It is real: I have received my author’s copies, and the print and electronic versions are available for purchase. Citation: Levine, Peter. What Should We Do?: A Theory of Civic Life. Oxford University Press, 2022

This is a companion website that is meant for practitioners and students: https://sites.tufts.edu/civicstudies/. It can be used without reading the book; it employs the same structure to present a collection of practical tools, examples, and short explanations of theory. The book offers much more argumentation and detail.

From the back cover:

“Peter Levine is among the leading philosophers of civic life of his generation. What Should We Do? is his magnum opus. It ranges widely from a masterly review of political philosophy to practical suggestions for addressing issues like the Black Lives Matter movement. For anyone concerned about the state of our democracy and what our role should be, this book is must reading.” — Robert D. Putnam, Research Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, and coauthor of The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again

“What Should We Do? offers a compelling, thought-provoking, and urgently-needed framework for anyone trying to understand how we can relate to and act with each other to co-create a more just world. I love this book and you will too.” — Hahrie Han, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University

“Peter Levine makes everyone think more clearly about everything. How fortunate for our country that he’s applied this gift to the realm of civic life. In this insightful and wise book, Levine reveals what it truly means to cooperate, deliberate, and activate—and challenges us to do all three more mindfully.” — Eric Liu, CEO of Citizen University, and author Become America

According to data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), about 130 million Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 cannot read beyond the fourth-grade level. The graph shows the distribution (where level 3 = fourth grade).

Taken at face value, this statistic has troubling implications for politics (as well as economics, health, and other matters). It does require some caution, however.

First, especially for adults, literacy is very heterogeneous or multidimensional. It’s easy to imagine that one adult could manage the King James Version, a different one could interpret instructions for installing an HVAC system, and a third could enjoy reading a thriller.

Texts present diverse challenges. The Bible can be forbidding unless you are familiar with its vocabulary and cadences from sermons. The Associated Press’ “inverted pyramid” style begins each news story with the latest developments and then explains the broader picture several paragraphs later. This is off-putting for people who have not been following the story, even if their vocabulary is good. For instance, I have paid zero attention to the Johnny Depp trial and don’t happen to know who Amber Heard is, which makes the breaking news stories actually a bit hard for me to understand. Yet my job involves reading hard texts all day.

Sample items from the PIAAC are here. They are appropriately diverse, but mostly oriented to work or news. There would be no way to design a fully comprehensive adult literacy assessment or to score it on only one metric.

Second, some texts are unnecessarily hard to read. US ballot initiatives are scandalously dense. (Compare the Brexit referendum, which asked, in full, “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?”) The inverted pyramid style is problematic, and good explanatory journalism is too scarce. Many academics write impenetrably. (Including me: why did I use “impenetrably” instead of “badly?”)

Third, we live in a profoundly audiovisual culture, and you can obviously learn an enormous amount from sound and images. Nor are books necessarily preferable. Leaving aside children’s books, the best selling book in the US last year was a right-wing screed, Mark R. Levin’s American Marxism, which is worse than much TV and radio. In Russia in the 1990s, 39% of all publications were related to the occult, which is hardly a sign of rigorous review. (On the other hand, people who learn a lot from sound and images ought to be able to perform well on the PIAAC assessment.)

Despite these caveats, I’m worried not only that a lack of conventional literacy blocks the flow of valuable information but also that it may be alienating. Imagine that the government, reporters, medical professionals, and others keep sending messages that you literally cannot read. That is not a basis for trust.

We already accept that literacy for children is a public need. To be sure, we don’t succeed with all children, and there are complex questions about why good learning experiences aren’t consistently available for all youth. But no one doubts that the issue merits attention. Adult literacy is also important. Even if we suddenly made K-12 schools work well for all our youth, we would still have about 130 million Americans over school age who cannot score above 3 on the PIAAC.

Adults cannot (and should not be) compelled to do anything to improve their own literacy. But there is a case for much more attractive adult learning opportunities–not only as a path to better jobs but also in the interest of democracy. In my idea world, adult civic education would be literacy education, and vice-versa.

See also a way forward for high culture; separating populism from anti-intellectualism; a German/US civic education discussion; etc.

Well, our theme is The Pursuit of Happiness: Reigniting the Social Studies Spark. And we know it’s going to be fantastic. Check out the keynote speaker!

So get those proposals in, and help us, and your colleagues, reignite that spark!

Proposals are due no later than June 8, 2022. If you have any questions, please contact Terry Davila-Alexander and Lauren Samoszenko at conferenceproposals@fcss.org. You can submit your proposals at this link.

The word “Western” is often appended to ideas and institutions, sometimes to praise them and sometimes to bury them. I almost always find this terminology fuzzy and unhelpful. On the other hand, imperialism and colonialism are evils that are important to name and combat.

Two of the topics that I follow regularly these days are education and Ukraine. Both supply examples of problematic uses of the term “Western” and real examples of imperialism.

A manuscript that I read recently described the radical Brazilian educator Paolo Freire as a critic of “Western” approaches to education, meaning hierarchical and authoritarian pedagogies. When I searched Freire’s major works, I did not find the words “West ” or “Western” used in relevant ways, but I did find articles that concur in describing Freire’s pedagogy as an alternative “to the traditional Western ‘banking’ model of education in which an authority ‘deposits’ knowledge into a student” (Bhargava et al 2016). I also found some articles that decry the “North American and Western appropriations of Freire’s work and thought,” which ostensibly ignore Freire’s “anti-colonial and postcolonial” agenda (Giroux 1992). Finally, I encountered a burgeoning recent literature that criticizes Freire’s “Western assumptions” and argues that “the Freirian approach to empowerment is really a disguised form of colonization” (Bowers & Appfel-Marglin 2004, p. 2). In some of this literature, Freire is described explicitly and critically as a “Western” thinker.

There is a parallel debate about how to classify Freire’s influences. Sol Stern complains that “Freire isn’t interested in the Western tradition’s leading education thinkers—not Rousseau, not Piaget, not John Dewey, not Horace Mann, not Maria Montessori.” Douglas Kellner classifies Freire and Ivan Illich as “critics of classical Western education.” But many other analysts trace pervasive echoes of Rousseau and Dewey in Freire. Insofar as Freire was a Marxist–well, Karl Marx was a Western thinker.

Meanwhile, the Russian right-wing theorist, Alexander Dugin (who apparently inspires Putin) writes, “We need to unite all the forces that are opposed to Western norms. … Therefore, we must create strategic alliances to overthrow the present order of things, of which the core could be described as human rights, anti-hierarchy, and political correctness – everything that is the face of the Beast, the anti-Christ or, in other terms, Kali-Yuga.”

For Dugin, to oppose natural hierarchy in a classroom or elsewhere is “Western”–and that is a very bad thing. Dugin is willing to make alliances with Jihadists, Hindu nationalists, European neofascists, and anyone who will stand against the hegemonic liberal norms of “the West.” This a justification for the Russian war in Ukraine.

Note how “Western” is used as a token of appraisal (Stern) or condemnation (Dugin), and how many meanings it takes on.

What does it actually mean? Plato was “Western.” He lived in Europe; his name comes first on many syllabuses for “Western philosophy.” He advocated (possibly with irony) a radically authoritarian educational system. He proposed various dualisms and believed in objective truths. He has been at least as influential in Islam as in Christianity and Judaism, and therefore as influential in Tehran and Dakar as in New York and Moscow.

Dewey was also “Western.” He was a White man from Vermont. He opposed all dualisms, wanted to make education radically democratic, and saw truth as co-constructed. He had a fruitful sojourn in China.

Freire was born even further west than Dewey and wrote in Portuguese. His influences were mostly European writers. The three men share some vocabulary and had similar roles as teachers, writers, and political advisors, but many other people whom we could also classify as Western thinkers did not. The West has generated aesthetes, engineers, hermits, mystics, revolutionaries, and reactionaries. People who figure on canonical lists of Western thinkers have lived and written in places like Damascus and Alexandria, Rio and Mexico City, and Moscow and Kolkata as well as Paris and London. It is impossible to draw a border around the West on any map.

We should say what we’re for and against, and why. It rarely adds any value to append the adjective “Western” to these things. However, the concepts of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism are much sharper, and they reflect the global trauma of European conquest after 1492. Colonialism has been a highly concrete, material experience, not a set of abstract ideas. Indeed, the colonizers have been intellectually diverse and have sometimes shared ideas with people who resist colonialism.

Importantly, Russia was a major participant in European imperialism and exploitation, not a victim of it.

Sources: Bhargava, Rahul, Ricardo Kadouaki, Emily Bhargava, Guilherme Castro, and Catherine D’Ignazio. “Data murals: Using the arts to build data literacy.” The Journal of Community Informatics, 12, no. 3 (2016); Giroux, Henry A. “Paulo Freire and the politics of postcolonialism.” Journal of Advanced Composition (1992): 15-26. Bowers, Chet A. & Appfel-Marglin, F. (eds) Re-thinking Freire: Globalization and the environmental crisis. Routledge, 2004. See also: to whom do the ancient Greeks belong?; Jesus was a person of color; avoiding the labels of East and West; when East and West were one; on modernity and the distinction between East and West; who says that binary thinking is Western?; two cheers for the West; etc.