Led by iCivics, Arizona State University, Harvard University, and Tufts University, the effort will bring together more than 100 experts in civics, history, education, and political science to outline a strategy for teaching American Democracy in the 21st century.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Nov 1, 2019) — The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), in partnership with the U.S. Department of Education, has awarded a $650,000 cooperative agreement to a collaborative of experts who will work together to design a roadmap to prepare K-12 students for America’s constitutional democracy.

Educating for American Democracy: A Roadmap for Excellence in History and Civics Education for All Learners will bring together more than 100 leading academics and practitioners in education, civics, history, and political science to set out a foundation for understanding and teaching American history and civics. And it will issue a roadmap that will outline high-priority civics content areas and make clear and actionable recommendations for integrating the teaching of civics and history at every grade level, along with best practices and implementation strategies that teachers, schools, districts and states can use to shape their instructional programs. 

The roadmap will develop the foundation from which to prepare all students to understand the value of America’s constitutional democracy as well as its past failures and present challenges. Our goal is to design a program that will secure a strong commitment to and sense of ownership of that democracy in K-12 students.

Educating for American Democracy is a cross-partisan effort led by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, the School of Civic & Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, Tufts University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement and Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, and iCivics — the country’s largest civic education provider. 

The group has formed a Steering Committee, as well as task forces in History, Political Science, and Pedagogy that will hold two convenings over the next year — one at Louisiana State University and one at Arizona State University. It will then issue its report, which will be authored by Danielle Allen from Harvard University, Paul Carrese from ASU, Louise Dube from iCivics, and Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg and Peter Levine from Tufts University, prior to a National Forum on September 2020 in Washington, DC, which will be co-hosted by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History and the National Archives and Records Administration Foundation. 

“As the United States looks toward our 250^th anniversary as a nation in 2026, it is critical that our K-12 educational system teaches the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and the democratic principles on which the country was founded,” said NEH Chairman Jon Parrish Peede. “The National Endowment for the Humanities is pleased to be working with Educating for American Democracy to identify ways to improve the teaching and learning of American history and government so that all students gain an appreciation of the workings of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.” 

The Educating for American Democracy project responds to an NEH-Education Department call for proposals for a fifteen-month project that would highlight innovative approaches, learning strategies, and professional development practices in K-12 civics education, with an emphasis on activities and programs that benefit low-income and underserved populations.

Educating for American Democracy will rely on the expertise of the teams at ASU, Harvard, and Tufts and will utilize iCivics’ community of more than 100,000 teachers, as well as partner communities for field testing to ensure that the Roadmap is a practical and useful document in the classroom. It will draw upon the collective network of CivXNow, a coalition of 113 organizations and foundations dedicated to improving civic education in order to disseminate the curriculum. 

“Educating for American Democracy is an effort to provide guidance for integrating history and civics so that today’s learners form a strong connection to our constitutional democracy—and take ownership of it,” said Louise Dubé, the executive director of iCivics, which was founded by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in 2009. “We are very thankful that this cooperative agreement with NEH and the Department of Education will give our team of experts, academics, and practitioners the opportunity to design a trans-partisan roadmap for excellence in history and civics education.”

The Educating for American Democracy cooperative agreement is funded through a partnership between NEH’s Division of Education Programs and the U.S. Department of Education’s American History and Civics Education-National Activities program and is part of NEH’s newly announced “More Perfect Union” initiative focused on the upcoming 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.

“Our republic is at a crossroads, facing deep partisan and philosophical polarization, while understanding of and trust in America’s democratic institutions are dangerously low – especially among younger citizens.  Our interdisciplinary and balanced team of scholars, teachers, and civic educators believes that the relative neglect of civics education in the past half-century is a major root cause of much civic and political dysfunction,” ASU’s Paul Carrese said. “We’re grateful to the NEH and Department of Education for marshaling the resources and attention needed to spur real reform.”  

National Endowment for the Humanities: Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.

The School of Civic & Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University blends a liberal arts education with civic education to prepare 21^st century leaders for American and international affairs, balancing study of classic ideas with outside-the-classroom learning experiences.  The School also provides civic education programs such as a podcast (Keeping It Civil), the Arizona Constitution Project, and the Civic Discourse Project – a national-caliber speakers program partnering with Arizona PBS to provide a space for civil discourse on pressing issues.  https://scetl.asu.edu/

The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University seeks to strengthen teaching and research about pressing ethical issues; to foster sound norms of ethical reasoning and civic discussion; and to share the work of our community in the public interest. The Center stands at the core of a well-established movement giving ethics a prominent place in the curriculum and on research agendas at Harvard and throughout the world. The Center’s Democratic Knowledge Project is a K-16 civic education provider that seeks to identify and disseminate the bodies of knowledge, capacities, and skills that democratic citizens need in order to build and sustain healthy, thriving democracies.

Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life and Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement: The only university-wide college of its kind, the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University studies and promotes the civic and political engagement of young people at Tufts University, in our communities, and in our democracy. Peter Levine serves as Associate Dean of Academic Affairs. Tisch College’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), directed by Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, is a premier research center on young people’s civic education and engagement in the United States, especially those who are marginalized or disadvantaged in political life. CIRCLE’s scholarly research informs policy and practice for healthier youth development and a better democracy. https://tischcollege.tufts.edu/iCivics: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor founded iCivics in 2009 to transform the field through innovative, free educational video games and lessons that teach students to be knowledgeable, curious, and engaged in civic life. Today, iCivics is the nation’s largest provider of civic education curriculum, with our resources used by over 108,000 educators and more than 6.7 million students each year nationwide. Visit www.icivics.org to learn more

(My notes for a talk this evening at a Ludics Seminar at Harvard’s Mahindra Center on “The Role of Play in Human Evolution and Public Life: Work, or Play?”)

It is very common to distinguish politics or civic life from both work and play. (The words “politics” and “civic” have overlapping meanings, coming respectively from Greek and Latin, and I’ll use them interchangeably here.)

Aristotle provides an early example of the distinction between work and politics. He begins with the premise that “the citizen’s function” is “deliberating and judging (whether on all issues or only a few).” In other words, to act as a citizen means to talk, to listen, and to vote. It is discursive and cognitive. Citizens, understood as deliberators and judges, must be free from doing the necessary tasks of life, which are done by slaves (who work for individuals) and by mechanics and laborers (who work for the community). Aristotle advises: “The best form of city will not make the mechanic a citizen.” Note that the mechanic or laborer is not defined by poverty, for some are very rich, but by participation in the marketplace. Working distorts people’s values and goals and makes them bad at deliberation about the public good, perhaps because they focus on their economic interests. Governance is best reserved for a class that has enough wealth not to work.

I cannot think of anyone today who would openly disenfranchise workers for the reasons that Aristotle cites. However, the same distinction between work and politics is evident in several political traditions that make the opposite value-judgment from Aristotle’s. Like him, they presume that politics is about talking, listening, and deciding, and it’s done outside of work. But unlike Aristotle, they think that only those who work are worthy of politics, because they alone have the appropriate values or because their productive labor gives them the right to rule.

One version holds that people of industry and thrift are worthy of governing a republic. This idea is familiar from the English Revolution, the Dutch Republic, and Colonial New England. It associates the bourgeois work ethic with republican virtues.

A different version is agrarian populism, which sees the stalwart farmer as the most legitimate citizen. Like Cincinnatus, a republican farmer puts down his plow to govern and fight, but he hastens back to his fields when his civic duty is done. Jeffersonian American populism and Russian Narodnism are examples.

A third version is Marxist. The workers form a class, distinguished from the bourgeoisie, who merely claim a “work ethic” while they exploit the actual laborers. The working class should rule. Marx offers the resonant ideal of unifying work with Aristotelian politics, removing the alienation between ruling and making. But my impression is that Marxist reforms–from mild democratic socialism all the way to Maoism–have hardly ever realized that ideal. Instead, they have tended to distinguish–just as Aristotle did–between work and governance, but they make the workers into the governors. You work in the factory by day, and after the whistle blows, you attend a workers’ council meeting to make decisions. In fact, the problem with socialism, according to Oscar Wilde, is that it occupies too many evenings.

Two additional strands of reform have developed since the Industrial Revolution. I endorse both, but they are not my main subject here. One aims to democratize the workplace by creating co-ops and other alternative enterprises that are governed on the basis of one-worker, one-vote. The other puts democratic pressure on the workforce by forming an independent association of workers than can negotiate and strike–a union. Both reforms narrow the gap between work and politics, but not in the way that I will describe.

My friend Harry Boyte advocates a different ideal, which he calls Public Work. He has uncovered many precedents for it from around the world.

Public Work begins with a conceptual shift. We should no longer distinguish deliberating and judging from designing and making. They are all aspects of building our public world, our res publica or common-wealth.

For example, the democracy of ancient Athens was not just a discussion among gentlemen; it was also a set of physical spaces–like the Pnyx, where the discussions occurred–that people had built with their hands. The workers and the deliberators were jointly responsible, and their tasks were not sharply distinguishable. Talking in a forum is one kind of work; building the forum requires deliberation and judgment as well as skill and sweat.

Closer to our time and place: Harvard Square is the joint creation of the Cambridge City Council (which deliberates and judges about things like zoning rules), many firms and corporations (including the Harvard Corporation), workers who do everything from drawing blueprints to pouring cement, and the people who put their bodies onto the streets for a wide variety of reasons, including the homeless who sleep there. All of them create the common space.

Public Work disputes the standard definition of “civic engagement” as activities that people undertake voluntarily without being paid, such as voting, protest, or discussing issues. That definition trivializes civic life by reducing it to after-work voluntarism and marginalizes the many ways that people contribute to public spaces and institutions. Public Work also disputes the distinctions among public, private, and nonprofit sectors. A private enterprise might turn out to contribute more and better to a public good than a government does.

We do need a definition of the word “public” in “Public Work,” or else the phrase threatens to encompass all work and ceases to guide judgments and reforms. Perhaps to be public, work must involve intentional efforts to create public goods (at least as byproducts) and must be responsive to other citizens. If you run a bank in Harvard Square, you strive to make a profit; but if you also ensure that the facade of your building is attractive and harmonious with the other structures in the Square and you take advice and feedback from other people, including the homeless who sleep on your doorsteps, you have made your work more public. If everyone behaves like that, we have a democratic commonwealth.

This ideal suggests a whole range of reforms, from regulations that compel consultation to changes in the training and education of professionals. We might also reconceive some policy proposals, such as the Green New Deal, as opportunities for many people in many sectors to do Public Work. Reducing greenhouse emissions and mitigating the damage of climate change are public goods. People can contribute to these goods by paying taxes, supporting regulations, participating in local planning processes, volunteering after work, reorienting their businesses, conducting research, refraining from certain purchases, and educating their own children. All of this–together–can be seen as Public Work and promoted (but not fully realized) by federal policy.

So far, I have discussed work and tried to soften the distinction between work and politics or civic engagement. But we are not only workers and artisans; we also like to play. We are homo ludens as well as homo faber.

In Making Democracy Fun, Josh Lerner argues that civic and political leaders should learn from people who know how to make good games. For instance, in an enjoyable game, you glean the information you need as you go along. You needn’t study for months before you can begin to play. But we tend to assume that you can’t be a good voter until you have already studied many details about government and policy. Couldn’t we integrate learning into political participation?

Likewise, fun games give most of the players something satisfying to do all the way through. If only a few get to play, or if the game continues long after the result is obvious, people drop off. Couldn’t we redesign civic processes so that everyone has interesting roles all the way through?

Our colleague Eric Gordon [who will be present] has contributed excellent examples of such redesigns and important theoretical insights, such as his idea of “meaningful inefficiency“:

Well designed human systems are indeed comprised of efficient transactions, but they should also include encounter, wonder, relation and caring, experiences largely absent from the smart city paradigm. Borrowing from game design, where players are provided with goals, and confronted with unnecessary obstacles that make their striving for that goal meaningful, I suggest that these meaningful inefficiencies are necessary for making a city smart. When there is room for play in the systems with which we interact, there is opportunity for people to form relationships, build trust, care for one another, and make shared meaning — all of which comprise the foundation for resilient communities.

To summarize the argument so far: Most people reflexively distinguish citizenship and politics from work and from play. When you’re on the job or having fun, you are not involved in politics or civic engagement. If you get paid for public service, that is work; but if you help others for free, that is volunteering, which is an example of civic engagement. If your after-work activity is a game, it is not service. The standard view is a three-way distinction: work, play, politics.

Harry Boyte and others reject one of these distinctions, the one between work and politics. For Boyte, politics is Public Work. In passing, he sometimes complains that we have reduced it to mere play. “It is as if citizens have been consigned to the playground of civil society after they have been chased off everywhere else.”

Josh Lerner, Eric Gordon, and others reject the other distinction: between play and politics. In passing, Lerner suggests that we have made politics too much like work (in a bad sense). He cites Erik Erikson for the idea that play involves self-imposed rules. So does democratic politics, because the people are supposed to make the rules that govern them. In contrast, work is defined by externally imposed rules (p. 61).

Must these two critical positions conflict? It may depend on how we define play or games and work. These particular definitions are notoriously difficult. In the great text of his late phase, The Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein uses “game” as his primary example of a word that functions very well for communication even though it cannot be defined with necessary and sufficient conditions. We can learn what the word “game” means. We can use it correctly or incorrectly. Mistakes in our use of the word can be demonstrated. Yet the dictionary’s definition will not teach us how to use it, basically because it is a family-resemblance term. It encompasses many types of behavior that cluster together without having one common denominator.

The same is likely true of the word “work.” In fact, Wittgenstein gives examples of games that are work. Already on the first page of the main text of the Investigations, he asks us to imagine

[A] language that is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words “block”, “pillar”, “slab”, “beam”. A calls them out;—B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call.——Conceive this as a complete primitive language. (PI #2, Anscombe translation)

This example is also a game, and it is also work. Wittgenstein presents the example as he begins to analogize all language to games, and all purposive human behavior to language.

To explore the similarities further: Both work and game-play usually involve interactions among multiple parties, although at the limit, one can work alone or play solitaire. Both require planning and execution. Both can result in success or failure. Both can either satisfy or bore and alienate. (Similar design features may increase the odds of satisfaction). Both imply agency: purposive action within a larger structure. Both depend on rules, but the rules must permit innovation and judgment. Both usually develop as traditional structures that newcomers can learn, but we can invent new forms of work and new games. We can find what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls “flow” in either work or play.

The overlap is large and important, but I would like to conclude with a difference that inclines me to favor Public Work.

Characteristically, work produces things of market value (even if the producer does not choose to sell or trade them). This is not characteristic of play. Borderline forms of play, such as professional athletics, hunting, and such hobbies as knitting may produce tradable goods, but in each case, we wonder whether “play” is really the right word.

Producing things with market value generates political power or leverage over systems. Once producers organize themselves, they can refuse to provide goods or deploy their revenue to influence politics. By these means, workers have been able to win a share of political power. They haven’t been granted power because they deserve it as a matter of fairness; they have demanded and seized it.

The classic case is an organized strike, but workers have many other ways to influence states. I believe that democracy arose basically because elites in certain countries (beginning with Holland and England) offered segments of their productive classes political voice in return for a willingness to pay taxes, purchase government bonds, and enlist in the military. These countries then decisively defeated monarchies because they could field much larger and better armies and navies. The nascent democracies had a Darwinian advantage over monarchies; they spread because their workers and elites coorperated.

This means that work tends to promote democracy. I don’t see the same pattern for play. Josh Lerner offers excellent advice to benign political leaders (including the organizers of insurgent social movements) whose goal is to engage the people. Such leaders should learn from game-design and create opportunities for play. But I don’t see an equally viable strategy for using play to combat obstinate power, whether in the state or in popular movements (which tend to turn into oligarchies).

It is worth thinking about some interesting cases in which play does seem to confer power. Lerner cites the Theater of the Oppressed of Augusto Boal: poor people improvise public theatrical performances. Their activities can be classified as “play,” and they contribute to radical social reforms. But I suspect that they only succeed when poor people also use their work for leverage.

Another interesting example is Participatory Budgeting, which invites the public to develop and choose proposals that get public funding. It is somewhat game-like and it turns out better to the extent that it uses good practices of game design. It originated with an elite: the leaders of the newly elected Workers party in Porto Alegre, Brazil. But it proved so popular that succeeding governments retained it. That suggests that the popularity of play generated some power. On the other hand, I once wrote a chapter for the World Bank that conceptualized Participatory Budgeting as Public Work. I think it was the play aspect that made PB enjoyable, but the work aspect that made it powerful.

I mention all of this because automation and artificial intelligence may worsen the scarcity of work, yet human needs may continue to be met by an increasingly productive economy, giving more people more time for play. If play conferred power and tended to strengthen democracy, this would be good news. But if democracy depends on work–on elites needing the support of workers–then the news is bad. We may be heading for authoritarian oligarchies that rely on machines and very high-skilled labor to generate wealth and that offer play to keep most people compliant. To respond to that threat, we probably ought to save work rather than expand play.

(Provo, UT) I am at Brigham Young University, discussing civic engagement with insightful faculty and students, against a background of cold, clear mountains. Within the past two weeks, I have had somewhat similar conversations inside the classroom of a Massachusetts medium security prison, a Tufts classroom with 50 talented 18-20-year-olds, a glittering living room in Boston’s Louisburg Square (at a political fundraiser), and in various coffee shops around Cambridge, MA. I’ve also heard a lecture on Tagore and the Upanishads and chatted with colleagues scattered across the country.

I just want to express my gratitude for these opportunities. To some extent, they come with being an academic, which is a privilege in itself. But my particular role and institution make such experiences especially frequent, diverse, and rewarding.

See also: at BYU; and teaching about institutions, in a prison

Please Join MassForward for “Advancing Democratic Innovation and Electoral Reform in Massachusetts” (Register Here)

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

8:30 to 10:30 a.m. Continental breakfast will be available at 8:00 a.m.

The Edgerley Center for Civic Leadership at the Boston Foundation 75 Arlington Street, 3rd Floor, Boston

Please join the Boston Foundation for the release of new research by MassINC and Tufts’ Tisch College of Civic Life that examines the health of our Commonwealth’s democratic processes and institutions. From increasingly strong one-party rule to lack of representation for communities of color, this report new provides data to illuminate acute challenges and presents a comprehensive set of reforms and innovations to fortify our democracy at the state and local level. This opening presentation will be followed by a panel conversation with leaders who can offer a wide-range of perspectives on workable solutions to these pressing challenges.

Welcome & Opening Remarks

Paul S. Grogan, President & CEO, The Boston Foundation

Presentation of Report

Peter Levine, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs & Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs, Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University

Panel Discussion
Jay R. Kaufman, Retired State Representative (D), 15th Middlesex District, Commonwealth of Massachusetts; Founder & President, Beacon Leadership Collaborative
Beth Lindstrom, Former Executive Director, Massachusetts Republican Party
Keith Mahoney, Vice President, Communications & Public Affairs, The Boston Foundation (Moderator)
Laurie Nsiah-Jefferson, PhD, Interim Director, Center for Women in Politics & Public Policy; Interim Director, Gender, Leadership, and Public Policy Graduate Certificate Program at UMass Boston Pavel Payano, Councilor-at Large, City of Lawrence

Closing Remarks
Juana Matias, Chief Operating Officer, MassINC

For additional information, please contact Michelle Hinkle at 617-338-4268 or michelle.hinkle@tbf.org

By working in collaboration with a wide range of partners, the Boston Foundation provides opportunities for people to come together to explore challenges facing our constantly changing community and to develop an informed civic agenda. All of the Boston Foundation’s civic leadership activities are supported by our annual campaign for Civic Leadership. Visit www.tbf.org/civicleadership to learn more about this important campaign. Visit www.tbf.org to learn more about the Boston Foundation and its activities.

The Tufts University Prison Initiative of the Tisch College of Civic Life (TUPIT) is my institution’s contribution to the national movement for prison education. Colleges and universities are offering classes, degree programs, and special events for people in prisons or for incarcerated people along with students who come from “outside.” Sometimes, corrections staff and scholars of criminal justice also participate in these programs as learners, educators, or both.

In the era of mass incarceration–and in the wake of massive cuts to prison education programs–these efforts are far too small to fill the need, but they offer valuable opportunities and potential models for broader reform. Some of my favorite colleagues are deeply involved in prison education, and that includes the Founding Director of TUPIT, Prof. Hilary Binda, and her colleagues here at Tufts.

Thanks to TUPIT, I got to guest-teach a class at MCI-Concord last week. The class consisted of about 25 incarcerated men who are working on associates degrees. I presented my current working model for institutions, which I had also presented a few days earlier in the very different environment of a Tufts brown-bag series.

I told the students at MCI Concord that they should decide whether we’d focus on the prison as an institution, or spend more time on other examples. I’d say that we talked about prisons about half the time during the 2-hour conversation, but we also discussed families, gangs, schools, businesses, the foster-care system, and even biological systems such as forests. At least one student was interested in understanding the self as an “institution” that could fit the model. At Tufts, in contrast, the main institution that we’d discussed was “science”—mainly because that was the topic of the brown bag series in which I presented. Science and a prison make a pretty sharp contrast, but the model covers both.

For me, a goal was to test the validity of the model with this particular group. I think it largely passed muster, although many classes are too polite to share their reservations, and this was an exceptionally polite class, by any standard.

Certain aspects of the model seemed illuminating for at least some students. For example, the diagram shows a two-way arrow between biophysical conditions and the action space, which is composed of rules, norms, etc. Students at MCI-Concord generated the insight that the walls and barbed wire around the prison are biophysical conditions that both shape, and are shaped by, the rules and norms on the inside.

Among the interesting topics that arose was the distinction between a rule and a norm. Which is the right word for “Don’t snitch” within MCI-Concord? It is not an official rule; in fact, it violates the official rules. But it may be more than a norm, since it is enforced by the community, with clear consequences. Maybe it is a community-imposed rule.

I took one major challenge away from the conversation. The model that I presented is static or cross-sectional. It analyzes how an institution functions at a given time. The students wanted to know how people develop and change as they pass into, out of, and through multiple institutions. I suggested to them that they might be thinking that way because they’re taking a course that is all about personal transformation, but I also acknowledged that personal change is a concern for everyone, everywhere. So I came away feeling that the model of institutions should somehow connect to a model of personal development.

Finally, a word about the origins of this model. Where did I get this diagram, and why do I claim it might be valid? Essentially, it is my simplification of the Institutional Analysis and Design Model developed by Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues, which she presented in her Nobel Lecture. That is a pretty strong pedigree. I have simplified it in order to make it more general. The kinds of cases that Ostrom investigated are well modeled by game theory. They involve actors with fairly fixed goals who interact by bargaining. But human beings also interact in other kinds of situations, e.g., when we don’t know what we want and we are open to discussing it, or when our interests fuse due to very strong emotional attachments. My more general model is meant to cover bargaining situations, deliberative situations, loving relationships, and more. I am also interested in explicitly analyzing the role of power in institutions—not that Ostrom was blind to power, but I think she interpreted it too narrowly. I have claimed that power operates on every element of this model.