ones in support of civic learning and the development of important citizenship traits.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to civic learning, and states with conservative, progressive, urban, rural, and other diverse profiles have adopted varied policy strategies. For example, New Hampshire’s bipartisan “More Time on Civics” measure, signed by Governor Chris Sununu in August 2023, mandates a semester of civics for middle school students and incorporates civics instruction in elementary school. In Minnesota, those entering high school during the 2024-25 school year or later will now be required to complete a civics course as juniors or seniors. Kentucky is piloting a new Civic Seal program, sponsored by Secretary of State Michael Adams. This seal will honor students who demonstrate good citizenship through a student-led civic engagement project, a strong understanding of governance and democratic principles, proficiency in information literacy, and thoughtful self-reflection. These are just a few examples of how different states are adopting policies that fit their context.

Civics Transcends Politics

Cross-partisan support for civic education initiatives is crucial to their success and sustainability. The broad coalition backing the Civics Secures Democracy Act demonstrates that this is an issue that transcends political divides, and not just in Congress. According to survey data from Republican pollster Frank Luntz, a majority of Americans think the time is here for increased investment in civic education. The findings show that Americans of all political stripes believe civic education will have a more positive impact on strengthening our national common identity than any other democratic reform respondents were asked about.

Cross-partisan approaches, such as the Educating for American Democracy initiative, also help ensure that civic education receives the funding and resources it needs to be effectively implemented across the country. Furthermore, cross-partisan efforts can help counteract the politicization of and contestation over civics curricula that we are currently seeing in some states , including Florida and Texas . By forging coalitions that are diverse in identity and viewpoint, we can foster a more inclusive and comprehensive approach to teaching civics. This helps to build consensus around the importance of civic education for a healthy democracy and encourages collaboration among educators, policymakers, and community organizations.

The need for civic education in our constitutional democracy is urgent, especially in the face of rising polarization and declining trust in democratic institutions. By securing adequate funding, increasing public awareness, supporting state and local initiatives, encouraging research and innovation, and promoting pluralism, Congress can play a pivotal role in revitalizing it. If legislators work together across party lines, they can ensure that future generations are equipped with the knowledge, skills, and civic dispositions and virtues necessary to uphold and strengthen American democracy.

From the Symposium

Bipartisanship reinvigorated, toward a social media that enhances democracy, 15 min read, read more about civics education.

Danielle S. Allen is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.

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Carah Ong Whaley is Director of Election Protection at Issue One and a lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia.

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The need for civic education in 21st-century schools

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Rebecca winthrop rebecca winthrop director - center for universal education , senior fellow - global economy and development.

June 4, 2020

• 15 min read

Americans’ participation in civic life is essential to sustaining our democratic form of government. Without it, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people will not last. Of increasing concern to many is the declining levels of civic engagement across the country, a trend that started several decades ago. Today, we see evidence of this in the limited civic knowledge of the American public, 1 in 4 of whom, according to a 2016 survey led by Annenberg Public Policy Center, are unable to name the three branches of government. It is not only knowledge about how the government works that is lacking—confidence in our leadership is also extremely low. According to the Pew Research Center , which tracks public trust in government, as of March 2019, only an unnerving 17 percent trust the government in Washington to do the right thing. We also see this lack of engagement in civic behaviors, with Americans’ reduced participation in community organizations and lackluster participation in elections , especially among young voters. 1

Many reasons undoubtedly contribute to this decline in civic engagement: from political dysfunction to an actively polarized media to the growing mobility of Americans and even the technological transformation of leisure , as posited by Robert D. Putnam. Of particular concern is the rise of what Matthew N. Atwell, John Bridgeland, and Peter Levine call “civic deserts,” namely places where there are few to no opportunities for people to “meet, discuss issues, or address problems.” They estimate that 60 percent of all rural youth live in civic deserts along with 30 percent of urban and suburban Americans. Given the decline of participation in religious organizations and unions, which a large proportion of Americans consistently engaged in over the course of the 20th century, it is clear that new forms of civic networks are needed in communities.

As one of the few social institutions present in virtually every community across America, schools can and should play an important role in catalyzing increased civic engagement. They can do this by helping young people develop and practice the knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors needed to participate in civic life. Schools can also directly provide opportunities for civic engagement as a local institution that can connect young and old people alike across the community. To do this, civic learning needs to be part and parcel of the current movement across many schools in America to equip young people with 21st-century skills.

To date however, civic education experts argue that civic learning is on the margins of young people’s school experience. The 2018 Brown Center Report on American Education examined the status of civic education and found that while reading and math scores have improved in recent years, there has not been the commensurate increase in eighth grade civics knowledge. While 42 states and the District of Columbia require at least one course related to civics, few states prioritize the range of strategies, such as service learning which is only included in the standards for 11 states, that is required for an effective civic education experience. The study also found that high school social studies teachers are some of the least supported teachers in schools and report teaching larger numbers of students and taking on more non-teaching responsibilities like coaching school sports than other teachers. Student experience reinforces this view that civic learning is not a central concern of schools. Seventy percent of 12th graders say they have never written a letter to give an opinion or solve a problem and 30 percent say they have never taken part in a debate—all important parts of a quality civic learning.

The origins of civic education

The fact that children today across the country wake up in the morning and go to school five days a week for most of the year has everything to do with civic education. The idea of a shared school experience where all young people in America receive a standard quality education is inextricably linked to the development of the United States as a national entity and the development of citizens who had the skills and knowledge to engage in a democracy.

In the early 1800s, as the country struggled to navigate what it meant to be a democratic republic, school as we know it did not exist as a distinguishing feature of childhood. Even almost midway into the century—in 1840—only 40 percent of the population ages 5 to 19 attended school. 2 For those who did attend, what they learned while at school was widely variable depending on the institution they attended and the instructor they had. Several education leaders began advocating for a more cohesive school system, one in which all young people could attend and receive similar instruction regardless of economic status, institution, or location. Chief among these leaders was Horace Mann, often referred to as the “father of American education,” who argued that free, standardized, and universal schooling was essential to the grand American experiment of self-governance. In an 1848 report he wrote: “It may be an easy thing to make a Republic; but it is a very laborious thing to make Republicans; and woe to the republic that rests upon no better foundations than ignorance, selfishness, and passion.”

The rise of reading, math, and science

The Common Schools Movement that Mann helped establish and design was the foundation of our current American education system. Despite the fact that the core of our education system was built upon the belief that schooling institutions have a central role to play in preparing American youth to be civically engaged, this goal has been pushed to the margins over time as other educational objectives have moved to the forefront. Reading, math, and science have always been essential elements of a child’s educational experience, but many educationalists argue that these subjects were elevated above all others after the country’s “Sputnik moment.” In 1957, the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, the first space satellite, made waves across the U.S. as Americans perceived they were falling behind academically and scientifically. A wave of reforms including in math, science, and engineering education followed. Improving students poor reading and math skills received particular attention over the last several decades including in President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. A focus on ensuring American students get strong STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) skills continues to be an ongoing concern, as highlighted by President Obama’s 2013 Educate to Innovate plan focused on improving American students performance in STEM subjects.

The case for incorporating 21st-century skills

Civic learning experts, however, are not the only ones concerned about the perceived narrow focus on reading, math, and science in American schools. In recent years, there has been a growing movement for schools to help students develop “21st-century skills” alongside academic competencies, driven in large part by frequent reports of employers unsatisfied with the skills of recent school graduates. Business leaders point out that they not only need employees who are smart and competent in math and reading and writing, they also need people who can lead teams, communicate effectively to partners, come up with new ways to solve problems, and effectively navigate an increasingly digital world. With the rise of automation , there is an increasing premium on non-routine and higher order thinking skills across both blue collar and white collar jobs. A recent study of trends in the U.S. labor market shows that social skills that are increasingly in demand 3 and many employers are struggling to find people with the sets of skills they need.

Advances in the science of learning have bolstered the 21st-century skills movement. Learning scientists argue that young people master math, reading, and science much better if they have an educational experience that develops their social and emotional learning competencies—like self-awareness and relationship skills which are the foundation of later workplace skills—and puts academic learning in a larger, more meaningful context. One framework, among many, that articulates the breadth of skills and competencies young people need to succeed in a fast-changing world comes from learning scientists Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff. Their “6 Cs” framework , a variation on the prior “4 Cs” framework, is widely used and argues that schools should focus on helping young people develop not just academically, but as people. As all learning is fundamentally social, students must learn to collaborate , laying an important foundation for communication —an essential prerequisite for mastering the academic content in school that provides the specific topics around which students can practice critical thinking and creative innovation , and which ultimately will help develop the confidence to take risks and iterate on failures.

This movement for 21st-century skills has powerful allies and growing momentum even while the movement itself is comprised of an eclectic collection of organizations spread across the country with a wide range of interests and multiple missions for their work. However, a central thread is that the standardized approach to education, the legacy of Horace Mann’s Common Schools movement, is holding back student learning. Teacher-led instruction, for example, will never be sufficient for helping students learn to collaborate with each other or create new things. Active and experiential learning is required, which is harder to standardize as the specifics must be adapted to the particular communities and learners.

Civic learning as an essential 21st-century skill

This focus on mastering academic subjects through a teaching and learning approach that develops 21st-century skills is important but brings with it a worldview that focuses on the development of the individual child to the exclusion of the political. After all, one could argue that the leaders of the terrorist organization ISIS display excellence in key 21st-century skills such as collaboration, creativity, confidence, and navigating the digital world. Their ability to work together to bring in new recruits, largely through on-line strategies, and pull off terrorist attacks with relatively limited resources takes a great deal of ingenuity, teamwork, perseverance, and problem solving. Of course, the goals of Islamic extremists and their methods of inflicting violence on civilians are morally unacceptable in almost any corner of the globe, but creative innovation they have in abundance.

What the 21st-century skills movement is missing is an explicit focus on social values. Schools always impart values, whether intentionally or not. From the content in the curriculum to the language of instruction to the way in which teachers interact with students, ideas around what is good and what is bad are constantly being modeled and taught. While a number of competencies that are regularly included in 21st-century skills frameworks, like the ability to work with others, have implicit values such as respect for others’ perspectives, they do not explicitly impart strong norms and values about society. Of course, as long as there has been public education there has been heated debate about whose values should be privileged, especially in relation to deeply held religious and cultural beliefs. From the teaching of evolution and creationism to transgender bathrooms, debates on values in public schools can be contentious.

In a democracy, however, the values that are at the core of civic learning are different. They are foundational to helping young people develop the dispositions needed to actively engage in civic life and maintain the norms by which Americans debate and decide their differences. The very nature of developing and sustaining a social norm means that a shared or common experience across all schools is needed. While civic learning has been essential throughout American history, in this age of growing polarization and rising civic deserts, it should be considered an essential component of a 21st-century education.

Civic learning defined

The term civic learning evokes for most Americans their high school civics class in which they learned about the U.S. Constitution, the three branches of government, and how a bill becomes a law. This knowledge and information is essential—after all how can young people be expected to actively participate in democracy if they are unaware of the basic rules of the game?—but it is by no means sufficient. There is an emerging consensus across the many scholars and organizations that work on civic learning that imparting knowledge must be paired with developing civic attitudes and behaviors. For example, CivXNow , a bipartisan coalition of over one hundred actors including academic and research institutions, learning providers, and philanthropic organizations, argues that civic education must include a focus on:

• Civic knowledge and skills: where youth gain an understanding of the processes of government, prevalent political ideologies, civic and constitutional rights, and the history and heritage of the above.
• Civic values and dispositions: where youth gain an appreciation for civil discourse, free speech, and engaging with those whose perspectives differ from their own.
• Civic behaviors: where students develop the civic agency and confidence to vote, volunteer, attend public meetings, and engage with their communities.

There is also emerging evidence suggesting a correlation between high quality civic learning programs and increased civic engagement from students. As the 2011 Guardian of Democracy: The Civic Mission of Schools report highlights, students who receive high quality civic education are more likely to “understand public issues, view political engagement as a means of addressing communal challenges, and participate in civic activities.” The outcomes are equally as influential on civic equality, as there is evidence to suggest that poor, minority, rural, and urban students who receive high-quality civics education perform better than their counterparts.

Civic learning delivered

The crucial question is how to deliver high-quality civic learning across American schools. Researchers in civic learning have reviewed a wide range of approaches and the evidence surrounding their effectiveness. Experts identified a menu of six specific approaches , which was later updated to ten, that if implemented well has been demonstrated to advance civic learning. These range from teaching young people about civics to creating learning opportunities for practicing civic behaviors.

Classroom instruction, including discussing current events and developing media literacy skills, is needed for developing civic knowledge and skills, whether it is delivered as a stand-alone course or lessons integrated into other subjects. Many in the civics education community are advocating for more time devoted to civics from the elementary grades through high school and the corresponding teacher professional development and support required to make this a reality.

However, for developing civic dispositions, values, and behaviors, the promising practices identified by the civic learning experts are very similar to those required to develop 21st-century skills in part because many of the competencies in question are essentially the same. For example, strong communication skills contribute to the ability of students to speak up at meetings and strong collaboration skills enable them to effectively work with others in their community. Indeed, the Center for Educational Equity at Teachers College notes that “civic and political values are a subset of the values that young people should learn, and there are no sharp lines separating the civic/political domain from others.”

Hence, the range of teaching and learning experiences needed to develop civic behaviors and needed for 21st-century skills are similar. They include experiential learning approaches, such as service learning where students work on a community project alongside organizations or extracurricular activities where students learn to work together in teams. Experiential learning can also include simulations of democratic procedures or, better yet, direct engagement in school governance and school climate initiatives. In communities where there is limited opportunities for civic engagement, schools can themselves model civic values by becoming the place where community members gather and connect with each other.

Uniting the 21st-century skills and civic learning movements

A movement for 21st-century skills that does not include in a meaningful way the cultivation of democratic values is incomplete and will not prepare young people to thrive in today’s world. Given what is at stake in terms of civic engagement in America, uniting the powerful push for 21st-century skills with the less well-resourced but equally important movement for civic learning could prove to be an important strategy for helping schools fill the civic desert vacuum and renew the social norms that underpin our democratic form of government. In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, “Civic education, like all education, is a continuing enterprise and conversation. Each generation has an obligation to pass on to the next, not only a fully functioning government responsive to the needs of the people, but the tools to understand and improve it.”

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