The political/social upheavals of the last few years send mixed signals. Are they signs civic culture is being reinvigorated or that it is in a death spiral? One might look at the Women’s March, the #MeToo movement, or Black Lives Matter protests and see the former. Others see their way of life (or at least their political dominance) threatened by them.
Raw Story reports that a Republican Idaho state legislator opposes expanding funding for early childhood education because it “makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home and let others raise their child.” One might infer he knows not only that women belong in their dwellings but in what room.
“What year is this?” asked Josh Holland. “Sorry, what century is this?”
Hullabaloo alum David Atkins advised conservatives not to become too attached to social structures that are always evolving, even as American Enterprise Institute Fellow Steven Hayward once opened a conference on movement conservatism with the assertion that conservatives “defend the unchanging ground of our changing experience.”
It is not that civics taught in schools was that rigorous a subject. Mine was taught by the high school’s basketball coach. Still, some see the decline of any kind of civics education (so rumored) as comcomittant with a breakdown in civic comity. Will bringing it back with renewed vigor help reverse the decline in commitment to this democratic republic?
“Our constitutional democracy is ailing,” Danielle Allen and Paul Carrese argue in the Washington Post. If that was not clear before the Jan. 6 Trump insurrection “the lesson was etched into our souls that day.”
As members of the executive committee for the Educating for American Democracy Initiative, they argue for renewing civics education on a roadmap developed “by a diverse and cross-ideological group of scholars and educators.”
They write:
The roadmap is not a national curriculum, nor a set of instructional standards. It recommends approaches to learning that do five critical things at once: (1) inspire students to want to become involved in their constitutional democracy; (2) tell a full narrative of America’s plural yet shared story; (3) explore the need for compromise to make constitutional democracy work; (4) cultivate civic honesty and patriotism that leaves space both to love and to critique this country; and (5) teach history and civics both through a timeline of events and the themes that run through those events.
Our group has done something that wasn’t supposed to be doable in our fractious times — debate disagreements productively across differences of identity, viewpoint and geography, and achieve consensus about what and how to teach for an excellent civic education.
Even as educators found agreement on how to teach English language arts and on math and STEM, cultural polarization has exacerbated disagreements over teaching social studies.
Yet disagreement is a feature, not a bug, of our constitutional democracy; the question is whether we can learn to disagree productively. One of the goals of the Educating for American Democracy Roadmap is to teach young people about our disagreements in ways that can help them productively engage in those debates.
Yet disagreeing productively is not an aspiration for members of a delusional secessionist cult of personality that has possessed a major political party in the world’s greatest military power. Governing has been replaced with owning the libs, with conflict for conflict’s sake, a feature of “morally unconstrained collective egoism,” as Bálint Magyar tells Masha Gessen.
From at least the advent of the T-party, many on the right abandoned the sort of highfalutin conservatism of Buckley’s dreams in 1955 for something more primal and more bare-knuckles. The Party of Trump does not want to be fed. Like T-Rex, it wants to hunt. Neither does it want its radicalism tamed by new civics education.
I wish the Educating for American Democracy Initiative all the best in its endeavors. They will need it.
Update: Replaced image with one bearing Creative Commons license.