Category Archives: Education / Youth

Good Citizens

I have been asked to address students at an Indiana High School on “Good Government Day.” My assignment was to describe to them the attributes of a good citizen.

Here’s what I plan to tell them. (Constructive criticism is welcome!)

Good governments require good citizens. If there is one thing that history has taught us, it is that without good citizens to hold government accountable, power really does corrupt those who exercise it.

So the question becomes: what makes a good citizen? I think that there are three requirements topping the list: Constitutional literacy, critical thinking skills, and the willingness to pay one’s dues.

What do I mean by each of these?

Let’s start with Constitutional literacy. You simply can’t be a good, responsible citizen if you are ignorant of the history and philosophy of your own country. A week or so ago, Newsweek Magazine ran an article titled “How Ignorant Are You?” It was a quiz, with questions taken from the tests immigrants have to pass in order to become citizens. The percentages of Americans who could answer the questions correctly were embarrassing—for most of them, it was less than 30%. There are literally hundreds of other surveys that confirm how little most Americans know about their own system: two-thirds of us don’t even know that we have three branches of government!

If you don’t know what the Enlightenment was, and how it shaped our constitutional system, if you don’t understand that the purpose of the Bill of Rights was to protect individual rights both from government and from the majority, if you don’t understand the difference between civil liberties and civil rights, you can be a good person, but I would argue that you don’t know enough to be a good citizen.

Constitutional and historic literacy are just the beginning. You also need critical thinking skills.

What I mean by critical thinking skills is the ability to tell the difference between facts and garbage. One of the reasons that Constitutional literacy and an analytical mind are such important parts of good citizenship is that the world is a more complicated place than it used to be, especially when it comes to the oceans of information we get every day. The internet is a wonderful thing—I’m not sure how I survived before google—but because it brings so much unfiltered material into our lives, the ability to separate factual, credible information from spin and propaganda is more important than it has ever been. If you don’t know what the Constitution and Bill of Rights really say, or how the Courts have defined and interpreted what they say, you’re a lot more likely to believe that forwarded email you got from your crazy Uncle Ray.

In the last few years, we have seen incredible changes in the media. Fewer people read newspapers or even watch the evening news on television, and more and more of us get our information on line. Some of that is great, some of it isn’t. We are in danger of losing real journalism—where people monitor what government does, where they fact-check and provide context and background. Instead, we have mountains of unsubstantiated opinion, PR and spin. Good citizens have to be able to separate fact from fantasy. They have to live in the world as it is, not in a bubble where they listen only to things that confirm what they already believe—and the internet makes it so easy and tempting to construct that bubble. At the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, where I teach, we are so concerned about this issue that we have established a new undergraduate major in Media and Public Affairs. So far, it is the only major of its kind in the country.

Finally, the third quality of a good citizen:  Willingness to pay one’s dues—taxes. This one isn’t going to make me any friends, but it’s true. We’ve had 25 years of politicians telling us that taxes are like theft, that they are government stealing our money.  Not so. Taxes are the price we pay to live in a society that makes it possible for us to earn a living and live in safe communities. Taxes pay for everything from national defense to paved roads to air safety to garbage collection. Tax dollars pay for the school you attend, the parks you play in, the police and firefighters who keep you safe. Don’t misunderstand—good citizens are diligent watchdogs of the public purse, because there’s nothing virtuous or patriotic about waste or duplication—but they are also willing to pay their fair share without whining about it.

Think about a basketball team where some players just don’t pull their weight, or clubs you belong to where most of the members let a few people do all the work. Most of us don’t think very highly of the slackers. Good citizens aren’t slackers—they do their share. And that includes paying their share.

There are lots of other behaviors that characterize good citizens—voting, keeping up on the news, serving on juries, working for a political party or for a cause you believe in—all the things we mean when we encourage civic engagement. But if you aren’t civically literate—if you don’t know the basics of our history and constitutional system—your vote won’t be as informed.

If you don’t have the ability to assess the credibility of the news and commentary you are receiving, you won’t get the whole story, or the accurate account, and you will make decisions based on bad information.

And if you accept public services—police protection, garbage collection, paved roads, education and so many more—but you don’t pay your fair share of taxes, you aren’t a citizen at all. You’re a freeloader.

At the end of the day, being a good citizen requires a lot more than just being born in the United States. It’s more than wearing a flag pin, or being proud of what this country has accomplished. Being a good citizen means doing your part to move America forward, it means helping this country of ours live up to its highest ideals. And that requires civic knowledge, intellectual honesty and a willingness to contribute time, effort and tax dollars to our common civic enterprise.

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Burning Down the Village to Roast a Pig

One of my favorite lines from a Supreme Court decision was delivered in the opinion striking down the mis-named “Internet Decency Act.” The Court compared the measure to burning down a village to roast a pig.

The “pig” this time is the budget deficit, which is unquestionably a very significant problem. Unfortunately, Congress is attacking America, not the problem.

Any credible economist will confirm that even if we zeroed out all discretionary spending–that is, if we spent only on the military and entitlements, and absolutely nothing else–we would not erase the deficit for twenty-plus years. (Actually, we would never erase it, because that would destroy the economy and lose billions in tax revenues.) If we are to get the budget balanced, we must couple responsible, judicious spending cuts (including military cuts) with measures to grow the economy and increase tax revenues. We might begin with rolling back the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest 2% of Americans.

Instead, Congress is merrily proceeding to destroy civil society.

There has been a lot written about the effect of defunding Planned Parenthood on the health of poor women, and about the effort to kill public broadcasting. Those proposals are in the news. But another proposed cut that has been less discussed would defund the single most successful civic education program we have. The “savings” wouldn’t pay for a single fighter jet, but the cost would be incalculable.

The program is “We the People.” In a 2010 study conducted for the Center for Civic Education, students who completed We the People were far and away more knowledgeable about the country’s democratic principles and institutions compared to their peers.

We the People national finalists also were:

* More likely to register to vote, write to a public official, investigate compelling political issues, participate in lawful demonstrations, and boycott certain products or stores.

* More likely to agree that keeping up with political affairs, influencing the political structure, developing a meaningful philosophy of life, becoming a community leader, and helping others in need are of strong to absolute importance.

* More likely to agree that people should be able to express unpopular opinions and that newspapers should be able to publish freely, without government interaction.

As a graduate student who has worked with the program put it in an email to me:

“It’s mind boggling to me that right now, when we need it most, the best program in the country on educating citizens would be eliminated. This is very real, as the Center for Civic Education had to cancel the We the People – Frontiers partnership. Frontiers is a 70+ year old organization providing civic engagement opportunities to the African American community. Four years ago, we teamed up with them to provide We The People to their inner-city and urban club students on nights and weekends, since their schools are no longer teaching civics. These kids traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, competed in We the People competition and experienced the civil rights movement first-hand, learning from Foot Soldiers who marched when they were their age. That event was scheduled to take place in July and has been cut. 600+ inner-city and urban youth from around the country have already been hurt by this, not to mention the millions more in the future who may never know We the People.”

I wonder what those who are stoking the fire will do when our civic village is gone.

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File Under: Be Careful What You Wish For…..

Here’s a cautionary tale for those private and parochial schools advocating at the legislature for vouchers: Sweden just passed a new education law stipulating that public schools must teach all their subjects in a “non-confessional” and “objective” (i.e. secular) manner. The law applies to all schools, including independent Christian and Muslim schools, because they, too, receive funding from the state.

Anyone who believes that tax dollars via vouchers wouldn’t come with strings attached is delusional. It’s called accountability, or more colloquially, “dancing with the guy what brung you.”

Think about it: what would some of our not-very-enlightened lawmakers say to families who wanted to use those vouchers to send their children to Muslim religious schools? Schools for Freethinkers? What would our more responsible legislators say about using them at schools that employed unqualified teachers, or taught “alternative” history, or that produced students unable to read? What about schools that didn’t meet minimum health or safety standards?

As a wise inner-city pastor once said about the Bush Administration’s Faith-Based Initiative,  “With the government’s sheckels come the government’s shackles.”

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Paging Civics Teachers

Where are all the high-school civics teachers when you need them?

During the past few weeks, we have been treated to an absolute bonanza of constitutional ineptitude: we’ve had Dr. Laura explaining her departure from radio as an effort to get her First Amendment rights back; continuation of the ugly, ginned-up controversy over Muslims building a community center three blocks from Ground Zero; and an equally retrograde proposal to eliminate portions of the 14th Amendment, among other embarrassments.

Dr. Laura (whose doctorate, we should recall, is in physiology—not logic, and certainly not law) seems to equate the disapproval of her sponsors with denial of her First Amendment rights. Someone should gently explain to her that the First Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, is a limit on government action. It prevents the government from censoring her. Unfair as it may seem to her, her sponsors also have First Amendment rights—and in this case, they have evidently decided to exercise them by disavowing her message.

That’s the problem with those darn constitutional rights—people who disagree with us have them too.

Aside from the southern Congressman who questioned whether Islam is “really a religion,” those who oppose allowing Muslims to build a community center and mosque three blocks from Ground Zero have generally conceded that the Constitution gives them the right to do so. Instead, they have fallen back on what First Amendment lawyers call the “heckler’s veto” argument. The “heckler’s veto” was most prominently used in the 1950s, during the Civil Rights movement. When Martin Luther King would ask for a permit to make a speech in a public venue, the city or town would argue that allowing the speech was likely to cause a civil disturbance and thus the permit should be denied in order to protect the public’s safety. Courts weren’t receptive to the notion that some people’s rights should be held hostage to other people’s hostility; nevertheless, opponents of the mosque argue that it is “insensitive” and “offensive” to build near the neighborhood where the Twin Towers went down (and just down the street from the Pussycat Lounge strip club).

When we come to proposals to amend the 14th Amendment, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that some of our dimmer political actors have noticed that it exists. It wasn’t all that long ago that a Georgia governor denied that the Bill of Rights applied to the states—a rather clear signal that he hadn’t encountered this particular Amendment. On the other hand, there is something surreal about watching people who claim to revere the Constitution when their own rights are at issue blithely proposing to shred that document when other people are its beneficiaries.

It’s hard to know whether these folks are really constitutionally illiterate or simply playing cynical political games. As one pundit has wryly noted, there are two ways we can understand the meaning of the word “base” in the phrase “playing to the base.”

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This Was a SCIENCE Teacher??!

According to the New York Daily News, a Brooklyn principal has reprimanded a sixth-grade teacher for selling students a book that tells how to “recognize those serving Satan and bring them to Jesus.”

Steven Arizmendi sold “He Came to Set the Captives Free” to four of his students at Junior High School 220 in Sunset Park for $5 apiece. The science teacher also loaned copies of the evangelical novel to eight students.