Anyone who works on civic education or grassroots civic engagement will sooner or later encounter critics who say, “The US is not a democracy–it is a republic” as if that were a profound objection to teaching or practicing democratic values. In a longer post, I analyzed the terms “democracy” and “republic” in the language of the Framers and subsequent authors. I argued that: (1) populist Framers like Jefferson used the word “republic” to mean what can also accurately be called a democracy, and (2) the original Constitution did include undemocratic elements, but they have been deliberately removed by the 15th, 17th, 19th, and 24th amendments to the Constitution. That means that although the Framers would call the United States a republic, it is now a democracy, at least in aspiration.

Here I would like to emphasize a related point. During the 20th century, almost all American political leaders asserted that the US was a democracy. Conservatives tended to be more sanguine about how much of a democracy we actually had. Left-liberals were the ones who argued that America was not authentically democratic because of persistent injustices. It is only in the last decade that it has become a talking-point for some conservatives that the US is (and ought to be) a republic and not a democracy.

I have quickly found one quotation from each GOP president since McKinley in which the president called the US a democracy. This was the result of 30 minutes of web searching; many more examples could be found:

[*It’s been noted that I accidentally omitted William Howard Taft, and it’s not easy to find a positive statement by him about democracy. He was, indeed, an opponent of the direct-democracy reforms of his era. So Taft may be an exception.]

• Teddy Roosevelt, “A Charter of Democracy” (1912): “I believe in pure democracy. With Lincoln, I hold that ‘this country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it.'”
• Warren Harding, Inauguration Address (1921): “Because we cherish ideals of justice and peace, because we appraise international comity and helpful relationship no less highly than any people of the world, we aspire to a high place in the moral leadership of civilization, and we hold a maintained America, the proven Republic, the unshaken temple of representative democracy, to be not only an inspiration and example, but the highest agency of strengthening good will and promoting accord on both continents.”
• Calvin Coolidge’s Address at the Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926) is probably the most interesting, because it is an explicit and rather scholarly argument that the Framers had created a democracy. “Placing every man on a plane where he acknowledged no superiors, where no one possessed any right to rule over him, he must inevitably choose his own rulers through a system of self-government. This was their theory of democracy. In those days such doctrines would scarcely have been permitted to flourish and spread in any other country. This was the purpose which the fathers cherished.” Coolidge quotes Thomas Jefferson saying that his “‘best ideas of democracy’ had been secured at church meetings.” Coolidge says that Jefferson was influenced by John Wise, who had written, “Democracy is Christ’s government in church and state.”
• Herbert Hoover, in a Challenge to Liberty (193o) argued that the New Deal had repudiated democracy, leaving “the Republican Party alone the guardian of the Ark of the Covenant with its charter of freedom.” He added, “You might think that reform and change to meet new conditions of life are discoveries of the New Deal. Free men have always applied reform. We have been reforming and changing ever since George Washington. Democracy is not static. It is a living force. Every new idea, every new invention offers opportunity for both good and evil.”
• President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address as president (1961): “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. … We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”
• Richard Nixon, State of the Union Address (1970): “In the majesty of this great Chamber we hear the echoes of America’s history, of debates that rocked the Union and those that repaired it, of the summons to war and the search for peace, of the uniting of the people, the building of a nation. Those echoes of history remind us of our roots and our strengths. They remind us also of that special genius of American democracy, which at one critical turning point after another has led us to spot the new road to the future and given us the wisdom and the courage to take it.”
• Ronald Reagan, Normandy, June 6, 1984: “You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One’s country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.”
• George H.W. Bush, Inaugural Address (1989): “We meet on democracy’s front porch. … Our children are watching in schools throughout our great land. And to them I say, Thank you for watching democracy’s big day. For democracy belongs to us all, and freedom is like a beautiful kite that can go higher and higher with the breeze. And to all I say, No matter what your circumstances or where you are, you are part of this day, you are part of the life of our great nation.”
• George W. Bush at the National Endowment for Democracy (2005) “The roots of our democracy can be traced to England, and to its Parliament — and so can the roots of this organization. … Working democracies always need time to develop — as did our own. We’ve taken a 200-year journey toward inclusion and justice — and this makes us patient and understanding as other nations are at different stages of this journey.”

For more than a century, both Democrats and Republicans vigorously claimed that the US was a democracy as well as a republic. It’s possible that the names of the two major parties have recently encouraged some people to view the words “republic” and “democracy” as partisan labels. That is both an etymological error and an unfortunate barrier to what used to be shared aspirations. I happen to be confident that the language of democracy will regain its consensus appeal for Americans, thus inspiring us to honor our democratic ideals. But we are sailing through a rough patch right now, and virtually no political word seems able to unite rather than divide.

Our colleagues Amy Syvertsen, Laura Wray-Lake, and Aaron Metzger have posted on the CIRCLE website a set of survey-based measures of civic engagement that they have carefully developed to be appropriate for kids all the way from fourth grade up to twelfth grade. Such measures are invaluable for assessing growth and learning. They are hard to develop, for reasons the authors describe on the CIRCLE website. Even just finding phrases that are appropriate for both children and older teenagers is a challenge. The new toolkit is the result of an intensive and highly professional project funded by the John Templeton Foundation, and it sets the standard.

See Civic and Character Development: Good Data Starts with Good Measures. The recommended citation for the toolkit itself is: Syvertsen, A. K., Wray-Lake, L., & Metzger, A. (2015). Youth civic and character measures toolkit. Minneapolis, MN: Search Institute.

Released today is a strategy paper entitled Returning to Our Roots: Educating for Democracy. The authors are Generation Citizen plus a committee from other groups, including my CIRCLE colleagues and me. I’m pleased to have been part of the discussions that generated this paper. It is distinctive in that it puts political engagement at the center of civic education and addresses both schools and out-of-school opportunities.

Generation Citizens’ executive director, Scott Warren, also has a piece entitled “Student protests reveal thirst for a dialogue on democratic process” in the Hechinger Report. Scott uses this article to summarize the recommendations of the report.

(Washington, DC) In a new article, Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg and I argue that discussing current, controversial issues is an effective way to teach civic skills and raise students’ interest in politics. Such discussions are relatively rare in schools that are “racially pluralistic” (having no racial majority), probably in part because diversity makes teachers and students wary of broaching controversy. Yet the benefits of discussion are strongest in just those schools. That may because the students’ diversity is an asset for good conversations, and also because planned discussions fill a gap in diverse schools that pervasively lack political conversation. Our article assembles the quantitative evidence for controversial issue discussions in racially pluralistic schools and offers tips for teachers and links to helpful organizations. See Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg & Peter Levine, “Challenges and Opportunities for Discussion of Controversial Issues in Racially Pluralistic Schools,” Social Education, vol. 79, no. 5 (Oct. 2105), p. 271-7 (or via Academia.edu.)

New on the CIRCLE website is a guest post on Critical Consciousness Impact Measures. As the authors (Matthew Diemer, Ellen Hawley McWhirter, Emily J. Ozer, and Luke Rapa) explain, Critical Consciousness “refers to marginalized or oppressed people’s critical reflection on oppressive social, economic, or political conditions, the motivation to address perceived injustice, and action taken to counter injustice.” In their work–together and separately–these scholars have found that students do better when they have more Critical Consciousness. Survey measures are embedded in the post and are available for anyone to use in program evaluations or research, or even just for discussion.

It’s Constitution Day. Thanks to an amendment included at the behest of the late Robert Byrd in 2004, every educational institution that receives federal money–from a kindergarten to a graduate school–must offer programs on this day that concern the Constitution. Eight years ago, I posed some gently subversive questions that could be the basis of a discussion on Constitution Day. Here are my questions again, with–for what they’re worth–my answers:

• How, under our Constitution, can legislation be passed on the sole prerogative of one US Senator?

The Constitution leaves it up to each house of Congress to organize its own procedures. (Article 1, sec. 2: “Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings.”) The Senate can basically construct bills any way it wants.

There is no ideal way to legislate. Any parliamentary body faces a severe challenge in aggregating the opinions of its many members on the many topics that come before it. No legislature can discuss and separately vote on everything. Still, the Senate’s rules give an awful lot of power to individual members to insert provisions. I suspect the reason lies with the Senate’s filibuster rules, which make the passage of legislation extraordinarily difficult. To prevent even more filibusters than we actually have, Senators are allowed to slip in special provisions they especially care about.

Legislating this way is not “unconstitutional” in the sense of violating the text of the document. But we could say that in the broader meaning of the phrase “constitutional system,” our system includes the rules of the US Senate, which are very problematic.

• How can Congress pass legislation without hearings or debate?

See above. But this second question underlines a particular disadvantage of the Senate’s rules: many decisions get no deliberation whatsoever. No teachers were asked to testify about the pros and cons of a Constitution Day mandate. Again, no process is prefect, but the Senate’s procedures seem to neglect the deliberative value that our constitutional order was meant to uphold: “the mild voice of reason, pleading the cause of an enlarged and permanent interest.”

• Is it a constructive and appropriate use of federal power to determine the content and timing of educational instruction?

Strong conservative constitutionalists will say that Congress has no business in education at all, because education is not among the enumerated powers of Article 1, Section 8. Students should learn and consider that argument. For my part, I think we long ago rightly settled that the Congress may raise taxes and spend the money on education and may put certain conditions on the funding. I would especially argue for a federal role in supporting education for republican self-government, on the ground that this is “necessary and proper” for the survival of our system.

But that doesn’t mean that micromanagement from Washington is wise. To pick a day–right at the beginning of the conventional academic year–when every school (k-20) must teach the Constitution is a good example of meddling. It’s unlikely to yield positive results. Conservatives make a valid point that needn’t be rooted in an originalist reading of the Constitution: Congress should generally avoid micromanaging, especially in an ad hoc way, because it is too distant from local concerns, too likely to make one size fit all, and too remote from accountability. Characteristically, when the Senate passed a Constitution Day mandate, no one even dreamed of empirically evaluating the impact–whereas a school district that tried such an experiment might have to show that it was cost-effective and a “research-based best practice.” Congressional micromanagement violates the spirit of the Constitution, even when it passes legal muster.

Finally, I do think some good comes from the Constitution Day mandate. It gives an annual boost to the wonderful organizations that provide materials, lesson plans, and professional development for civics, and it yields an annual crop of articles and social media about civic education. Still, if I had to teach a lesson on Constitution Day, it might be about how the legislation that launched it is constitutional yet also problematic–so maybe we need some reform.

See also liberals, conservatives, and love of the Constitution; is our constitutional order doomed? and constitutional piety.

In April, 2014, I had the pleasure of watching Boston teenagers begin a youth Participatory Budgeting process. The city has asked them to decide how to allocate $1 million of capital funds, engaging their peers in research, deliberation, and voting. I described my observations in “You can add us to equations but they never make us equal: participatory budgeting in Boston.”

Now their decisions have been announced. The projects they selected include extending the city’s bicycle share system and free WiFi to additional neighborhoods, installing water bottle refill stations, and renovating a high school gym. The photo below shows some of the kids with Boston Mayor Marty Walsh. More here.

The post youth Participatory Budgeting in Boston appeared first on Peter Levine.