My Devoted Reader Reginleif is in a grumpy mood over this Boston Globe editorial, which celebrates the efforts of educational groups to bring back civics education. Sounds good, right?
REMEMBER CIVICS class? Too many people don't, and that's why national groups working to make democracy and citizenship riveting parts of the kindergarten-through-12th-grade curriculum deserve a rousing blast of John Philip Sousa -- with flags. The newest effort, started in March, is the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, which last month gave grants of $150,000 each to six states to make civics a priority.
"We want to revive the ideal," said David Skaggs, a former Democratic congressman from Colorado, in a recent interview. He is founder and director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship in Washington, which is overseeing the school program.
Funded by the Carnegie Corporation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the initiative seeks to turn civics education into a statewide effort that includes coalitions of politicians, judges, business people, and community leaders as well as teachers. The idea is to go beyond how a bill becomes a law and to inspire students with the power a citizen holds in democratic society.
Skaggs wants to get young people to be as passionate about voting as many of them are about recycling, which, he noted, "has instilled in people the idea that every can matters." He asks, "Why haven't we instilled the kind of civic faith in people that tells them every vote matters?"
Here's Reginleif's commentary:
Wouldn't be so bad on the face of it, but the express reason given in the editorial is that people have become "too" anti-government, and they're hoping for a renaissance of statist indoctrination.
I didn't quite read that into the article. Of course, the part about Americans being too anti-government is explicitly stated:
But civics -- which was a priority after World War II -- is no longer embraced by an America that has developed an ornery anti-government streak.
Tam Taylor, press officer of the 40-year-old Center for Civic Education -- a Calabasas, Calif., group that has led the movement for a better-informed citizenry -- noted that the Vietnam War protests, followed by the Watergate scandals and the cultural revolution, soured the public on civic involvement. The national focus on science and math after the launching of Sputnik also stole attention from civics -- and those disciplines still eclipse Democracy 101.
Haven't Americans always had an "ornery anti-government streak"? I'd be willing to bet that civics education was given more weight back before the 1960's, but I find it hard to believe that (a) we don't teach civics any more because we focus too much on math and science, or (b) civics is somehow more important now than ever to kids who are all-too-often lacking the necessary literacy and numeracy skills to support themselves, much less enter government service.
What's more, I believe the decline in civics education goes hand-in-hand with a decline in the general standards of education. Certainly, some public schools have spent the last 30 years urging their children to "find themselves" and have prized "deep thinking and creativity" over hard facts, which doesn't necessarily inspire a student to enter politics any more than a scientific or mathematical field. The problem isn't limited to civics, in other words.
I don't have a problem with a re-emergence of civics in the classroom. In fact, I think it could produce more students who are informed, yet ornery anti-government types (like Reginleif), as opposed to the uninformed "rebels" we see marching in the streets everywhere nowadays. Good civics education, to me, isn't so much about accepting governmental interference as it about gaining an understanding of how the system works, so that it may be changed in effective and positive ways.
Posted by kswygert at September 20, 2004 01:43 PM