Citizen politics grows from the sense that we have to "live together afterwards," for all the differences and conflict. Politics in this elemental sense is the alternative to war and violence.

Citizen politics grows from the sense that we have to "live together afterwards," for all the differences and conflict. Politics in this elemental sense is the alternative to war and violence.

In the face of violent threats from groups like ISIS, a citizen-led alternative is crucial. Schools and colleges are a potential site. Thus my first idea.

In the face of violent threats from groups like ISIS, a citizen-led alternative is crucial. Schools and colleges are a potential site. Thus my first idea.

In her last blog in "Bridging Differences," our continuing discussion of schools, colleges, and democracy on Education Week, Deborah Meier asks "What Will It Take to Build a Democratic Movement?" She writes, "What I want to encourage is for every community to discuss what they want for themselves, their neighbors, and the world that schools might be the appropriate vehicle for." She continues, "Some structures make it harder to experience power and some make it easier to experience it and to sustain it. Like being rewarded and humiliated for being quiet and punished for being outspoken. Fear works. But then...it doesn't work anymore, or at least not often enough to squash the rebelliousness altogether...What is it that you think changes culture?"

In the face of violent threats from groups like ISIS, a citizen-led alternative is crucial. Schools and colleges are a potential site. Thus my first idea.

Culture change involves conceptual change, put into practice in a different kind of politics, plural and citizen-centered, taking root in free public spaces around education. This means "relationships before program," in the language of community organizing. But such politics can take place many places beyond community organizations.

Put differently, I agree with Meier's call for "every community discussing what they want for themselves, their neighbors and the world." But the call needs to be connected to a different politics which can build public relationships across vast differences, conveying a vision of a democratic way of life based on diversity and agency. Otherwise, "discussing what we want" easily turns today into what we want for our kind of people.

We're living in a bitterly fragmented world. Value wars continually erupt around education. Education is one rare "commons" in which communities of different value frameworks are invested. Organizing for change in and around schools and colleges is key to "changing the world." But it's not a matter of rallying educational progressives around a program.

Kenan Malik observes last Saturday in "Why Do Islamist Groups Seem So Much More Sadistic, Even Evil?," in the Guardian that Islamist groups like ISIS include many young people who are not very different than other young people -- they're certainly not monsters from another planet. They're also hostile to progressive politics. They go to secular public schools. And they are hopeless about making democratic changes in their schools.

They have some similarities with young people who join gangs but Islamist youth identify with fundamentalist religion. They demonize "infidels" whom they see as a part of a secular, consumer, individualist, impersonal world. They rage against a culture that seems destructive of their identities and interests.

Many less extreme but nonetheless deep divisions produce Manichean politics, a totalizing politics of good versus evil. What is needed is a way for people to build relationships across chasms of faith, ideology, and other differences, a different kind of politics, as context for developing common agendas.

This requires "free spaces" where politics centers on citizens not on ideologies or parties. London Citizen, an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation community organizing network, illustrates.

It is extremely diverse, with Muslims, Christians, and Jews, all of many persuasions, and also nonbelievers. It includes schools, unions, civic groups. London Citizen creates multiple free spaces where people build public relationships with people who make them uncomfortable or even dislike. This is their ground for developing programmatic ideas. Such politics creates hope, countering the fatalism which violence feeds on. Luke Bretherton's recent Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship, and the Politics of a Common Life is a brilliant analysis.

This kind of politics can inspire electoral politics -- in England it's produced a "Blue Labour" alternative to conservative politics and to the technocratic centrism of Tony Blair alike, with affinities with Catholic social thought and its emphasis on decentralization of power. But London Citizen itself continues as a highly diverse, cross-partisan site of citizen-centered politics.

The emerging field called "Civic Studies" seeks to conceptualize such politics. Civic Studies, also called "The New Civic Politics," is organized around core concepts of agency and citizens as co-creators. The Tisch College of Citizenship at Tufts University has a lot on Civic Studies, including a book describing its feeder intellectual traditions, and a curriculum of the Summer Institute of Civic Studies each year. The Tisch College has a site.

The late Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, and I worked on a chart comparing citizen-centered politics with government-centered ideological politics and community-centered politics. I put a version about education up on academia. .

We need to spread such citizen-centered politics -- as a way to create a democratic movement around schools, and as the alternative to deepening chaos and violence.

In the face of violent threats from groups like ISIS, a citizen-led alternative is crucial. Schools and colleges are a potential site. Thus my first idea.

In the face of violent threats from groups like ISIS, a citizen-led alternative is crucial. Schools and colleges are a potential site. Thus my first idea.

Deborah Meier, a great democracy educator and a mentor of mine, and I have been discussing the meaning of "citizen politics" in our Bridging Differences blog conversation at Education Week. In the last blog she responds both to me and to Mike Miller, long time community organizer who commented on our exchange (his comments are on the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship blog).

"I'm struggling to picture the alternative form of organizing you are suggesting," says Meier, remarking that she can better understand Miller's description of large coalitions of community groups and trade unions. She adds that Miller has no examples of large-scale successful educational transformation. She also observes that an example which does purport to be about large scale change, the school choice movement, "creates communities separate from the ones we actually live in and vote in."

Then she asks "what's our alternative?"

I agree choice does not equate with "democracy." Citizen politics is the wellspring of democracy as a way of life in American history is citizen politics. Let me elaborate.

Mike Miller's involvement in the conversation illustrates one example, which is fairly widely known these days. In 1983 I wrote about the San Francisco Organizing Project (SFOP), a broad-based community organization which he was organizing, and attended its founding convention. The chapter, "God's Laboratory," from my book, Community Is Possible, is up on academia.edu

SFOP was wonderfully diverse. It reminded me of a vivid description of San Francisco in a black newspaper at the turn of the century, "Like a Fairway of an enormous circus [with] thousands of every race...Hindoos, Japanese, Black men with wide shoulders, slim hips, loose relaxed gait, Jews, Swedes, Spaniards, Chinese, lean Englishmen..."

SFOP brought together religious groups, trade unions, community organizations, with people from different racial, cultural, and partisan backgrounds to work on issues like affordable housing and jobs,. These days some such broad based community organizations also include schools.

Building the conference involved intentional work to create public relationships across huge differences, using methods like one on one meetings. It was full of conflict but very productive, growing the "public persona" which Alyssa Blood observed among special education kids in Public Achievement - capacities to work in public settings full of diversity. It also embodied key democratic values such as equality, cooperation, and respect -- faith in the public potential of people from all sorts of backgrounds. Overall it was about civic agency, or developing collective empowerment.

That's what I mean by "citizen politics."

Mike and I discussed how citizen politics can spread. We both agreed that more is needed than community organizing to change America. We had some differences on what will spread it.

We discussed two models. The Chinese model, the countryside encircling the cities, builds coalitions to overcome the powerful. Mike advocates variations on this model - as do most community organizers.

I also argued another model is necessary, "cultural organizing," and we discussed the astonishing spread of Christianity in its early centuries especially among the poor and marginalized. It involved conversion to a different way of seeing themselves and reality, which accorded people a new dignity and worth. This was a molecular process of cultural transformation. In American history something similar has taken place again and again around democracy, in which religious values and of practices are one strand but they form part of a larger public whole.

We're seeing signs of this democratic ferment again, especially around education. Lani Guinier's The Tyranny of the Meritocracy has many examples of bringing a more cooperative ethos into the hypercompetitive individualist culture of education. For instance, Guinier describes the "quiet revolutionary" Shirley Collado, who develops ways for minority students from low income backgrounds to work together cooperatively. Guinier calls such examples "democratic merit," challenging the "testocracy."

The subtitle of her book, "Democratizing higher education," is revealing. In colleges and in schools, there are signs of a fledgling democratic movement.
It needs the idea of public life as an arena of diversity and tension which can be constructive - if people grow "public personas." Public Achievement illustrates. At Maxfield Elementary School in St. Paul a PA team of fifth grade African Americans are working on an anti-bullying campaign. I asked them why kids bully. They had many insights about the hypercompetitive culture.

They are learning strategies for working together - cooperating - and with a broader public, kids not their buddies.

PA is one seedbed of a movement.

Harry Boyte's most recent book is the edited collection, Democracy's Education (Vanderbilt University Press, 2015).