Supplement for Fourth Meeting of

A. Discussion: Could one contend that mandatory civic education might be “indoctrination?”

pp. 84-85 I began this chapter by arguing for the essential role social mobility plays in the liberal democratic project and how vital the collective belief in the prospect of mobility is to sustaining it. Democracies draw their credibility and their resilience from an implicit covenant that anyone with enough grit and talent can move beyond the confines of the circumstances into which they were born. As income inequality and stratification have grown more acute and intergenerational mobility has stalled, this central tenet of the American Dream has become increasingly fragile…[and] universities cannot truly stand for equal opportunity until they muster the courage to eliminate the most conspicuous vestiges of caste that still cling to them. Only then can they lay claim to their heritage as carriers of the American Dream….

Daniel begins his Second Chapter discussing an initiative he supported at Johns Hopkins early in his Presidency to foster democratic education:

pp. 87-88 …we designed an orientation session for incoming first-year students that explored the critical role of freedom of thought and expression as core tenets of the university. The session introduced students to John Locke’s and John Milton’s cases for free speech, how these were linked to academic freedom, and why this principle was so essential for universities to honor. By design, we enlisted faculty members from across the ideological and disciplinary spectrum to explain why these values were so critical for their own research and writing.

After we held this session for the first time, we surveyed students to gauge their reaction. I was worried that the panel might be too rudimentary, or that we had missed the mark. The feedback we received was arresting. Student after student expressed appreciation for the panel. Many confessed that until that moment, they—who uniformly stood in the top 10 percent of their high school classes, who had SAT scores far above the national average, and who hailed from every state in the union—had never been exposed to the case for free speech in their high school studies. We were gobsmacked. This most foundational of American ideals, this cornerstone of citizenship, was somehow overlooked (or, more perplexingly, expunged) from our students’ high school education.

He notes that the capacities for good citizenship are not natural or simply inherited, and that from Ancient Athens through Montesquieu, Jefferson and Dewey there have been continuing efforts to inculcate such capacities. While families, support groups, and K-12 schools have all been used toward this end, he contends that more sustained effort is required—on pp. 90-93 he uses Figure 2 (Average civic knowledge scores and Liberal Democracy Index scores by country in 2016) to argue this (while noting that the US does not participate in this study).

93-94 basic skills like literacy and numeracy are necessary for this kind of citizen, but they are insufficient. A consensus has emerged that this multifaceted ideal of democratic citizenship is supported by four pillars: knowledge, skills, values, and aspirations. Civic knowledge refers to a familiarity with the history and theory of democracy and its institutions, which ensures that one brings to public life a nuanced understanding of the past and the present. Civic skills entail, among other things, critical reasoning and bridging skills that enable citizens both to discern true from false and also to translate ideas into collective action. Civic values include a commitment to ideals of tolerance and equality that provide the standards against which citizens hold policies and policy makers to account. And, finally, civic aspiration denotes a disposition directed toward cooperation and collective action.

Of course a lot more elaboration is called for on each point. While he doesn’t sufficiently elaborate, we should consider both whether these four pillars are each really necessary, and whether they are jointly sufficient (while keeping in mind that democratic citizenship may be without an “essence” but while they may be extremely important “family characteristics” of the variety of democratic citizenships).

p. 94 Daniels maintains that a “civic education” “…should cultivate in students a pride in the ideals of liberal democracy, a sober and clear-eyed recognition of its incompleteness and its failures, and a competence in the practices necessary to improve it.”

But this, again, raises the question of indoctrination, and last time I referred to John Dewey’s important claim in his “Democratic Ends Need Democratic Methods for Their Realization:”

if there is one conclusion to which human experience unmistakably points, it is that democratic ends demand democratic methods for their realization. Authoritarian methods now [1939] offer themselves to us in new guises. They come to us claiming to serve the ultimate ends of freedom by immediate, and allegedly temporal, techniques of suppression.

Or they recommend adoption of a totalitarian regime in order to fight totalitarianism. In whatever form they offer themselves, they owe their seductive power to their claim to serve ideal ends.

Our first defense is to realize that democracy can be served only by the slow day by day adoption of and contagious diffusion in every phase of our common life of methods that are identical with the ends to be reached.

There is no substitute for intelligence and integrity in cultural life. Anything else is a betrayal of human freedom no matter in what guise it presents itself.

An American democracy can serve the world only as it demonstrates in the conduct of its own life the efficacy of plural, partial, and experimental methods in securing and maintaining an ever-increasing release of the powers of human nature, in service of a freedom which is cooperative and a cooperation which is voluntary.^{^[1]}

pp. 95-97 Daniels notes that in the 1960s the concept of a unified civic culture began to disappear and in the 1980s its importance was sidelined by growing concerns with failing math and science scores. Finally the growing political rifts make it unlikely that true civic education in the K-12 environment will be possible:

p. 97 the decades-long evaporation of civic education from primary and secondary schools has left a deep scar. Students’ scores on civic tests suffered a steep decline in the 1970s and have remained stagnant since. Today, only about a quarter of K–12 students in the United States score as proficient in a test of civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions. Even more disquieting are yawning gaps that have emerged in civic education across racial, ethnic, class, and geographic lines, which have produced a democratic landscape divided, in the words of one expert, between civic “oases” and civic “deserts.”

pp. 97-99 But, he contends, the history of higher education and civic education is not much better. From an 1818 report though today the efforts and results have been spotty. But, he contends undergraduate students are than ideal audience for civic education, colleges and universities are great venues for such education, and they have the resources to provide this important service.

pp. 99-103 while the Founders like Washington wanted the country to create a University to promote civic education

From Wikipedia: George Washington...advocated for the establishment of a national university in the capital in his first State of the Union address in 1790 and continued to promote this idea throughout his career and until his death. In his will Washington left shares in the Potomac Company to endow the university. However, due to the company's financial difficulties, funds were raised independently. On February 9, 1821, the university was established by an Act of Congress first as Columbian College and then as Columbian University, making it one of only five universities with a Congressional charter.... ...Columbian University was renamed The George Washington University in 1904.

Through the early 1800s American colleges had a largely classical education (Greek, Latin, composition, history, and philosophy with a “political theory capstone experience. But in the latter half of the 1800s the capstone began disappearing and the rising tide of science led to the replacement of the classical curriculum.

p. 102 in 1876, the same year that America’s first research university, Johns Hopkins, opened its doors to students, famed Harvard psychologist William James published a withering editorial in The Nation that characterized the moral philosophy capstone—perhaps somewhat unfairly—as a fossil from a bygone era, whose “lifeless discussions and flabby formulas” left students “dampened and discouraged.”

p. 103 …the rigid structure of the classical curriculum gradually gave way to the liberating freedom of electives. At its most extreme, the elective curriculum allowed students to choose whatever courses they wanted throughout their education; in its more limited manifestations, a common curriculum in the first year or two of college opened up onto a buffet of specialized options in later years. The aggregate effect, however, was that colleges could no longer maintain a four-year-long fixed sequence of courses that affirmed the underlying unity and coherence of human knowledge. By the turn of the twentieth century, the classical curriculum was essentially an artifact of an earlier age and, with its demise, how colleges and universities educated for citizenship changed, too.

pp. 107-116 He continues his historical account through the 1900s noting brief flourishes in civic education leading up to current “service learning” initiatives. While these are valuable, engagement with communities is not the same thing as “civic education (p. 116).

p. 122-128 Daniels discusses three contemporary experiments which he believes are good: Stanford and Columbia’s class in “Problems of Citizenship,” Virginia’s “interdisciplinary engagements” courses, and Purdue University’s President Mitch Daniels’ proposal of a required civics knowledge test. Somewhat inconsistently he claims

pp. 125-126 these three examples are vivid reminders of the absolutely critical role that faculty support plays in instituting a meaningful democracy requirement, as well as how difficult it can often be both to reach consensus on such a sensitive topic and to implement a program of change. Across history, civic education innovations at colleges and universities have succeeded best when leadership and faculty collaborated to reimagine the curriculum along more democratic lines….Given the political polarization embedded in every aspect of our lives, achieving a shared vision of goals and methods like that again may be impossible, but I continue to believe that open and honest conversations among faculty and leadership about what our students ought to know as citizens can still yield meaningful change. As these examples show, a democracy requirement may take many different forms, but it should embody the fullest expression of civic learning.

p. 128 building a new requirement into the curriculum—especially one that has the potential to be as controversial as a democracy requirement—is no mean task. The curriculum at any college or university lies at the intersection of a great many stakeholders—including faculty, students, and administrators—with a lot of divergent interests. The coursework students take must be responsive to students’ needs and trajectories, accommodate the disciplinary expertise of faculty, and adhere to the broader aims of the administration as well as the structural and historical legacies of the institution. Even the best-laid plans for curricular reform can fall apart. Meaningful and enduring reforms demand the sustained commitment of leadership and engagement at multiple levels of the institution.

Amy Guttmann is one of the nations most respected and highly influential political theorists of democracy. From 2001-2004 she was Provost of Princeton and from 2004-2022 she was President of the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently the US Ambassador to Germany. Her Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton UP., 1987 and 1999) and Why Deliberative Democracy? coauthored with Dennis Thompson (Princeton UP., 2004) are important works and their conception of “deliberative democracy” is highly influential--see my A Quick Introduction to "Deliberative Democracy" and Democratic Education for more. During her Presidency she led Pen to commit to commit to a vision that its “highest institutional priority is to prepare promising students of all races, religions, and backgrounds to become the leaders and innovators of the future.” In many ways she appears to have committed the University to many of the goals Daniels champions and the Penn Compact 2020 codifies many of these initiatives. Amongst her initiatives was the establishment of The Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement which is founded on the principle that a democratic, open, secure, tolerant, and interconnected world benefits all Americans. One of its initiatives is The Democracy Project which aims to reverse what it believes is a crisis of confidence: “even as Americans remain committed to the ideals of democracy, a majority see democracy in the United States as weak and getting weaker, according to a national survey jointly commissioned by Freedom House, the George W. Bush Institute, and the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.

One example of both the potential and the challenges confronting “civic education” is an “undergraduate student’s paper: Patel, Amit B., “Democratic Political Socialization on University Campuses” 08 April 2011. CUREJ: College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal, University of Pennsylvania:

Abstract: this paper intends to contextualize early research on political socialization with recent developments that provide new considerations for the transmission of democratic political learning at a more advanced learning stage. It attempts to demonstrate this literature on political socialization as the foundation for evaluating the continuing research of the Penn Democracy Project in the field of democratic political socialization of undergraduate students. In light of the political socialization literature, this paper reveals the results of the most recent iteration of the Penn Democracy Project research study, which provide insight into the state of citizenship at the University of Pennsylvania. The overarching conclusion of this study supports the notion that while the University of Pennsylvania offers resources and opportunities for undergraduates to foster civic values, through specialized courses; centers; and funding for clubs, it fails to actively cultivate a shared culture of citizenship among its students. Finally, this paper evaluates strategic policy initiatives to effectively increase democratic citizenship education for undergraduate students at the University of Pennsylvania and introduces possible considerations to transplant this “Penn Model” on other university campuses.

While this study bears out some of the “challenges” and “failures” Daniels points to, I see it as a very positive confirmation of the potential of Penn’s work to promote “civic” and “democratic” education!

Note: [click on the note number to return to the text for the note]

[1] John Dewey, “Democratic Ends Need Democratic Methods for Their Realization,” New Leader v. 22, October 21, 1939. Originally read a public meeting of the Committee for Cultural Freedom on October 13, 1939. Reprinted in in John Dewey: The Political Writings, ed. Debra Morris and Ian Shapiro (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), pp. 205-206. Emphasis [bold] added to the text twice.