Notes on Civics Education
With Americans across the political spectrum increasingly agreeing that democracy is on life support, effective, nonpartisan and intellectually serious civic education is the most urgent task for higher education. There is no institution better equipped to rescue our public argument — our ability to reach across disagreement — than our colleges and universities.
Well before Harvard became ground zero in the battle over American colleges and democracy — before the cacophony of executive orders, revoked visas and grants, and encampments — left- and right-wing educators were working on how best to educate a new generation of good citizens. Many college mission statements commit their institutions to civic education, and that goal is one of the few ambitions both right and left agree should be at the center of students’ education.
For decades, colleges have sought to instill civic spirit in their students through service-learning opportunities and voter-registration drives alongside classes on democratic citizenship. Broadly oriented toward the left, these programs have tended to focus on civic action, giving students the tools to advocate and organize for social justice.
These classes, whether in the social sciences or the humanities, emphasize the ways groups are excluded from civic power and the importance of removing those barriers. Inequity and exclusion are presented as the primary civic threats; the most important civic education is obtained when engaging with communities and exposing exclusion. To revive our democracy, students need to learn to rigorously root out the vestiges of exclusion in their own behaviors and in the structures of American politics and society, according to the civic action model.
Many recently formed civic institutes in red-state public universities have rolled out a dramatically different vision. As that faculty sees it, students rarely gain an understanding of the philosophy of civic life, much less an appreciation of America’s founding principles or the ideas behind them. They seek to remedy this failure by teaching a renewed respect for those texts and principles.
