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 participationâ€ﾝ (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.â€ﾝ 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. The Good Citizen
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. The Good Democrat
2.1 Amy Gutmann: Conscious Social Reproduction
2.2 William Galston: Civic Education in a Representative System
3. The Good Person
3.1 Good Persons and Good Citizens
3.2 Spectrum of Virtues
4. Civic Education as Political Action
4.1 Service Learning
4.2 John Dewey: School as Community
4.3 Paulo Freire: Liberation Pedagogy
5. Cosmopolitan Education
Bibliography
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.â€ﾝ[3] Hence there is a need to educate youth to be “civic-mindedâ€ﾝ; 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 collectivityâ€ﾝ (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 coincideâ€ﾝ (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 20th century. From the 18th 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 educationâ€ﾝ (1916, 90).
In a democracy, however, because of its combination of “numerous and more varied points of shared common interestâ€ﾝ and its requirement of “continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations produced by varied intercourse,â€ﾝ which Dewey called “progress,â€ﾝ education could address personal development and “full and free interplayâ€ﾝ 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
Sunday, December 14, 2008
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