Author Archives: Peter

talking about the Pledge of Allegiance on So Tell Me More

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At 2 pm Eastern, I’ll be on NPR’s “So Tell Me More,” talking about the Pledge of Allegiance. I don’t know where the conversation will go, but this is my usual line on the Pledge. Because it’s traditional, stopping it (or letting it lapse) is interpreted as a lack of concern for patriotism, for the flag, or for the God who is mentioned in the third clause. But imagine we had never had a Pledge in schools, and people wanted to do something to boost patriotism. Would they really invent a daily ritual that involved these characteristics?

1. Asking people who are too young to make a legal commitment to say something that sounds like a vow.
2. Asking people who have already “pledged allegiance” to re-pledge allegiance every day for 13 years? (I thought promises were for keeps.)
3. Asking children to say words like “indivisible” without studying their meaning.
4. Repeating the same activity every day from kindergarten to 12th grade without raising the difficulty or adding new ideas.
5. Asking students to say “liberty” and “justice” every day without making sure that they understand the live debates about what those terms mean.
6. In a 30-word statement that is meant to summarize the core, shared values of the republic, courting controversy by making it a pledge to a flag (considered idolatrous by some), citing a singular God (not recognized by many, and considered profane to name by others), and emphasizing indivisibility (which, I assume, is a rebuke to successionists).

Even if your fundamental goal is to inculcate patriotism, I can think of better means to that end.

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the state humanities councils, connecting the public to scholarship

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(Elon, NC) Elizabeth Lynn has published an important paper entitled State Councils, The Humanities, and the American Public. It tells the story of the formation of the National Endowment for the Humanities as a means to fund high scholarship, the almost accidental creation of state humanities councils (composed of laypeople as well as scholars), and how those councils helped save and strengthen the NEH from the grassroots up.

I contribute a relatively long preface that tells a story of its own. In brief summary, these are the stages in my story:

The humanities were invented by the ancient Sophists and then reinvented in the Renaissance to teach rhetoric, practical reasoning, and other skills for public life.

Professional humanists uncovered truths about the texts they studied that tended to reduce their immediate relevance to current public life. For example, they first mined classical history for models of virtue and wisdom, but the more they understood the past, the more complex, distant, and even irrelevant it seemed.

Humanism as professional expertise reached is apogee in Germany, and many of the greatest German scholars migrated to the United States because of Hitler. In the immediate post-war period, those exiles coexisted pretty comfortably in elite American universities with Anglophone public intellectuals who wrote appreciative essays on high culture for relatively broad audiences. Together, they produced scholarship that was widely respected and reasonably noncontroversial.

At around the same time, the federal government attained peak levels of public trust and frequently allocated public funds and decision-making power to specialized groups–military officers, business and union leaders, and scientists–who also had the public’s trust. Thus it was natural for Congress to appropriate funds for the humanities and turn the cash over to distinguished professional humanists in elite universities.

But all that collapsed as the public lost trust in government and specialized experts of all types, and as the calm consensus within the humanities gave way to intense and abstruse controversies, often with a political edge.

Today, even if you want to use public funds to support high scholarship in the humanities, you’ve got to think about strategies that tie scholarship to laypeople’s concerns. Elizabeth Lynn depicts the state humanities councils as means to that end. By the way, we are working with her and the Indiana state council (now known as “Indiana Humanities”) on an empirical study of the public humanities in that state. I hope it will demonstrate the breadth and robustness of the network.

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asking Congress to vote on Syria was a deliberative act

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(Sacramento) President Obama’s decision to ask Congress for authorization to bomb targets in Syria may have been wise or foolish. It had  military and diplomatic repercussions that I cannot judge. But when the president asked legislators to discuss the issue and then make a decision, he used a deliberative style of leadership that we ought to recognize, at least. It is a style that reasonable people use when they lead ordinary associations and communities, and the founders expected it when they created Congress as a deliberative body.  So I wrote on Sept. 10, and the Boston’s Globe’s Farah Stockman picks up the theme in today’s opinion piece:

Of course, Obama got called a lot of names for the delay that made that outcome possible: “weakling,” “ditherer-in-chief” and  – nastiest of all, in some corners -  “community organizer.” I must admit that even I thought he was crazy for going to Congress, which often seems more eager to tar and feather him than to approve of anything he wants.

But political theorist Dennis Thompson, co-author of the book “Why Deliberative Democracy?” says Obama’s moves mirrored a style of leadership he taught at Harvard. Thompson believes that, in a true democracy, a leader ought to explain the reasoning behind the course of action he or she wants to take. But in the end, wherever possible, the group itself should debate it and have the final word.

… So, why then were Americas so infuriated that Obama took the issue to Congress?

“It is as if we expect decisions of war and peace to be made by the president rather than society as a whole,” said Archon Fung, another Harvard professor who had studied the virtues of “deliberative democracy.” “Decisions about when to use military force . . .involve killing as a state act. If any decision should be made democratically, then it’s this one.”

Peter Levine, a professor at Tufts University, sees the public reaction as a sign of the times. Americans have grown less interested in the public deliberations that that make democracies work. Participation on juries and PTA meetings are at an all time low, he said. Voters expect their elected leaders to solve their problems. Debates over the best way to go about it are seen as a sign of failure or weakness.

“Our system is supposed to be deliberative,” Levine said. “But we live in a profoundly anti-deliberative moment.”

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why can’t a centrist coalition form in the US House?

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(Sacramento) If the legislature of almost any other democracy faced our current crisis, there would be talk of forming a new government.

John Boehner presides over a coalition composed of the center-right plus the Tea Party. Since those two groups are at odds, the obvious choice in almost any other system would be to build a different majority in the House. For instance, Boehner could propose a status-quo budget until the 2014 elections and promise to allow votes on all other topics with simple majority support. That proposal would probably gain the backing of 70% of the House. (It would exclude the Tea Party–who would turn their attention to the next election–and the House Progressive Caucus, whose members would balk on the ground that the budgetary status quo is unacceptable.) Boehner could even offer Nancy Pelosi the number-two position in the House. He would thus become the leader of a new majority coalition that would easily pass a budget.

Why isn’t this an option in the US? The constitution is no impediment. In fact, as Sandy Levinson notes, the House can even name a distinguished non-Congressperson to serve as Speaker. That is an example of the freedom to innovate that we tend to forget because we regard our traditions as inviolable.

If the constitution does not prevent a parliamentary solution to our current crisis, I think these are the main obstacles:

First, single-member, winner-take-all districts yield a two-party system. If there are just two parties, then (barring a perfect tie) one of them must have an outright majority in the House. Members of the majority party benefit from that status and are always highly reluctant to split. In Italy, India, or Israel, legislators come from many parties that sometimes split and recombine; leaving the governing coalition can be an appealing choice.

Second, the Speaker controls the floor. I don’t know much about discharge petitions and the like, but I don’t think that a proposal for new leadership could come up for a vote without the rules changing first. This means that although Boehner could—hypothetically—abandon the Tea Party and build a new centrist majority, no one else is really in a position to do that. Since Boehner doesn’t have to worry about the threat of a new majority being formed by a rival (say, by Nancy Pelosi), he can concentrate on potential revolts within his own party instead.

Finally, sheer tradition stands in the way. Because new coalitions never form in our Congress, the Tea Party would regard Republicans who suddenly joined a bipartisan governing majority as traitors on the order of Benedict Arnold himself. Their shock and horror would be immense. In contrast, parliamentary systems see frequent realignments. If you get dropped from a majority coalition, it’s just politics as usual.

John Boehner could form a centrist coalition in the US House and resolve the current budgetary crisis. That’s not illegal or unthinkable, but I think the odds are about one in a thousand. It’s also about one in a thousand that some moderate Republicans will decide to caucus with the Democrats and bring down his speakership. Far more likely is a continued struggle between the two existing party blocs in the House. Although our system has certain advantages, it is far more brittle than the alternatives, and we are paying the price right now.

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game theory and the fiscal cliff (ii)

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In January, I wrote a post diagramming the negotiations between President Obama and the House Republicans in game-theory terms. I thought the result that actually occurred was highly predictable if one assumed that the situation was a one-off Prisoner’s Dilemma with two players (Obama and Boehner). But I raised two complications: the game might be “Chicken” rather than a Prisoner’s Dilemma; and it would be repeated, which changes the strategic calculations.

Now it is being repeated. The President sees it as “Chicken” this time and has made the recommended play. To win Chicken, you should throw your steering wheel out of the window to show that you are not going to swerve. Then the other player has the choice of dying in a draw or living by losing. Obama tried to create that situation for John Boehner by calling the Speaker privately to say that he will not negotiate over the debt limit. I say Obama “tried” to create that situation because, in fact, the president still holds the steering wheel, and Republicans know he can negotiate if he wants to. That is why they are still driving straight.

In the Economist, “M.S.” suggests a play for Obama: promise to veto any debt-ceiling increase unless Congress passes immigration reform. This would be symmetrical to the Republicans’ threat to undermine or repeal Obamacare in return for a debt-ceiling increase. M.S. thinks this gambit would reveal the reckless behavior of the House Republicans. Maybe, but I think the public would draw the conclusion that both sides are maniacs. The president should simply point out that he is not making that kind of play.

In any case, the situation is a lot more complicated than a two-player Chicken Game. For one thing, the Republicans get to choose whether to play the “shut-the-government” game or the “default-on-the-debt” game, and in which order. Besides, there are many players. To name just the obvious ones: Tea Party House Republicans (who are showing that they understand the situation, they don’t care about Boehner, and they do not want to lose); Senate Republicans of various stripes; Wall Street and other big donors; Congressional Democrats; reporters; and the American people, most of whom have not paid much attention yet–but they will.

If the government shuts down or defaults (or both), then clearly the next stage in the “game” will be an effort to pin the blame on the other side. Game theory is not especially helpful for understanding this stage, which will be a struggle for rhetorical framing rather than a negotiation. Probably the best guess is that the Republicans will take the blame– which I think they deserve–but that is uncertain because the country and media are polarized and the Republicans have their talking points ready and honed. Pew finds that Republicans will start the blame-allocation phase about on par with the President, and that may embolden them to take us into default.

The Democrats will win the finger-pointing phase if people blame Republicans and decide to vote against them in 2014, but not if people blame Congress, which you cannot vote against. This is a sticky reality for the President, because attacking Republicans makes him look partisan (when people see partisanship as the problem). But I think he has to do it anyway. He will have two free cards to play: 1) Congress may not even succeed in sending him a bill to veto, in which case it will be much easier to pin the full responsibility on the House leadership, and 2) the House has taken about 124 recess days in 2013, by my unofficial calculation.

Congressional procedure is always a confusing and boring topic, but if I were the president, I would say: “The government has shut down because the House Republicans could not even send me a budget bill to consider, even though it is their constitutional responsibility to pass a budget by the end of every fiscal year. They took 124 days off this year. They can reopen the government in fifteen minutes by sending me a clean budget bill that preserves the status quo.” (Of course, the status quo is a unacceptable, but it beats a disaster.)

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defending free speech in public schools

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Frank LoMonte is Executive Director of the Student Press Law Center. His talk at this year’s National Conference on Citizenship really drew my attention to the lack of First Amendment rights in our schools.

Students should exercise freedom of speech, assembly, and the press* because: 1) that is how they can learn to use those rights in our democratic system; 2) they are human beings with intrinsic rights to express themselves; 3) the school represents the state and should behave like a limited government that respects rights; and 4) student journalists are well placed to uncover and discuss serious issues that society must understand. Especially considering that teachers have very limited rights of expression–and most professional education reporters have been laid off–student journalists represent essential sources of information pertinent to school reform.

Alas, under the Supreme Court’s Hazelwood decision (1988), students have limited rights to free speech in officially sanctioned student media. No one has unlimited rights: adults cannot threaten, libel, or harass. But student journalists have much more constrained constitutional rights—or so says the Supreme Court. Their work can be subject to prior censorship, and administrators have wide latitude to block it for educational reasons. This means that some students have what I regard as highly legitimate complaints about censorship that do not prevail in court.

That said, Hazelwood did not exile the First Amendment from schools. Administrators may censor, but they may not censor viewpoints. If, for instance, a high school newspaper takes an editorial position against a controversial school policy, that is protected—contrary to popular belief.

Hazelwood should be overturned, in my opinion. Failing that, LaMonte offers alternative strategies.

One is legislative. Hazelwood sets an inadequate minimum level of free speech in the nation’s schools. But states can set higher bars, declaring by statute or regulation that students have rights against prior censorship. Nine states have done so.

A second strategy involves changing administrators’ priorities. Apparently, many prospective assistant principals, principals, and superintendents take courses and training sessions that merely address the disadvantages of student expression. They are given examples of speech that caused headaches and are reminded that they have the right to censor it. Virtually no time is spent talking about the benefits of student expression. Even if some free speech is offensive or stupid, a climate of free expression is valuable for schools, just as it is for democracies writ large. See John Stewart Mill for arguments.

Finally, LoMonte has advice for student journalists. They play an important social role, and their rights are tenuous. Under those circumstances, they should steer away from frivolous and needlessly controversial speech. As LoMonte writes, “If you must do humor – and with only one newspaper a month, why waste that precious space? – then do outlandish humor that obviously mocks national celebrities, not cruel jokes about the appearance or character flaws of classmates or administrators.” In principle, I would defend the right of students to use their media for dumb purposes (and perhaps learn from the consequences). But they don’t really have that right under current US law. And regardless of their legal standing, the best advice is to keep their journalism serious, tough, and focused on issues. Then, if they end up in a battle with the superintendent over their expression, at least it is a battle worth winning.

*They should also exercise the remaining rights in the First Amendment–free exercise of religion and free worship–but those require somewhat different arguments.

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will the creepy anti-Obamacare ads work?

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(Morven Park, VA) Generation Opportunity is running ads in which an evil clown-like figure dressed as Uncle Sam pops up in the gynecologist’s office and other intimate places. This is part of their campaign to persuade young people not to sign up for Obamacare. NPR’s Don Gonyea asked me whether these  ads would be persuasive. My response found its way into his All Things Considered segment: “One analyst says humorous ads, creepy or not, tend to work only on people who already agree with the message.” I was anonymous on the air, but Gonyea’s blog post names me and provides a bit more detail. I answered on the basis of our randomized experiment using Flackcheck’s humorous videos and other research summarized here. Humor captures attention and provokes strong emotions, but political polarization limits its persuasiveness. In this case, people who hate Obamacare will find the Generation Opportunity ads funny. People who like Obamacare will be deeply offended. And people who are not following the debate will be mystified–not amused and not moved toward any particular conclusion.

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Emerson’s mistake

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Emerson’s Self-Reliance makes a provocative case for cultivating the self and shunning morality in the form of obligations to others. One famous paragraph begins, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. … Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” The same paragraph ends with an argument against charity as an entanglement that damages integrity: “do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.”

Emerson strongly favors interacting with other minds, especially the geniuses who figure in the books that he devours in his private hours. Moses, Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, Jesus, Luther, Milton, Copernicus, and Newton are just some of the names he invokes in Self-Reliance. He thinks these people (all men) had distinct and invariant characters. “For I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being.” Thus, to understand an author is to grasp something unitary and unique about him that inspires you to enrich your own equally coherent character, not by sharing his truth but by creating your own. In Experience, Emerson writes:

Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other points of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a particular union lasts, the more energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire. Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be chaos.

But this is false. To experience another person’s mind (whether through a brilliant book or an everyday interaction) is not just to pick out one idea that you think defines the other. It is to begin exploring his or her web of thinking while sharing your own. You both have unique webs, but each element of your thought is shared with many other people. You gain the most by exploring many of the other person’s moral nodes and their connections. This does not threaten your “unity” or risk chaos, because your own character was already a heterogeneous, evolving, and loosely connected web that you largely adopted from other people. Touching at just one point is a failure of communication and interpretation.

To be sure, you can strive to disentangle from everyday life and politics and prefer books to “dining out occasionally” (which, Thoreau found, interfered with his “domestic arrangements”), but you should not persuade yourself that you have thereby disconnected your network map from everyone else’s. Your self is still a social creation, and you are still mentally involved with others, even if you detach politically and economically.

References: Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, (New York: Random House, 2009) pp. 134-5, 138. Emerson, “Experience,” in ibid, p. 322. Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (New York: T.Y Crowell & Co., 1899)p. 62

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can nonprofits solve big problems?

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Bill Shore and Darrell Hammond are fabulously successful social entrepreneurs. Each founded a nonprofit that raised tons of money, inspired many thousands of volunteers, drew great press, and provided lots of services. (Share Our Strength fed homeless people; KaBOOM! built playgrounds.) Now, along with Amy Celep, these two founders have written a provocative piece entitled “When Good is Not Good Enough.” This passage –contributed by Shore–gives a flavor of the whole article:

So I began with an idea that was clear, simple, and wrong: we would end hunger by raising money and granting it out to food banks and other emergency food assistance programs. It should have been obvious then, as it is now, that hunger is a symptom of the deeper, more complex problem of poverty.

Both Share Our Strength and KaBOOM! have shifted to addressing what they see as the root causes of big social problems, using tactics inspired by the movements against smoking, drunk driving, and malaria.

In a reply also published by the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Cynthia Gibson, Katya Smyth, Gail Nayowith, & Jonathan Zaff anticipate most of the points I would want to make. They applaud the honesty and ambition of the original article but raise doubts about whether nonprofit organizations can really “solve” social problems without the rest of the public. The two articles together offer a great guide to the debate between social entrepreneurship and civic engagement.

I would add a couple of points that are generally consistent with Gibson, Smyth, Nayowith and Zaff.

First, the metaphor of “root causes” is problematic and misleading. It suggests that if you could fix the root, you could solve a whole problem in one stroke, much as pulling out the root of a weed will kill it. Much more typically, problems form complex systems with no  primary cause. For example, racism, crime, violence, education, and poverty all influence each other. Poverty worsens crime, but crime independently deepens the poverty of afflicted communities. Such complexity should not cause despair. You can intervene helpfully at many points in the cycle, not only at the “deepest” point, which may be the least accessible. For instance, better policing does not directly address poverty, but it can cut crime, and that helps poor people.

The metaphor of a root misleadingly suggests that you should only work on the part of the problem that seems somehow biggest and most difficult. That is doubly wrong: (1) you might be able to do more good with limited resources if you intervened somewhere else, and (2) even if you solved the problem that you see as primary, the rest of the system would remain.

Second, the idea that organizations can solve social problems ignores the persistence of politics. In We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (starting on pp. 65), I mention the popular “moon-ghetto” metaphor from the 1960s:

This was the idea that engineers and other specialists had put human beings on the moon (and brought them safely home), so it should be possible to tackle the problems of the so-called “ghetto” in much the same way. It was all a matter of scientifically diagnosing the causes of poverty and efficiently deploying solutions.

Actually, the moon and the “ghetto” are very different. The moon is almost perfectly detached from all other human issues and contexts, because it is 240,000 miles away from our planet (although NASA’s launch facilities in Florida and Houston might have some local impact). The goal of the Apollo Program—whether you endorsed it or not—was clear and easily defined. The challenges were physical; thus Newtonian physics allowed engineers to predict the impact of their tools precisely in advance. The costs were also calculable—in fact, the Apollo Program was completed under budget. The astronauts and other participants were highly motivated volunteers, who had signed up for a fully developed concept that they understood in advance. The president and other national leaders had committed enough funds to make the Apollo Program a success, because its value to them exceeded the costs.

In contrast, a low-income urban neighborhood is enmeshed with other communities. Its challenges are multi-dimensional. Its strengths and weaknesses are open to debate. Defining success is a matter of values; even how to measure the basic facts is controversial. (For example, how should “race” be defined in a survey? What are the borders of a neighborhood?) Everyone involved—from the smallest child on the block to the most powerful official downtown—has distinct interests and motivations. Outsiders may not care enough to provide adequate funds, and residents may prefer to leave than to make their area better. When social scientists and policymakers implement rewards or punishments to affect people’s behavior, the targets tend to realize what is happening and develop strategies to resist, subvert, or profit from the policies—a response that machines can never offer. No wonder we could put a man on the moon but our poor urban neighborhoods persist. …

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what we must do for civics: my remarks at the National Conference on Citizenship

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(Washington, DC) I’d like to talk briefly about what we have to do to improve civic education in America.

First, I need to say something very quick about the goal. What should students learn?

I agree with people who say that kids should study the founding documents of the American republic, their origins and great principles. Citizens will not protect these ideas unless they understand them. And the founding documents are worthy of understanding and exploration.

But understanding perennial principles is not enough. Students must also deliberate with fellow citizens about current controversies. That is a skill human beings have to learn. It does not come automatically, and it is certainly not being modeled by our media or the national government. Students must learn from experience how to talk with others who may disagree about controversial issues.

And deliberation is not enough. Talking without ever acting is pretty empty. You can say most anything without learning from the results or affecting the world. At least sometimes, students should be part of groups that talk about what they should do, then actually do what they have talked about doing, and then reflect on the experience, holding themselves accountable for the results.

By the way, I am not necessarily talking about service-learning projects as the opportunities for students to plan projects and then act as citizens. Students can act in many other ways as well—for example, when they manage school clubs and groups, produce collaborative reports and presentations, or even play roles in fictional simulations.

Like deliberation, collaboration is something we must learn from experience, with guidance from teachers and other adults. It does not come naturally.

I have mentioned three things to learn: the fundamental principles and structure of the republic, actual deliberation, and collaboration. The three go together beautifully. The constitutional principles underlie the deliberation and work. The work informs the discussion. The discussion guides the work.

Many social studies teachers know how to bring all three together—certainly not every day, but over the course of a semester or a school year. We conducted a national survey of civics teachers this summer and found most of them committed to just this kind of education.

But a lot of things stand in the way.

Most state standards are just long lists of facts to cover. A teacher we surveyed recently said:

“Students do not ‘debate’—they argue and have no support for their opinions. Should that be a priority? Well, of course, but I don’t have time to teach it. I am bound by a set of state guidelines as to what I am to teach even though there is no high stake testing for government classes.”

Also, most states don’t test in civics, and those that do ask exclusively multiple-choice questions that have nothing to do with deliberation or collaboration. Our research finds that whether a state has a test makes no difference to what students know, perhaps because the existing tests are not much good.

Opportunities for civic learning are deeply unequal, most widely available to students in wealthy communities who are on course to college.

Teachers get very little education or support for interactive civic education. Nationally, most recall never having received relevant professional development once they are in the classroom. Only 10 states require instructors who teach civics or government classes to have certification in civics or government.

Last week, the National Council for the Social Studies released a new framework for state social studies standards called the C3 Framework: College, Career, and Citizenship. Maryland and Kentucky are already using it to revise their state standards, and I am confident other states will join them. For full disclosure, I was deeply involved in writing the C3, so I am biased. But I can vouch for that fact that all the themes I have mentioned today are included: foundational principles, deliberation, action.

Implementing the C3 Framework would be a good step. But civic education completely depends on quality. Standards mean little without supportive materials, teacher education, and assessments. A test for students or a teacher certification requirement can be valuable if it is well designed, aligned with the curriculum, and if the people who face the assessment have opportunities to learn what they need to know. If not, the assessment can hurt. To implement a test or requirement well, over time, takes support from organizations outside of higher education: the legal community, higher education, the media, parents.

On Oct. 9, CIRCLE will release the report of the Commission on Youth Voting and Civic Knowledge, which is entitled All Together Now: Innovation and Collaboration for Youth Engagement. It is based on truly exhaustive research, including surveys or interviews with more than 6,000 youth, students, and stakeholders. Note the title, which calls for collaboration. The report will recommend state coalitions for civics that can be in the business for the long term, not only demanding a new law or policy, but staying around to make sure the implementation is good.

We know that many other institutions influence kids’ civic development: parents and families, the news media, social media, campaigns and elections, city governments. Schools matter, but they cannot by themselves get the job done. Civic education is a responsibility of society as a whole, and a diverse coalition or task force can call on many different sectors as opportunities arise.

We have been involved with several such efforts. The one that has had the most legislative impact is The Florida Joint Center for Citizenship, based at the University of Central Florida and the University of Florida. The Joint Center grew from a 2006 bipartisan effort, launched by Congressman Lou Frey and Senator Bob Graham, to improve civic education in Florida. Since then, with the help of many other organizations and people, the state’s social studies standards and benchmarks have been revised and strengthened and the Justice Sandra Day O’Connor Civics Education Act has added civics to Florida’s list of tested subjects. In addition to Sen. Graham, the Joint Center’s director, Doug Dobson, is here today.

Another model is The Illinois Civic Mission Coalition, which includes educators, administrators, students, universities, funders, elected officials, policymakers, and representatives from the private and non-profit sectors. They wrote a document called the Civic Blueprint for Illinois High Schools. They have enlisted partner schools that are committed to the cause, and they also advocate at the state level and draw on all their members for ongoing action and support.

In California, Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson have created a high-powered task force on civics. And of course, at the national level, the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, brilliantly directed by the unstoppable Ted McConnell, is the coalition for civics.

These efforts vary, but they all recognize the same truths. We are not doing enough to engage our young people in civic life. There are no simple solutions. A test, a mandatory course, an easier voting system—none of those reforms will make much difference just by itself. Engaging our young people will require the dedicated efforts of many people, in many contexts, over time.

None of that should surprise us. These are the same truths we teach—or ought to teach—our young people about politics in general. They are going to face serious public problems all their lives: the problems that we inherited or created and are leaving to them. No serious problem will yield unless people work together to define and address it—each contributing his or her own assets and ideas. Working together on public causes is not just a chore or burden but is also a satisfying aspect of the good life.

These are the lessons we should be sharing with our young people, and they apply to us as well.

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