I am currently, in this blog, revisiting the issue of how and
to what extent civics education is falling short of what we should expect from
that portion of our schools’ curricula.
The purpose is to update information I reported years ago when this blog
was new. Times change and the problems
identified in 2010 might be different today.
One such problem has to do with economic conditions and, as I wrote back
then, this might seem like a stretch to you –the relationship between the
economy and civics education – but I don’t think so.
When considering economic conditions, I find it helpful to
recall a concept that might initially sound unrelated to the hard numbers associated
with economic activity. That concept is
social capital. I was introduced to this
idea by reading Robert D. Putnam.[1] His definition of the concept – a bit paraphrased
– is: a societal quality characterized as having an
active, public-spirited citizenry, egalitarian political relations, and a
social environment of trust and cooperation; it speaks to communal bonds and
cooperative interactions. Summarily,
this concept refers to a citizenry that has adopted a meaningful degree of
selflessness. I have written about the
republican spirit that spurred our founding governing principles and its inclusion
of such selflessness, and yet what we are experiencing today is a social environment
in which we see increasing levels of selfishness and narcissism.[2]
Economically, we have
had increasing levels of income and wealth disparity and this trend has been
growing since I initially wrote about it in this blog. A more recent academic work is Putnam’s just
published book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.[3] Due to the economic trends which had their
origins in the 1970s, but increased in their pace of development during the
1980s, what we as a citizenry have accomplished is an ever increasing level of
economic segregation even within racial and ethnic groups. The overall trend has been population shifts toward
either upper income or lower income resulting in a depopulation of the
middle. This has led to a high degree of
economic and social segregation between these economic classes. Consequently, we are not only lacking in
social capital, but also are creating the social dynamics that will make it
almost impossible to sustain any social infrastructure that would support it.
Therefore, we can
expect in the coming years and decades less public-spirited citizenry, less
equality in terms of both economic factors – such as opportunity – and
political factors, and less trust and cooperation. We will most likely experience weakening
communal bonds and increased animosity between economic segments of the economy. Reflective of this economic backdrop, our
politics will likely become even more bizarre and antagonistic. I will not be surprised if this antagonism
takes on a more organized form. With
social media as a resource, one can imagine an organized and militant response
by disadvantaged groups. My point back
then and still today is that we are reaping what we sowed. And most telling is what Putnam points out:
that most Americans are only semi-conscious of these developments. They are simply not being instructed as to
these socioeconomic developments. They
know that things are not as good as they used to be, but they have little
understanding of what is actually taking place.
To illustrate his
points, Putnam writes of two kids who live miles apart, one a product of an advantaged
family, the other of a disadvantaged situation – I can’t even use the term “family”
to describe his home life. Despite their
proximity to each other, there is little to no chance they will ever have any
contact with each other. This is desperately
different from the social world Putnam grew up in back in the 1950s. In that earlier world, his high school had
kids from differing social and economic classes. The level of interaction among the different
segments of the student body was healthy and often. This is not so true today and the level
of such interaction is becoming more and more infrequent. For one thing, poorer kids are stuck in
dysfunctional schools while richer kids are more apt to attend private
schools. The “indivisibility” of our
nation is becoming a memory. We need to
address this development and our economic metrics need to account for the cost
factors caused by our neglect of such segregation.
[1] Putnam, R. D.
(1995). Bowling alone: America's declining social capital. Journal
of Democracy, January, pp. 65-78.
[2] Also see Twenge, J. M. & Campbell, W. K. (2009). The narcissism epidemic: Living in the age
of entitlement. New York, NY: Free Press.
[3]
Putnam, R. D.
(2015). Our kids: The American dream in
crisis. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
