This post features outreach from our friends at the Bill of Rights Institute.

As you may know, research shows that students who participate in service-learning projects have higher academic achievement and awareness of current issues (Smith, et al 2019). However, it can be a struggle for teachers to offer innovative service-learning opportunities on top of everything else they do. At the Bill of Rights Institute, we have a plug-and-play solution!

Our MyImpact Challenge contest and curriculum direct students who want to give back in a way that increases academic outcomes, AND they can win prizes!

The contest, open to students aged 13-19, asks entrants to undertake a service project in their communities and send us a project report and an essay on how their project aligns with Founding Principles and Civic Virtues. We offer up to $40,000 in prizes to students and teachers, with a student grand prize of $10,000.

In addition, we offer a free, six-lesson service-learning curricular supplement that shows students how to design a service project targeted to local issues.

We are looking for partners in the following efforts:

1. Advertising this year’s contest to students already involved in community service. We want to make sure that civically engaged students find out about the contest in time to enter by May 21. That means getting out the word to districts, teachers, and guidance counselors.
2. Getting our service-learning curriculum into schools for 2023. Our six-lesson supplement helps students design local service projects tailored to the needs of their communities. It is a great addition to social studies courses ranging from 8^th Grade Civics to AP Government. We’re happy to meet with any state or district that has an interest, and we want to make sure we’re reaching smaller districts as well as large ones.
3. Setting up local civics fairs. Our long-term plan is to evolve the contest to include state-level competitions that filter up to the national contest. We are seeking local partners to launch in-person civics fairs either at the end of this school year or sometime in the 2023-24 cycle. Planning for several of these events is already underway, but we are hoping to significantly scale up activity in the coming year. 

If you are interested in any of these initiatives, email Adam Brickley at abrickley@mybri.org to set up a meeting. 

This is an exciting opportunity and a worthwhile effort, and we appreciate the work that our friends at BRI are putting into student civic engagement!

Today’s post comes to us from Dr. Terri Fine, our content specialist and the Associate Director of the Lou Frey Institute, in honor of Super Bowl Sunday (though I confessm, being a lifelong Patriot fan, I was not aware the Super Bowl was still played anymore). It looks at the American Bald Eagle as our national bird!

One of the great unofficial American holidays is Super Bowl Sunday.  In 2023, the Super Bowl matchup brought together the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles.  Philadelphia represents so much about U.S. civics, government, and history because the U.S. Constitution was written in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.   But what about the team mascot, the American Bald Eagle?  Why is the American Bald Eagle the national bird, and why does the image of the American Bald Eagle appear on so many government documents and artifacts including the Great Deal of the United States, the president’s flag, the mace of the U.S. House of Representatives, dollar bills and coins?

In 1789, the year that the U.S. Constitution took effect, the American Bald Eagle was chosen by Congress to represent the United States.  What is unique about the American Bald Eagle that influenced Congress (and, likely, the Philadelphia professional football team) to select it as the national bird? 

The American Bald Eagle is uniquely American—it is found only in North America and is seen as a symbol of strength and freedom.  It has no predators and is not a bird that is typically eaten unlike, by contrast, the turkey, which is both hunted and eaten.  When turkeys do fly, it is for short distances only, and generally not nigher than 50 feet, which is quite different from the American Bald Eagle, which flies solo and does not travel in flocks.  Consider these symbols in the context of the emergence of the United States as an independent world superpower, “flying above” other nations that seek to emulate the United States in their government and economic systems.

I am visiting Wake Forest University today, mainly to speak at the Program for Leadership and Character. I will also visit a course on political activism in the 1960s. There, I’m planning to contribute a few remarks about the influence of the Civil Rights Movement.

By the time student radicalism became common on predominantly white college campuses in the Sixties, the Civil Rights Movement had already been underway for almost a decade. It was an inspiring model for Americans from the center-left to the far left. Specifically, about 1,000 mostly white, Northern students participated in Freedom Summer 1964, registering Black voters in Mississippi. As Doug McAdam shows, they returned radicalized by direct exposure to militant white supremacy. The summer changed them in many other ways; for instance, they turned bluejeans into the unofficial uniform of students in the Sixties by imitating rural Black organizers, who wore denim. Alumni of Freedom Summer became disproportionately influential in the left movements that followed. They also tended to exit the Civil Rights Movement itself–for a variety of reasons, including (appropriate) discomfort about their role in a Black-led struggle.

We misread the Civil Rights Movement if we assume that it had a coherent, centralized leadership structure–epitomized by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.–and a consistent message, as expressed in his “I Have a Dream Speech.” It was always a hotbed of debate and difference and always had many leaders. These facts would have been more evident to young radicals in the Sixties than they are today, because the King myth had not yet formed. However, young radicals also observed some actual features of the Civil Rights Movement that they increasingly disputed as the decade progressed, and these matters remain contested today.

First, the Movement developed and honored leaders: not one, and not just the Big Six (James Farmer, Philip Randolph, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, John Lewis, and King), but a cadre or layer of leaders across the country, including women. Leadership itself became more controversial after 1964 or so.

Second, the Movement treated the government as a target of demands. The goal was almost always to negotiate with government officials, from the police commissioner of a Southern city to Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daly to LBJ. The Movement eschewed two alternatives. It could have sought to become the government by winning elections or fomenting a revolution, or it could have shunned the government as illegitimate or un-reformable. Some Black leaders of the time advocated each of those strategies, but not the core leaders of the Movement. They wanted to be independent of the government and to influence it actively. The two alternatives (replacing or avoiding the government) became more popular in the student left as the Sixties enfolded.

Third, the Movement used existing social capital: organizations and associations. Churches were most important, but unions, businesses, newspapers, colleges, and fraternities and sororities also contributed. The genius of the original generation of Civil Rights leaders was to redirect inherited forms of social capital to new (political) purposes–for instance, by encouraging people already assembled in pews to boycott buses. Social capital had always been different in the urban North, it changed rapidly in the late 1900s, and leftists became critical of its major components, such as churches. Subsequent movements have sometimes tried to do without much organization or to create social capital almost from scratch, as with the communes, collectives, and consciousness-raising groups of the later 1960s.

Clearly, other changes also unfolded during the Sixties (which lasted until 1974 or so), including new causes, crises, ideologies, and constituencies. But I think the issues I’ve mentioned here still echo for today’s activists.

See also: social movements of the sixties, seventies, and today; why the sixties wore jeans; a different explanation of dispiriting political news coverage and debate; What is the appropriate role for higher education at a time of social activism? etc.

As someone who has worked for more than 20 years on the nitty-gritty of civic education in schools and colleges (the details of state standards, curricula, textbooks, measures, tests, etc.), I welcome prominent calls for more attention to this topic. The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens by the senior diplomat Richard Haass looks like a worthwhile example. I look forward to reading this book after seeing a pre-release article in The Atlantic entitled “Why We Need Civics: We’re failing to teach what it means to be American.”

But I would like to register a qualm about the basic thrust of the argument, at least as it’s presented in The Atlantic. Haass offers the example of Passover, when Jews reinforce their “collective identity” by retelling a short story that has explicit lessons. Haass thinks that US citizens must do something similar. “America is organized around a set of ideas that needs to be articulated again and again to survive.” His book will no doubt say more about exactly what these ideas are, but the article suggests that they are facts about the structure of the US Constitution and a positive view of that system.

I definitely feel the appeal of a collective ritual in which all my fellow citizens affirm what I believe most strongly. Similarly, I like the idea that after death, we will all meet our Maker and have revealed unto us the truths that I happen to hold right now on earth. The problem is that we actually disagree, and I could well be wrong.

To me, our main civic deficit is not a failure to teach certain basic facts about the political system. Haass underestimates the amount of time students are already required to spend studying these topics, because he only counts state-required courses entitled “civics” or “US government.” Students also study American history at several grade-levels, addressing the topics he mentions in his article. State mandates for civics courses are valuable–I have helped to work for them–but the difference in students’ knowledge between states with and without those mandates is small (Kawashima-Ginsberg & Levine 2014). We must address other dimensions of the problem.

I think our main deficit is that we do not disagree well. We will always hold conflicting views, not only about routine matters like how to allocate public money, but also about such fundamental questions as what defines us as a people, what to make of our history, and whether our current constitution is well designed. In a free and diverse society, people will hold sharply divergent views about such matters and should care enough to articulate them. However, current debates are polarized and distorted in damaging ways.

Disagreeing well is a high bar. It requires values, but they are values like empathy, responsiveness, respect, and humility-plus-conviction that are demanding and whose exact implications are themselves highly debatable. It is often a good and hard question whether a given statement deserves respect.

Disagreeing well also requires facts, but they are not mainly facts about the basic structure of the US Constitution. Ideally, deliberating citizens know history, statistics, economic principles, the tenets of world religions, natural science, literary representations of society, and many other topics.

On one hand, this means that civic education is all of education–not just a course. Democracy demands richer, more challenging, and more effective teaching of all subjects. On the other hand, we must actively respect fellow citizens who don’t demonstrate much of the knowledge that one can gain in schools. There are other kinds of knowledge (often derived from life-experience). More importantly, all of our fellow citizens have a non-negotiable right to participate in politics and cannot be excluded because of things they don’t know. The higher we set expectations for civic education, the more we risk disparaging many of our fellow citizens. Survey measures of adults’ knowledge of US government usually produce low scores (and that has been true since the dawn of survey research), but so do surveys of public knowledge of health, science, economics, and most other topics. We must be willing to participate with fellow citizens who cannot pass exams.

Therefore, improving civic education is a complex and permanent task. To be sure, it deserves more overall attention, which is why I welcome books like The Bill of Obligations. If nothing else, they contribute to the perennial debate about what kind of a country we are. However, the way forward is not to enact a single new course that reflects a specific view of what everyone should believe. That is a way of imagining a conclusion to our basic debates, when we should be trying to encourage and enrich such discussions.

Source: Kawashima-Ginsberg, Kei, and Peter Levine. “Policy effects on informed political engagement.” American Behavioral Scientist 58.5 (2014): 665-688. See also: the relevance of American civil religion to K-12 education; college students’ civic knowledge “appalling” … in 1943; putting the constitution in its place; two dimensions of debate about civics; and The Educating for American Democracy Roadmap.

Tuesday, January 31 at 4 p.m: The Providence College Humanities Forum, in collaboration with “Conversations for Change” and The Frederick Douglass Project ; Ruane Center for the Humanities 105, Providence College, Providence RI

Friday, February 3 from 12:00pm to 1:30pm: Ohio State University COMPAS Colloquium (“What Should Civic Education Become in the 21st Century?”, panel with Angela M. Banks and Winston C. Thompson. Also online.

Monday, Feb 6: at Wake Forest University’s Program for Leadership and Character in Winston-Salem, NC

Plus a very enjoyable visit to a Harvard Design School seminar today, thanks to my friend Eric Gordon.

Frontiers of Democracy is an annual conference at Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life that convenes practitioners and scholars for intensive discussions. In 2023, thanks to generous funding from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the special theme of the conference is religious pluralism and its relationship to democracy in multiracial societies. 

The speakers in plenary sessions will include Cornell William Brooks, Brandon Thomas Crowley, Diana Eck, Aminta Kilawan-Narine, Eric Liu, Cristina Moon, Simran Jeet Singh, Michael Wear, and others. 

The religious pluralism theme is not exclusive, and we welcome sessions on other topics related to Tisch College’s “North Star”: building robust, inclusive democracy for an increasingly multiracial society. While we will consider proposals for presentations or panels of presentations, we actively seek proposals for other formats, such as moderated discussions, meetings devoted to strategy or design, trainings and workshops, case study discussions, debates, and other creative formats. 

• Register and purchase tickets. (Deadline for ticket sales is July 9, 2023.) 
• Propose sessions. (Deadline for proposals is March 31, 2023.)

Time and location: July 13 (5-7 pm) to July 15 (noon) on Tufts University’s Medford, MA campus near the Medford/Tufts Station on the Boston Green Line.

Cost: $240 for a standard ticket with discounts for current students. This includes hors d’oeuvres on July 13, breakfast and lunch on July 14, and breakfast and lunch on July 15. Other meals and lodgings are not provided.