Good afternoon, friends in civics and social studies. Did you miss our webinar done in collaboration with Dr. Charles Flanagan of the National Archives’ Center for Legislative Archives? It is now available online, and we encourage you to check it out. Dr. Flanagan joins us to talk about ways in which you can approach the Charters of Freedom with your students, just in time for Freedom Week! You can view the webinar on the Lou Frey Institute’s webinar channel here, and the PowerPoint is linked below.

And DON’T FORGET! We have a new webinar series this fall in collaboration with multiple members of the Presidential Libraries system. Be sure to register for that today! The flyer is below.

If Congress passes a reasonably ambitious spending package, I hope that some of the money can serve as at least a down-payment on the idea proposed last year by the mayors of Pittsburgh; Youngstown, Ohio; Dayton, Ohio; Columbus, Ohio; Cincinnati; Huntington, W.Va.; Morgantown, W.Va.; and Louisville. They call it a “Marshall Plan for Appalachia” and they cite Re-Imagine Appalachia‘s “New Deal” proposal for the region. They rightly recommend investing in the whole region, but they write as mayors, and I’d advocate for focusing substantial investments in the cities.

For more than a century, Appalachian resources, especially coal, were extracted to fuel US industrial growth. The social and environmental damage was grave, and now the region will bear a disproportionate price for de-carbonization. Already, about 15.2% of all residents of Appalachia live below the official poverty line. That’s not far from the 13.4% rate for the country as a whole, but poverty is concentrated in some Appalachian counties. McCreary County, KY has a poverty rate of 41% and a median household income below $20,000. Its last coal mine closed in 1994.

Appalachian residents live shorter lives than other Americans, and the gap is growing. According to Singh et al., “Cardiovascular diseases (especially heart disease), unintentional injuries (which include drug overdoses), and cancer accounted for 57.8 percent of the life-expectancy gap.”

Direct federal investments are appropriate and could help. However, the relationship between Appalachian residents and the federal government is bad, for deep and complex reasons. Trump won Leslie County, KY with 89% of the vote. (The county’s median household income is $18,546 and it ranks 3,120th out of 3,142 in life expectancy at birth.) I mention partisanship not to make a judgment about how people should vote, but for a pragmatic reason. I think it would be difficult to spend money effectively under conditions of deep distrust.

Appalachia is already more dependent on federal programs than any other region, but that has not made most voters favor those programs or their source. One resident, a Republican who previously voted for Democrats, told The New York Times’ Eduardo Porter: “People in Harlan County have been on the front lines of the war on poverty for 50-plus years and can see its actual effects. It is degrading.” Whether this person is right about welfare programs (as they are designed today) is immaterial; the point is that voters and local elected officials will not be primed to cooperate to make federal funding work. (Harlan gave 85% of the vote to Trump in 2020–having favored Democratic presidential candidates until and including 2000. Harlan ranks third from the bottom in the USA in life expectancy and has a median household income of $18,665.)

This is where the cities come in. Rural Appalachia is closely linked to nearby cities. In addition to Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Pittsburgh, Louisville, Youngstown, and the West Virginia cities (whose mayors all signed the op-ed), one could add Allentown, Binghamton, Charlotte, Chattanooga, Lexington, Nashville, and Scranton, among others. People, goods and culture flow back and forth between these cities and rural areas.

And almost all of these cities have Democratic mayors. Again, I mention partisanship not as a value-judgment but for practical reasons. Municipal leaders who believe in government may work better with federal officials and may use federal funds better, particularly when that is what their voters demand. At the same time, thriving cities in or near Appalachia can create markets and other opportunities for rural residents.

Insofar as we can spend funds to boost rural Appalachia, I am all for it. Infrastructure spending may go over better there than welfare, for understandable reasons. But I am especially optimistic about the impact of federal funds for transportation, renewables, health, and education in the cities within or near the 420 counties of Appalachia.

See also A Civic Green New Deal; a Green recovery; who wants less government?; Building Civic Capacity in an Era of Democratic Crisis by Hollie Russon-Gilman and K. Sabeel Rahman

Good morning friends! As you may be aware, the Lou Frey Institute/Florida Joint Center for Citizenship has been involved with the development of the Guardians of Democracy program.

These courses, which are highly intense, engaging, and in my opinion, fun, were developed in collaboration with Illinois Civics and through the generous and ongoing largesse of the McCormick Foundation. Indeed, a fourth course is currently in development that touches on the Educating for American Democracy Framework. At this point, multiple cohorts from Illinois, Florida, and nationally have completed these courses. So what has been the impact? Fortunately, our dear friends at CIRCLE have done a dive into the courses and the participants, and they have some positive news!

GoD courses helped teachers gain both knowledge about pedagogy, and self-awareness about how they teach and why. On average, teachers in the beginner courses gained an average of 10 percentage points in their civics pedagogy knowledge between the pre-test and post-test for the course.

The virtual courses evolved into more than “training”: it became a safe and supportive professional learning community that allowed teachers to share and learn from one another. Facilitators also pushed teachers to make active contributions to each other’s learning. The social bonds and peer-teaching that resulted from this environment allowed teachers to be authentic and often vulnerable about challenges and even perceived failures, which was essential to their development.

The courses helped teachers become more willing to use these pedagogical approaches in their classroom and more confident in their ability to do so effectively. In the CCID and IASL Bronze courses teachers showed growth; in the SoDP course they started out already feeling confident about employing the pedagogy and maintained that confidence throughout.

By emphasizing teacher accountability and an active learning pedagogy, GoD courses broke the mold of typical professional development and allowed teachers to form a simulated or context-specific idea of how that practice will unfold in reality.

The carefully designed courses, with concrete guidance and examples on how they can use each pedagogy, helped teachers experience a paradigm shift in their thinking about what the pedagogies can do for student learning.

We encourage you to read the full report, and be sure to check out the Guardians of Democracy program here.

Today, my late father’s books are on their way to the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo. Most of that library’s collection was lost on August 25-26, 1992 when the Army of the Republika Srpska shelled the building. Several generous friends have helped my family and me to cover the shipping costs.

The books fill more than 1,000 60-pound boxes, for about 30 tons of weight (27 metric tons). We did our best to measure the linear feet this spring and estimated there are 25,000 volumes. Although I watched dad pick out books over many years, it is still kind of amazing that he purchased each one individually, thinking about its price, whether he already owned a copy, and what he thought of it. He bought the majority in Britain, so most are making their second transatlantic voyage.

The coverage is basically Western European cultural and intellectual history from 1500 to 1900, with some offshoots. Dad didn’t read all his books, but he only purchased what he could read, which means that the languages are Latin, French, Italian, and English, with just a few exceptions.

We didn’t send all his books to Bosnia. Since 2014, several hundred volumes have been on loan to Montpelier, James Madison’s house. They match editions that we know Madison owned. (His library was sold to meet the debts of his stepson.) I also kept about 2,000 volumes, books printed between 1500 and 1820 that I didn’t think would survive the travel well. They now line the walls of my office at Tufts–rising eleven feet on three sides, which is hard to capture in a photo.

We intend these books as a gift to the people of Sarajevo and Bosnia and as a commitment to the humane values that made the library a target for destruction in 1992.

Good afternoon, friends. The newest Civics in Real Life is available. This was a hard one to write. Most of us likely have vivid memories of that day. Today’s Civics in Real Life looks at the impact of 9/11 on our civic life, even after 20 years.

You can download this CRL here.

You can find another relevant CRL here, looking at ways in which we can remember and honor those that lost their lives.

Good afternoon, friends. The Florida Department of Education has released a proposed rule regarding who will be qualified to earn the Civics Seal of Excellence endorsement for their teaching certificate. An overview is provided below:

This rule can be found here, and feedback can be provided here. I encourage you to provide feedback. There are a great many changes coming to our field over the next couple of years and it’s important that we all be aware of and have input on our field.

Good morning, friends in civics! It gives us great pleasure to announce the launch of our new Presidential Libraries webinar series, offered in collaboration with the Florida Council for the Social Studies, the Florida Association of Social Studies Supervisors, and of course the libraries themselves! We are very excited about this series, and hope you will join us for learning and discussion. You can register here.

(This is actually a post for Labor Day, although the connection to labor and working-class culture may not be immediately obvious.)

People sometimes say: “This artifact or text is worth your effort and attention. It is less accessible than some other works; it may take more effort to understand and appreciate. But it will make you a better person, or help you improve the world, or give you insight.”

This type of claim requires a justification because it is a proposal for how other people should allocate their time and effort. The justification can be an explicit argument that the work in question is valuable. Or it can be an interpretation, explanation, or reaction to the work that helps people to understand it. Understanding enables appreciation. Like any justification, it can fail because it was not a worthy claim in the first place, or because the reasons were weak, or because they fell on infertile soil.

To say that a given work deserves unusual effort puts that item in a special category. Even if you make such a claim in an informal and unpretentious way, you are suggesting a value-judgment and implying a rough ranking from better to worse.

We could have a culture in which many people frequently exchanged such claims, coming from diverse perspectives and advocating a wide range of cultural products. People would then allocate some of their time and effort to relatively challenging works because they had been persuaded that these items have special value. “High culture” would be the list of all the works that significant numbers of people appreciated in these ways.

And we do have that kind of culture. People exchange claims about value. Subcultures can be found that love almost any challenging form of culture you can think of. However, the dialogue about which works are especially worthy is constantly challenged–or even threatened–by several factors:

• The massive supply of culture that is profitable because it is addictive and easy to enjoy. (Believe me, I am addicted as anyone is.)
• A certain reluctance to accept that some works can be more worthy than others. This attitude has shaken the confidence of people, such as humanities professors, who might otherwise be more active proponents of challenging culture.
• The kind of defense of high culture that assumes it must be a traditional Eurocentric canon and that students should recognize a list of canonical authors without actually struggling with their works. In my own area of specialization, K-12 civic education, state standards often present long lists of names. Students are supposed to identify the word “locke” with a long-dead man who happened to believe in individual rights, as if that were a worthy learning objective. The backlash is inevitable.
• The dominant role that colleges and universities play in generating and consuming culture. Higher education has limitations: it serves mostly young adults, it has been assigned an economic function, and it is run by people (like me) who chose an academic path instead of another worthy vocation. Meanwhile, unions and other working-class organizations, religious denominations, small publishing houses and magazines, and other independent sources seem relatively weak.

In “Culture as Counterculture” (New Criterion, Sept. 2021), Adam Kirsch explains how we got to where we are.  I would start a bit earlier than he does and would propose a future phase, but steps 3 to 7 in the following summary match his account:

1. In aristocratic cultures, popularity indicates a lack of quality. Aristocrats gladly prefer to own unpopular things.
2. In democratic cultures, popular tastes gain influence and even authority.
3. As European cultures begin to democratize in the 1800s, people like Matthew Arnold, John Stewart Mill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others–I would add the Uruguayan essayist Jose Enrique Rodo or the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore–argue that all citizens should have access to “the best which has been thought and said in the world” (Arnold). They hope that a classically educated public will govern better.
4. In the 1900s, industries and governments become increasingly effective at distributing mass-produced cultural products whose markets dwarf those for traditional high culture. Leftist critics like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Dwight Macdonald argue that mass audiences are being exploited and denied access to better works, which people would prefer if they had real access to them.
5. In the mid-1990s, many students are still required to study canonical works in schools, under the influence of Arnold and other Victorians. A common motif in youth-oriented pop culture becomes the rejection of that canon. “My heart’s beating rhythm / And my soul keeps singing the blues / Roll over Beethoven / Tell Tchaikovsky the news.”
6. In the wake of that revolt, some highly sophisticated critics argue in favor of pop culture and against status hierarchies. Kirsch’s example is Susan Sontag ‘s 1966 essay collection.
7. Mass-produced, for-profit popular culture keeps expanding while the market for traditional high culture continues to shrink. Sontag decides that pop culture is mainly individualistic and consumerist; she should have resisted it, but the battle is now lost. Genres like classical music are now countercultural niches, not even worth making fun of.

Today’s surviving proponents of high culture seem somewhat diverse philosophically. They include intellectual successors of Macdonald and Sontag, who still want students to read Kafka or the Bhagavad Gita to counteract consumerist capitalism, plus conservatives who want them to read Locke and Jefferson–or at least to know those names–in order to preserve traditional values. Their choice of texts overlaps more than you might think, but the whole group is small and ineffectual, vastly outnumbered by people who don’t see much value to the humanities in any form.

Or perhaps there are still several “high culture countercultures.” Perry Link writes, “Should we compare poetry across civilizations? If we do, classical Chinese poetry wins easily. The contest is almost unfair …” Some of my fellow Americans read classical Chinese verse in the original calligraphy. Likewise, the best poetry being written in English today may take the form of rap lyrics, and some people have highly discriminating, deeply informed knowledge of rap. One could add students of the Talmud or Islamic jurisprudence, jazz aficionados, serious fans of midcentury modernism, and more.

Still, even if we combined all the diverse countercultures devoted to demanding forms of excellence, they would be badly outnumbered.

I believe we can move from step 7 to another phase, when claims of excellence are more influential again. To get there, we will need “business models” (defined broadly) for creating, sharing, and evaluating excellent and demanding forms of culture outside the monopoly of the university. Federal subsidies could help, but I would not put all my eggs in a governmental basket. The goal is not just to make fine culture available–there is already more online than you could see or hear in a lifetime–but to help it to compete for attention in marketplaces like Spotify or Amazon.

Meanwhile, there is cultural work to do. We need more–and more diverse–people to make confident, compelling arguments that specific works will reward the hard work needed to understand them. Some artifacts and texts are better than others: that is the claim. A good life incorporates some of the best works. They do not all come from any particular genre, cultural context, or tradition. One of life’s great joys is finding new forms of excellence where you didn’t expect them. Yet we are surrounded by insidiously addictive but highly profitable mediocrity, and it is up to us to do better.

See also: separating populism from anti-intellectualism; the library of Albert Shanker; “a different Shakespeare from the one I love”; the state of the classics in 2050; and the future of classics.

Wednesday, September 1, 2021

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: September 1, 2021
CONTACT: Jen McAndrew
jennifer.mcandrew@tufts.edu | 617.627.2029

Tufts University students will soon have more opportunities to explore the complex relationships between faith and civic life in a religiously diverse world, thanks to a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations (AVDF). Building on its undergraduate Civic Studies major, the only one of its kind, Tufts University will launch a new interdisciplinary curriculum track in interfaith civic studies.  This two-year project represents an innovative collaboration between the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, Tufts’ School of Arts & Sciences Department of Religion, and the Tufts University Chaplaincy.

The AVDF grant will catalyze the development of a 6-course sequence in interfaith civic studies at Tufts, provide opportunities for faculty professional development and course design, support a cadre of new “student interfaith ambassadors,” and support a Resident Fellow to facilitate interdisciplinary, interfaith discussions at Tufts.

Peter Levine, Tisch College Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs, who is the lead principal investigator, notes, “Religious traditions, identities, institutions, and conflicts are central to civic life. This generous grant will allow Tufts to develop new insights about the relationships between faith and civic life and to educate students to be effective and ethical contributors in a religiously diverse world.”

Co-principal investigator Brian Hatcher, former Chair of the Department of Religion, adds, “The Department of Religion is excited to join with the Tufts Chaplaincy and Tisch College to develop this new initiative to promote Interfaith Studies at Tufts and Beyond. Thanks to the generous support of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, we hope to explore new avenues for integrating the academic study of religion with lived, practical approaches for promoting awareness, knowledge, and engagement among faith communities. Our aim is to help prepare students to address the challenges of interfaith collaboration and religious contestation and to find ways to foster reflection on the role of religion in civic life.”

University Chaplain and co-principal investigator Elyse Nelson Winger is committed to centering student voices in all phases of the initiative. She says, “I am thrilled that our students and University Chaplaincy team are a vital part of this new initiative.  Through experiential learning, community-building, and co-curricular programming, the Interfaith Ambassador Program will equip students from different religious, spiritual, and philosophical backgrounds to ‘live the questions’ most pertinent to interfaith engagement.” 

Jennifer Howe Peace, Senior Researcher at Tisch College and co-founder of the Interreligious/Interfaith Studies Program Unit at the American Academy of Religions, will work with colleagues across departments to design an introduction to interfaith civic studies course and coordinate the grant.  Peace comments, “Young people are eager to creatively tackle the dilemmas and opportunities of living in religiously diverse societies. This grant gives us an opportunity to harness the expertise already at Tufts to educate a new generation of civically-minded leaders with a nuanced understanding of interfaith relations.”