We need to emphasize policies and practices that advance the work of making and sustaining democracy schools and the larger democracy. We need initiatives, like a new version of Cooperative Education, which tie liberal arts and citizenship to work experiences and also prepare students for citizenship expressed through their work in the future.

We need to emphasize policies and practices that advance the work of making and sustaining democracy schools and the larger democracy. We need initiatives, like a new version of Cooperative Education, which tie liberal arts and citizenship to work experiences and also prepare students for citizenship expressed through their work in the future.

In our ongoing Bridging Differences conversation at Education Week about democracy in education, Deborah Meier has been stressing the centrality of decision making, what she describes as "rules of governance that could make it more or less likely that democratic norms will flourish." I agree with the importance of this. But if we look at democracy as an empowering way of life, more than decision-making is necessary.

Otherwise citizenship is sentimentalized and democracy is narrowed.

We need to combine the "head," which makes decisions, the "heart," moral imagination and emotion, and the "hand," civic muscles that power action in the world. This is, in fact, a core argument in Civic Studies. Peter Levine's essay, "The Case for Civic Studies," in the Civic Studies collection, has a splendid treatment. Peter shows how current education curriculum artificially separates the empirical disciplines, natural and social sciences; normative fields, the humanities; and strategic or action fields, the professions and vocations.

What does it look like to prepare students who integrate these domains? Let me tell a story and suggest a policy.

The late Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey traced his political career to his father's drug store in Doland, South Dakota (described in The Education of a Public Man). The drug store was a free space for talk and action. "I've listened to some of the great parliamentary debates of our time," Humphrey wrote, "but have seldom heard better discussions of basic issues than I did as a boy standing on a wooden platform behind the soda fountain." Humphrey's father was one of a handful of Democrats in a town with hundreds of Republicans. He became the mayor. But his life work wasn't running for office. He was building a democratic culture.

The store functioned as a cultural center with music from his father's rickety phonograph, and many books and magazines. Humphrey wrote that "Time after time, when he read about some political development . . . he'd say, 'You should know this, Hubert. It might affect your life someday.'" His father was also a civic activist. "When most of the town wanted to sell the municipally owned power plant to a private utility, Dad...fought the idea tooth and nail...he would take me to the evening meetings of the council, install me in a chair by a corner window, and then do battle, hour after hour."

Humphrey's father was a "citizen pharmacist," who saw his career in civic terms. We've lost a lot of citizen careers and citizen professionals.

One remedy is a movement to revive "Cooperative Education."

Cooperative Education is a method that combines academic study and classroom learning with practical work experience for which students can receive academic credit. Co-op Education draws from Dewey's concept in Democracy and Education that education should be connected "with real things and materials" and his warning about "the tendency for every vocation to become exclusive...[emphasizing] technical method at the expense of meaning."

Cooperative Education, created by Dewey's contemporary, Herman Schneider, connects work and liberal learning. From 1965 to 1996 it was supported by federal legislation. Charles Grassley, Republican senator from Iowa, was a leading champion.

I asked Lois Olson, who long directed the Strommen Center at Augsburg College and was hired in 1985 to help implement a Cooperative Education grant from the US Department of Education, where she got her interest in this connection. "I grew up on a farm in Southwestern Minnesota where politics was everywhere," she said. "My dad often took me to the local pool hall, the civic site for the town. The conversations intertwined politics, religion and economics."

At Augsburg Lois helped to create an employer council and a prestigious faculty council including many liberal arts department chairs. Together they developed plans for student learning through work. She also posed questions to students to help them think about their careers in civic terms. "Describe the culture, policies, allocation of resources that might impact citizenship," she told them. She reported that "responses were very rich. Some said, 'I had no idea that my employer was doing all this.' Others said, 'I looked at the mission and realized it was mostly PR.' Some held discussions about this with their fellow workers."

In the 1990s, service learning, seen as "education for citizenship" in higher education, came to substitute for work-based learning in federal and state policies. The strength of service is to bring in "community," or a focus on human relationships and active learning. But if it loses work, experiential education citizenship becomes sentimentalized.

I saw this first hand in our partnership with the Clinton administration, which made the policy changes. Bill Clinton called for "Big Citizenship" and attacked "Big Government."

Democracy requires integrating head, heart, and hand.

In her piece "The Interdependency of Vocational and Liberal Aims in Higher Education," Kathleen Knight Abowitz proposes bringing liberal and vocational learning together. "Liberal education should be more vocationalized [with] social relevance and purposes in mind," she argues. "Vocational education should be liberalized [with] larger, holistic humanist aims and purposes." We also need stronger focus in both on civic agency, capacities to act collectively in and on the world.

A new Cooperative Education could help, while countering extremist attacks on education for being disconnected from "jobs."

It would also help to revive the idea of democracy as an empowering way of life, with government as the instrument of our collective work.

In our "Bridging Differences" blog discussion on Education Week, Deborah Meier and I have been discussing the meaning of democracy. We both agree that such discussion is important today, when democracy's meaning has been dramatically reduced - and we both agree that democracy is vastly more than elections!

We also have agreement that democracy involves tradeoffs and compromises, and agree on principles such as rough equality in power and knowledge. I like the comment of William Hastie, the first black federal judge, that democracy is a journey, not a destination.

We also have some differences worth exploring.

For one thing, Meier stresses self-governance as the heart of democracy, and, related, highlights the idea of leisure time ("the trouble with socialism is that it takes too many evenings," quipped Oscar Wilde, who meant it resolves around meetings. People say the same about democracy). In contrast, I find compelling the argument of Victor Hanson in The Other Greeks. Hanson argues against the dominant scholarship which assumes that Athenian public life represented the democratization of aristocratic leisure. Such a view is associated with the ideal of "civic virtue," which holds that citizens should put aside their interests to pursue a common good.

Hanson marshals a good deal of evidence to suggest that in fact Athenian democracy grew out of the breakup of the large landed estates and the rise of small farms. The gritty, everyday challenges and disciplines of such farming necessitated cooperative labors on common projects. It wasn't a matter of putting aside interests, but finding that interests sometimes needed to be pooled through cooperation. It was a political process, in the sense of politics we've been discussing. And the discipline of learning to tie one's interests, especially in work, to the long range health of the city turns out to be a key democratic habit.

Hanson's argument complements my research on the roots of democracy across the world in communal labors, which also suggests what the classicist Josiah Ober has shown: democracy in its Greek meaning did not mean a decision making structure, majority rule (see my last blog, "What Is Democracy?"). Rather for the Greeks it meant the capacity or power to act to shape the public world.

Put differently, democracy doesn't only involve participating in decision making. It means creating communities. The concept of citizen as co-creator is a revolutionary challenge to contemporary societies, worth much more discussion.

Democratic practices of communal labor, what we call public work, can be found in every culture long before the term democracy came into existence. Cooperative public work across differences of economic rank and status, sometimes others like ethnicity, has an element of democratic decision making that distinguishes it from conscripted labors organized and controlled by outside powers, whether emperors or nobles or kings. Public work is self-organized cooperative effort by a mix of people which produces something of lasting common benefit (cultural as well as material). It generates the sense that democracy is something people make, not simply participate in. Water systems, common spaces, public institutions, and also cultural products, from songs and dance to schools, are all examples of the many "commons" whose creation and sustenance are foundations of a democratic way of life.

Public work existed in settings (like medieval Europe) where formally people were ruled by kings and immigrants brought these traditions to America - a wellspring of our democratic culture. I describe the ways in which public work generates civic agency, collective power, in an essay in Political Theory, "Constructive Politics as Public Work."

Another ancient democratic practice is deliberation. Nelson Mandela in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom argues that deliberation of (male) villagers of all backgrounds and ranks is the heart of democracy - even though the chief made the final decision. These practices of deliberation, often around a great tree in the middle of villages, are an ancient feature of African civic life.

Deliberation and public work feed into the transdisciplinary field called Civic Studies, with a website at The Jonathan Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University. Civic Studies is based on concepts of agency and citizens as co-creators of communities at different scales.

Another concept in Civic Studies is self-governance of common resources like forests, irrigation systems, fisheries and others, which turns out to be essential to their survival, according to the research of Elinor Ostrom, one of our co-founders, her husband Vincent, and an international network of collaborative researchers. Olstrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics for this research in 2009. Her Nobel lecture, "Beyond Markets and States," can be taken as a brilliant case for Civic Studies. She contrasted citizen governance of common resources, where local communities set rules and sanctions and apply them, with control by outside forces ("markets and states"). Formal governance structures often are complex, what Ostrom calls "polymorphic," with many levels, but strong citizen involvement in their governance is essential for their survival.

After we worked together with several others to form Civic Studies and before her untimely death in 2012, we had many conversations about the relationship between governance of common resources and the work that creates and sustains them. Ostrom was enthusiastic about the concept of public work and terms I had discovered for its different forms, in cultures across the world.

Civic Studies also includes other traditions of theory and practice such as critical theory, community organizing, popular education, and interpretative social science, which recognizes the importance of different kinds of knowledge and different ways of knowing, not simply scientific or academic knowledge.

Civic Studies is full of implications for how we organize and practice democracy education, at every level. It also is full of resources for democracy in a time of trial.

Civic Studies also includes other traditions of theory and practice such as critical theory, community organizing, popular education, and interpretative social science, which recognizes the importance of different kinds of knowledge and different ways of knowing, not simply scientific or academic knowledge.