It has been a few years since I started this blog. Early on, I felt it necessary to outline the
shortcomings of civics education in American schools. This was done in order to provide you, the
reader, some sense of what was motivating this blog. Through the years, it has been my perceptions
of the ongoing conditions within this field that have guided what I wrote. It has occurred to me that since conditions
never remain static, it would be a responsible step to revisit these
observations and see if the literature of more recent vintage indicates a
change. Perhaps the conditions I reported
in 2010 have been addressed and are not as virulent as they were back
then. I would hasten to say that if that
were the case, it would have been reported extensively by the news. I would state that one condition has been
reported upon and that reporting has indicated that the condition has improved –
more on this in a future posting.
In order to give you this update, I am dedicating the next
few postings to this effort. I will remind
you of the specific deleterious conditions I reported back then and then give
more current research concerning each condition. But this particular posting will give an
overview of how well civics education is doing and I will rely on a report by the
National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) just published in 2015. Below, I quote a segment of the Executive Summary
of the report and then comment on it.
Here is the Summary’s main overall finding:
For more than 250 years, Americans
have shared a vision of a democracy in which all citizens understand,
appreciate, and engage actively in civic and political life. In recent decades, however, increasing
numbers of Americans have disengaged from civic and political institutions such
as voluntary associations, religious congregations, community-based
organizations, and political and electoral activities such as voting and being
informed about public issues. Young
people reflect these trends: they are
less likely to vote and are less interested in political discussion and public
issues than either their older counterparts or young people of past
decades. As a result, many young
Americans may not be prepared to participate fully in our democracy now and
when they become adults.[1]
This summary statement could not mirror more closely my
overall judgement of civics education when I addressed it back in 2010.
Back then, I made a point of sharing with you the description
of citizen involvement and its evolvement from the earliest times of our
republic. I used a lengthy account by
the writer Alexis de Tocqueville. His is
a vivid telling of how Americans readily partook in animated and engaged
discussion over the issues of that day. Foremost
were discussions over local civic projects and developments. The firsthand report was written in the
1830s. While I questioned how accurate
the account was, I presented it as at least a reasonable depiction if not a
truthful vision of how Americans were involved.
I also presented it as an ideal which I felt our civics instruction
should use to guide our efforts in promoting good citizenship. It is gratifying to see that the NCSL shares
this commitment. Not so gratifying is
the organization’s agreement that since those early days, we have not been so
effective in maintaining this level of engagement.
The time dimension referred to in the citation coincides with
mine in that the Summary mentions how in the last several decades there has
been a meaningful downturn in levels of engagement not only in terms of
politics and government, but also in the more civil pursuits such as working
with community-based organizations. One
of my main points in my early writings was to date our turn to a natural rights
perspective as a dominant view in the years just following World War II. That more current view emphasizes a more
individualistic social stance in which main concerns are over self-defined
goals and aims. This transition from a
more community based populous to a more self-centered one did not happen
overnight, but was the product of several trends starting almost as soon as the
ink on the Constitution of 1787 was
dry. However, the big transfer from a
traditional federalist view, the view that dominated to that point, to the
natural rights view has happened since 1945.
Again, my efforts in the upcoming postings will be to give
you an update on the conditions facing civics education. From this first entry, we can already tell that
things have not gotten much better and perhaps even worse.
[1]
National Conference of State Legislatures
(2015). The civic mission of schools.
Executive Summary. Dever,
CO: National Conference of State
Legislatures. Retrieved from http://www.ncsl.org/legislators-staff/legislators/trust-for-representative-democracy/the-civic-mission-of-schools-executive-summary.aspx
, a website.
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