Reviving the Real American Dream
"In a neighborhood dispute there may be stunts, rough words and hot insults, but when a whole people speaks to its government the quality of the action and the dialogue needs to reflect the worth of that people and the responsibility of that government." - Program Notes, March on Washington, August 28, 1963.
As those of us in the March on Washington will never forget, the experience created a transcendent sense of hopefulness. In my view, this grew from the march's remarkable civic qualities. The civil rights movement made a statement to the nation and also to itself about the meaning of citizenship.
The question for today, as we head into an election season marked by bitter polarization--"stunts, rough words, and hot insults"--is how we can develop a renewed sense of ourselves as a "whole people," responsible for democracy as a way of life, not simply elections. This larger democratic imagination is what the nation is waiting for.
Stories of public work and civic action from the grassroots of American society and the tools of social media developed in recent years give us resources to help accomplish this task if we use them to integrate democratic stirrings into a larger democratic narrative that challenges today's overly materialistic and individualistic version of the American Dream.
There is a history to build on, detailed in books like Taylor Branch's Pulitzer Prize-winning Parting the Waters. The March on Washington channeled years of disciplined, nonviolent action in communities across the South. Such action by everyday citizens gave the nation a civics lesson. The country had watched unforgettable, televised images of thousands of domestic workers in Montgomery walking with dignity and determination to their work rather than ride of segregated buses. People had seen black children in Little Rock on their way to school brave crowds of segregationists who yelled insults and threw rocks. Television had dramatized nonviolent demonstrators in Birmingham facing down police dogs. Such scenes created the background for the march.
The march integrated and amplified such stories. It also deepened a citizen identity and a shared sense of people-hood.
This civic identity was expressed in Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. King called the nation to "rise up [and] live out the true meaning of its creed" that all are created equal. He also countered divisive politics. "Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline."
Citizenship was also expressed by the determination and dignity of the marchers. They took to heart the message of the program notes (above), which called for marchers to understand themselves as a "whole people" speaking to "its government," taking responsibility for "the quality of [their] action and the dialogue," and showing the nation and the government their worth as a people.
Acts of citizenship continue in the present below the surface of today's degraded public discourse. In his book Ecology of Democracy, David Mathews, president of the Kettering Foundation, shows what this looks like. Citizens, in his definition, are those who act with others to address "the problems behind the problems," what he calls problems "of" democracy not simply problems "in" democracy.
Problems of democracy--polarization, devaluation of the talents of lay citizens, feelings of widespread powerlessness and others--cripple our collective ability to respond to the vast array of issues in democracy. These range from incarceration of black males to inequality, failing schools to climate change.
Sometimes citizenship acts are very localized such as acts of kindness to neighbors, or visits to lonely people in nursing homes. Sometimes they are community wide, as in the stories of what is called "broad based community organizing" bringing together people of different faiths, races, and income levels to address complex problems like economic development or school reform. In other cases, they involve creation and care for public goods, from garden groups to public spaces. Finally, some involve large acts of public reconstruction, like the efforts I recently described at the Rutgers University-Newark to discover and live out the identity of a "democracy university," reviving a once great American tradition.
Such civic stories furnish a foundation for an American Dream far different than the scramble for fame and fortune we see on the nightly news. By tending to the welfare of the community and the larger society, they suggest a renewed story of "the whole people" taking responsibility for democracy as a way of life.
In recent years we have heard a call for strong citizenship from political leaders. I saw first hand President Clinton's interest in citizenship when I coordinated the "New Citizenship" effort with the Domestic Policy Council from 1993 to 1995, culminating in a Camp David meeting on the future of democracy on January 14, 1965, just before Clinton's State of the Union address. In that address, "The New Covenant," Clinton described the work of citizenship as "the great strength of America." Barack Obama struck this theme in the 2008 election campaign, as Nancy Cantor and I detailed in an earlier Huffington Post blog.
The lesson of recent years is that political leaders by themselves will not sustain a strong citizenship message in the face of ferocious opposition from the elite political culture, even if they believe in it and have strong evidence of its appeal.
For a new sense of "the whole people" to take hold will require the work of the whole people.
The tools of social media offer us opportunities. For instance, in recent years they have shown their immense potential for responding to natural disasters. As Dina Fine Maron described in Scientific American, The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) wrote in its 2013 National Preparedness report that during Hurricane Sandy, "users sent more than 20 million Sandy-related Twitter posts, or "tweets," despite the loss of cell phone service during the peak of the storm." Michael Beckerman, president and CEO of the Internet Association, testified to the House Subcommittee on Emergency Preparedness, Response, and Communications that "the convergence of social networks and mobile has thrown the old response playbook out the window."
We need to define our elections as now a "civic disaster." And we need to develop a strategy for enlisting the energies and talents of the people in the work of response.
Harry Boyte is editor of the collection Democracy's Education, with many contributors describing the stirrings of a democratic American Dream.
As those of us in the March on Washington will never forget, the experience created a transcendent sense of hopefulness. In my view, this grew from the march's remarkable civic qualities. The civil rights movement made a statement to the nation and also to itself about the meaning of citizenship.
The question for today, as we head into an election season marked by bitter polarization--"stunts, rough words, and hot insults"--is how we can develop a renewed sense of ourselves as a "whole people," responsible for democracy as a way of life, not simply elections. This larger democratic imagination is what the nation is waiting for.
Stories of public work and civic action from the grassroots of American society and the tools of social media developed in recent years give us resources to help accomplish this task if we use them to integrate democratic stirrings into a larger democratic narrative that challenges today's overly materialistic and individualistic version of the American Dream.
There is a history to build on, detailed in books like Taylor Branch's Pulitzer Prize-winning Parting the Waters. The March on Washington channeled years of disciplined, nonviolent action in communities across the South. Such action by everyday citizens gave the nation a civics lesson. The country had watched unforgettable, televised images of thousands of domestic workers in Montgomery walking with dignity and determination to their work rather than ride of segregated buses. People had seen black children in Little Rock on their way to school brave crowds of segregationists who yelled insults and threw rocks. Television had dramatized nonviolent demonstrators in Birmingham facing down police dogs. Such scenes created the background for the march.
The march integrated and amplified such stories. It also deepened a citizen identity and a shared sense of people-hood.
This civic identity was expressed in Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. King called the nation to "rise up [and] live out the true meaning of its creed" that all are created equal. He also countered divisive politics. "Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline."
Citizenship was also expressed by the determination and dignity of the marchers. They took to heart the message of the program notes (above), which called for marchers to understand themselves as a "whole people" speaking to "its government," taking responsibility for "the quality of [their] action and the dialogue," and showing the nation and the government their worth as a people.
Acts of citizenship continue in the present below the surface of today's degraded public discourse. In his book Ecology of Democracy, David Mathews, president of the Kettering Foundation, shows what this looks like. Citizens, in his definition, are those who act with others to address "the problems behind the problems," what he calls problems "of" democracy not simply problems "in" democracy.
Problems of democracy--polarization, devaluation of the talents of lay citizens, feelings of widespread powerlessness and others--cripple our collective ability to respond to the vast array of issues in democracy. These range from incarceration of black males to inequality, failing schools to climate change.
Sometimes citizenship acts are very localized such as acts of kindness to neighbors, or visits to lonely people in nursing homes. Sometimes they are community wide, as in the stories of what is called "broad based community organizing" bringing together people of different faiths, races, and income levels to address complex problems like economic development or school reform. In other cases, they involve creation and care for public goods, from garden groups to public spaces. Finally, some involve large acts of public reconstruction, like the efforts I recently described at the Rutgers University-Newark to discover and live out the identity of a "democracy university," reviving a once great American tradition.
Such civic stories furnish a foundation for an American Dream far different than the scramble for fame and fortune we see on the nightly news. By tending to the welfare of the community and the larger society, they suggest a renewed story of "the whole people" taking responsibility for democracy as a way of life.
In recent years we have heard a call for strong citizenship from political leaders. I saw first hand President Clinton's interest in citizenship when I coordinated the "New Citizenship" effort with the Domestic Policy Council from 1993 to 1995, culminating in a Camp David meeting on the future of democracy on January 14, 1965, just before Clinton's State of the Union address. In that address, "The New Covenant," Clinton described the work of citizenship as "the great strength of America." Barack Obama struck this theme in the 2008 election campaign, as Nancy Cantor and I detailed in an earlier Huffington Post blog.
The lesson of recent years is that political leaders by themselves will not sustain a strong citizenship message in the face of ferocious opposition from the elite political culture, even if they believe in it and have strong evidence of its appeal.
For a new sense of "the whole people" to take hold will require the work of the whole people.
The tools of social media offer us opportunities. For instance, in recent years they have shown their immense potential for responding to natural disasters. As Dina Fine Maron described in Scientific American, The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) wrote in its 2013 National Preparedness report that during Hurricane Sandy, "users sent more than 20 million Sandy-related Twitter posts, or "tweets," despite the loss of cell phone service during the peak of the storm." Michael Beckerman, president and CEO of the Internet Association, testified to the House Subcommittee on Emergency Preparedness, Response, and Communications that "the convergence of social networks and mobile has thrown the old response playbook out the window."
We need to define our elections as now a "civic disaster." And we need to develop a strategy for enlisting the energies and talents of the people in the work of response.
Harry Boyte is editor of the collection Democracy's Education, with many contributors describing the stirrings of a democratic American Dream.
Reviving the Real American Dream
As we head into an election season marked by bitter polarization, how can we develop a renewed sense of ourselves as a whole people, responsible for democracy as a way of life, not simply elections?
Reviving the Real American Dream
As we head into an election season marked by bitter polarization, how can we develop a renewed sense of ourselves as a whole people, responsible for democracy as a way of life, not simply elections?
Reviving the Real American Dream
Regrowing Democracy — The Role of Higher Education
If, as William Hastie, the first black federal judge, put it, "democracy is a journey not a destination," we've gotten off track.
Democracy today is narrowed to elections. Government-centered definitions eviscerate the "great word whose history remains unwritten," as the poet Walt Whitman put it. Shrinking democracy collapses education's purpose to a ticket for individual success. Work comes to mean jobs with value measured by profit margins, a definition which threatens massive unemployment in the age of the smart machines described in Nicholas Carr's The Glass Cage and Martin Ford's Rise of the Robots.
If asked seriously, very few Americans really believe that politicians are going to fix our problems for us. But what to do? We need a "we the people democracy" once again and the education and work that can make it come back alive if we are to rebuild our confidence and renew our hope.
Vibrant democracy in American history wove elections into a much bigger way of life. From the Greek demos, people, and kratia, power, democracy meant the "powers of the society," whose "only safe depository," Thomas Jefferson argued, was the people. This came to life in the "portable democracy" described by historian Robert Wiebe in Self-Rule - A Cultural History of Democracy. As settlers built democracy through clearing lands, building towns, and working together on problems, democracy became their creation. The self-organizing spirit animated democratizing movements to "build a more perfect union," from unions and abolition, to women's movements, farmers movements, and the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Skills of a democratic way of life developed through education and work with civic meanings. Thus the Leather Apron Club, founded by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, included tradesmen, artisans, and shopkeepers. The club, with lively discussions about public affairs, was a civic network for "doing well by doing good." Members organized a street-sweeping corps, volunteer firefighters, tax-supported neighborhood constables, health and life insurance groups, a library, a hospital, a school for young people, a society for spreading scientific discoveries, and a postal system.
Education tied to work with public purposes animated movements like the Grange, settlements, and workmen's circles.
The New Deal drew on this history. When Franklin Roosevelt proposed the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), employing three million young men between 1933 and 1942, he argued that "more important than the material gains will be the moral and spiritual value of the work." The CCC made immense contributions to conservation. It also helped school "the greatest generation." In 1947, President Truman's Commission on Higher Education said "the first and most essential charge upon higher education is that... it shall be the carrier of democratic values, ideals and processes."
Our Center for Democracy and Citizenship's study of what makes Minnesota the most civically engaged state, including the highest voting levels, conducted with the National Conference of Citizenship, concluded that a rich history of citizen-organized education with strong connections to the life of communities and work with public meanings was key.
Higher education has mushroomed. In 2011, 21 million students were enrolled part or full time. Economic activity of colleges and universities is more than a trillion dollars yearly. But the democracy mission has eroded as an "Ivory Tower" culture has taken hold, described in the recent documentary by that name. As a result, politicians like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Doug Ducey of Arizona make hay by depicting colleges as out of touch.
Yet stirrings of a movement to renew higher education's democracy purpose are appearing, tied to educating for work for the common good, colleges that are part of the life of communities, and a revitalized vision of democracy as a way of life.
At Augsburg College in Minneapolis, nursing and teaching programs aim to prepare "citizen professionals" as change agents. The special education program sends student-teachers to schools to work with special needs kids on public issues they care about like bullying, obesity, and animal cruelty. It creates empowering environments for those with disabilities while equipping future teachers with civic skills. "When I heard words like power, change, and public life, I realized this is was what was craving without naming it," says Nora Ulseth, an Augsburg student. "College is where we train teachers. Unless we teach how to be change agents nothing will change."
Leaders like Nancy Cantor, Chancellor of the Rutgers University-Newark, call for universities to be citizens of a place, not on the side lines studying it. The university's Express Newark center conveys the culture of the city, locating faculty as citizens who contribute to the community, not a breed apart.
Higher education is the upstream school of leadership in our knowledge society. If its democracy movement spreads it will generate help to revive America's democratic soul.
Harry C. Boyte edits Democracy's Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities (Vanderbilt University Press 2015)
Democracy today is narrowed to elections. Government-centered definitions eviscerate the "great word whose history remains unwritten," as the poet Walt Whitman put it. Shrinking democracy collapses education's purpose to a ticket for individual success. Work comes to mean jobs with value measured by profit margins, a definition which threatens massive unemployment in the age of the smart machines described in Nicholas Carr's The Glass Cage and Martin Ford's Rise of the Robots.
If asked seriously, very few Americans really believe that politicians are going to fix our problems for us. But what to do? We need a "we the people democracy" once again and the education and work that can make it come back alive if we are to rebuild our confidence and renew our hope.
Vibrant democracy in American history wove elections into a much bigger way of life. From the Greek demos, people, and kratia, power, democracy meant the "powers of the society," whose "only safe depository," Thomas Jefferson argued, was the people. This came to life in the "portable democracy" described by historian Robert Wiebe in Self-Rule - A Cultural History of Democracy. As settlers built democracy through clearing lands, building towns, and working together on problems, democracy became their creation. The self-organizing spirit animated democratizing movements to "build a more perfect union," from unions and abolition, to women's movements, farmers movements, and the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Skills of a democratic way of life developed through education and work with civic meanings. Thus the Leather Apron Club, founded by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, included tradesmen, artisans, and shopkeepers. The club, with lively discussions about public affairs, was a civic network for "doing well by doing good." Members organized a street-sweeping corps, volunteer firefighters, tax-supported neighborhood constables, health and life insurance groups, a library, a hospital, a school for young people, a society for spreading scientific discoveries, and a postal system.
Education tied to work with public purposes animated movements like the Grange, settlements, and workmen's circles.
The New Deal drew on this history. When Franklin Roosevelt proposed the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), employing three million young men between 1933 and 1942, he argued that "more important than the material gains will be the moral and spiritual value of the work." The CCC made immense contributions to conservation. It also helped school "the greatest generation." In 1947, President Truman's Commission on Higher Education said "the first and most essential charge upon higher education is that... it shall be the carrier of democratic values, ideals and processes."
Our Center for Democracy and Citizenship's study of what makes Minnesota the most civically engaged state, including the highest voting levels, conducted with the National Conference of Citizenship, concluded that a rich history of citizen-organized education with strong connections to the life of communities and work with public meanings was key.
Higher education has mushroomed. In 2011, 21 million students were enrolled part or full time. Economic activity of colleges and universities is more than a trillion dollars yearly. But the democracy mission has eroded as an "Ivory Tower" culture has taken hold, described in the recent documentary by that name. As a result, politicians like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Doug Ducey of Arizona make hay by depicting colleges as out of touch.
Yet stirrings of a movement to renew higher education's democracy purpose are appearing, tied to educating for work for the common good, colleges that are part of the life of communities, and a revitalized vision of democracy as a way of life.
At Augsburg College in Minneapolis, nursing and teaching programs aim to prepare "citizen professionals" as change agents. The special education program sends student-teachers to schools to work with special needs kids on public issues they care about like bullying, obesity, and animal cruelty. It creates empowering environments for those with disabilities while equipping future teachers with civic skills. "When I heard words like power, change, and public life, I realized this is was what was craving without naming it," says Nora Ulseth, an Augsburg student. "College is where we train teachers. Unless we teach how to be change agents nothing will change."
Leaders like Nancy Cantor, Chancellor of the Rutgers University-Newark, call for universities to be citizens of a place, not on the side lines studying it. The university's Express Newark center conveys the culture of the city, locating faculty as citizens who contribute to the community, not a breed apart.
Higher education is the upstream school of leadership in our knowledge society. If its democracy movement spreads it will generate help to revive America's democratic soul.
Harry C. Boyte edits Democracy's Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities (Vanderbilt University Press 2015)
Regrowing Democracy — The Role of Higher Education
If, as William Hastie, the first black federal judge, put it, "democracy is a journey not a destination," we've gotten off track.
Regrowing Democracy — The Role of Higher Education
If, as William Hastie, the first black federal judge, put it, "democracy is a journey not a destination," we've gotten off track.
Regrowing Democracy — The Role of Higher Education
The Theft of Democracy’s Memory
In this coming election season we need to challenge ourselves and candidates of whatever party and at whatever level to recall the work of citizenship. And we need to ask candidates to stop pretending they will fix our problems by themselves. These are the questions to pose: