I remember when the first President Bush nominated David Souter to the Supreme Court. I listened to the televised session when he appeared before Congress (I think it was CSPAN–it was certainly past my bedtime), fearful after the disappointment that was Clarence Thomas, and I was impressed by the erudition of his responses. I wasn’t disappointed by his subsequent jurisprudence; agree or not (and usually I did agree), his opinions were always reasoned, nuanced and respectful of both the litigants and the Constitutional process.
I was sorry to see him step down from the Court. During the recent coverage of oral arguments, I was struck by the mediocrity of Alito and irritated by Scalia’s usual grandstanding, and really regretted Souter’s absence.
Yesterday, I had a chance to see him in person. I was attending a small conference on civic education at Harvard, co-sponsored by the Law School and former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s iCivics, and Souter was one of the panelists–along with Lawrence Tribe, Justice O’Connor, and Kenneth Starr. (Talk about your heavy hitters!)
Justice O’Connor said very little, but Souter was eloquent. In a day devoted to necessary technical issues–how do we improve civic education, what are the barriers we face, what is the necessary content of an education that will encourage informed, active citizenship–he cut to the chase: America has a tension between the rights of the individual and the common good. That’s a healthy tension. But we must guard against times when we go too far in either direction. When, as now, we place excessive importance on individualism, and neglect the common good, we run the danger of forgetting what it means to be an American, a part of a polity. We forget who “we” are when we focus too narrowly on the “me.”
And “we” are constituted by our commitment to our Constitution. When our citizens are ignorant of American history, American values and our constitutional commitments, we lose our identity.
His actual remarks were far, far more eloquent than my rendition of them. Listening to him, I could only think how much the current Court lost when he stepped down.
Whenever I attend an academic conference, I learn a lot, although what I learn is not necessarily the subject-matter of the conference itself, or the papers that are presented. Often, it’s the “happenstance” nuggets and accidental insights that are most interesting.
I have now unpacked from the recent conference in Detroit, and “debriefed” by sorting through the papers and notes and handouts that accumulate during such meetings, and was reminded of an observation made during one presentation–a research finding that was intriguing, to say the least. The study found a positive correlation between writing proficiency and “engaged and knowledgable citizenship.”
The research was alluded to in passing, and no explanation was offered. I suppose the easy answer might be that people who are bright and well-educated are more likely to write well and more likely to be engaged, informed citizens. But that seems too facile. I know people with degrees from prestigious institutions who can’t write clearly, and I know others with those same credentials who somehow missed elementary civics and government.
Of course, I didn’t see the research and didn’t get a citation, so it may well be that the study was flawed. But if it wasn’t, how might we explain this correlation? What would be the connection between the ability to write with clarity and grace, and the possession of above-average civic knowledge? Why would these two particular skills/understandings be correlated?
Some intriguing research on civic education is being conducted by Professor Joseph Kahne, the John and Martha Davidson Professor of Education at Mills College in California. Kahne is investigating the effect of digital media on young people’s political knowledge and engagement, and his preliminary findings (let’s face it, at this stage of our ‘cyber-world,’ everything we know is preliminary) are pretty fascinating.
Kahne says that half of all 18-20-year-olds say their voting decisions are influenced by what they learn online.
Seventy-five percent of America’s youth are active on Facebook; and ninety-five percent of teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 use the Internet. Almost a quarter of all smartphones are used by teens and young adults between 13 and 24.
Youth under twenty-five are more often recruited for civic or political activities online than through other methods.
Before you wring your hands and–in the manner of all passing generations–denounce this state of affairs as the harbinger of a disconnected, disinterested polity, consider some of Kahne’s other findings: even controlling for prior levels of engagement, when young people became highly involved in online, interest-driven communities (Harry Potter fans, sports fans, followers of particular music genres, etc.), they became more likely to volunteer in their communities, raise money for a charitable cause, or work together with others to solve a community problem. These groups are also less likely to serve as “echo chambers” and more likely to introduce young people to social and political perspectives other than their own than their off-line lives in communities of like-minded residents. Even when the online communities discuss sports or hobbies, political matters emerge and are discussed–and Hobbit aficionados are not likely to be politically homogeneous.
Kahne has even collaborated with Pew’s Internet and American Life Project to explore the ways in which video games can be used to provide youth with civic learning experiences, and he cites Games for Change, an organization working to exploit that possibility.
Cyberspace certainly presents parents and educators with new challenges–some of them worthy of our concern. But like all change, it also opens up new opportunities. The Internet is a tool, and like all tools, morally and educationally neutral. It’s how we use it that makes the difference.
I had a fascinating discussion yesterday with a scholar who studies the impact and use of digital media in teaching civic knowledge and skills.
Despite the widespread concern about use of the Internet to construct our favored realities–to build a “bubble” consisting of our preferred “facts” and interpretations–his research suggests there is less “bubble living” online than in the physical world, where we often choose to live and move in neighborhoods of the like-minded.
The Internet has facilitated what he calls “communities of interest”–Harry Potter or Star Trek fans, knitters, collectors, etc. Those communities include folks with varied political views, and political discussions come up in their interactions more often than we might think.
For those of us worried about the demise of the daily newspaper, where readers would encounter subjects and points of view that differed from their own, this research is reason to cheer. It also should remind us that there is so much we do not know about the ways that Facebook, Twitter et al are shaping social interactions and building different kinds of community.
It’s also well to recognize the ways in which geography can insulate us. Look at those maps of red and blue states. Or ponder the observation of the older student in my media class, who noted that she’d grown up in Martinsville, in what she described as a “racist bubble” composed of neighbors who all held the same attitudes about African-Americans and other people of color. As she pointed out, the Internet allows people to escape those kinds of bubbles.
Reality is more complicated than we think. Fortunately.
There is a robust debate underway about what it will take to attract the best and brightest of our young people to public service. As someone who has taught public affairs for 15 years—and with several years of government service in my own background—I have a theory that I would sum up as “civility, civic literacy and a meaningful opportunity for service.”
By “civility,” I mean a collegial and supportive workplace in which partisan political considerations take a back seat to achievement of the common good. By “civic literacy,” I mean familiarity with accepted understandings of America’s history and constitution. And by “a meaningful opportunity for service,” I mean an approach to administrative practice that balances ends and means in pursuit of the public interest.
There was an interesting symposium on political civility in a recent academic journal. The articles wrestled with confounding questions: what is the difference between argumentation that illuminates differences and rhetoric that “crosses the line”? The consensus seemed to be that incivility is rudeness or impoliteness that violates an agreed social standard.
I’m not sure we have agreed social standards in this age of invective, but surely rhetoric that focuses on, and disrespects, persons rather than positions should count as uncivil. (An example of civility in political argument might be Dick Lugar’s often-repeated phrase “that is a matter about which reasonable people can differ.”)
One of the most trenchant observations came from a professor who attributed the gridlock in Washington and elsewhere to “partisan one-upmanship expressed in ways that do not show respect for those with differing views.” In other words, if your motivation is simply to beat the other guys–to keep the President from a second term, for example–and if that motivation outweighs any concern for the public good, civility is absent and governing is impossible.
The reason politicians no longer “respectfully disagree” with each other, the professor pointed out, is that they do not in fact respect their opponents. For a variety of reasons, they hardly know them, and it’s easy to demonize people you don’t know.
Add to that an even more troubling aspect of today’s politics, a lack of civic literacy abetted by disregard for fact and truth and enabled by partisan television, talk radio and the internet. Survey after survey shows that people on the left and right alike get their “news” from sources that validate their biases. Worse, we have lost much of the real news, the mainstream, objective journalism that fact-checks, that confronts us with inconvenient realities. In such an environment, it becomes easier to characterize those with whom we disagree as buffoons or worse, unworthy of our respect. It is easier still if we lack even an elementary grounding in the origins and philosophy of American government, a lack confirmed by one dispiriting survey after another.
There is ample research confirming the existence of a worrisome civic deficit. I have reported much of it in this blog. If nature abhors a vacuum, as the old saying has it, it should not surprise us that citizens accept the spin and outright fabrications of the pundits and “talking heads” who have political axes to grind.
When political discourse is so nasty, and regard for truth so minimal–when the enterprise of government has more in common with a barroom brawl than a lofty exercise in statesmanship–is it any wonder that so many of our “best and brightest” shun politics? Forget elective office–who wants to go to work for a government agency the very existence of which is regarded as illegitimate by a substantial percentage of one’s fellow-citizens?
Americans have spent the last thirty plus years denigrating the role of government and the value of public service to an audience ill-equipped to evaluate those arguments. Now we are paying the price for our neglect of civic education and our unwillingness to defend the worth of the public sector.
Americans have a bipolar approach to issues: it’s either all good or all bad. But government is neither. We don’t have to abandon critical evaluation of government’s performance, but we do need to remind citizens of government’s importance and value.
I firmly believe in the line from Field of Dreams: if you build it, they will come. If we rebuild civic knowledge and respect for civility and public service, young people will answer the call.
