Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement
February 2003
Though last week's scheduled White House conference on history and civics had to be postponed because of the President's Day blizzard, there's no dearth of activity on the "civics education" front. Recently released by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement is this 40-page report that seeks to offer "a common vision of a richer, more comprehensive approach to civic education in the United States." Though praised in a recent column by the usually astute David Broder, it turns out to be a remarkable amalgam of very good and highly questionable material. It does a dandy job of explaining why schools should take civic education seriously and suggesting a variety of ways in which they can do better at this. It has excellent suggestions for the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The big problem is that it's grounded in what must be termed a "political activism" conception of both civic education and responsible citizenship. You'll find a bit here about being a good parent, good neighbor and conscientious participant in the nongovernmental institutions that comprise civil society. But you'll find lots and LOTS about influencing public policy and engaging in political activity. The report even faults nonpolitical "service-learning" programs on the dubious grounds that they may encourage "students to volunteer in place of political participation." Moreover, the report is ambivalent about the "knowledge" side of civic education, on the one hand urging schools to do better at instructing students in "government, history, law and democracy" but, on the other hand, deprecating "rote facts" on grounds that these "may actually alienate [pupils] from politics." Politics is clearly viewed by the authors as the highest - maybe the only legitimate - form of civic activity. You'll find other questionable suggestions here, such as greater classroom focus on "interdisciplinary instruction, cooperative learning and student-focused techniques." You'll see policymakers advised to take more seriously the curricular and pedagogical advice of the misguided National Council for the Social Studies (the same outfit that urged 9/11 curricula to focus on feelings and tolerance). You'll encounter the ill-conceived suggestion that Washington should create a new agency to oversee all federal activities on the civic-education front. You'll read multiple pleas for more federal funding. And you'll watch the report close with a classic liberal-foundation plea for private funders to do more to support "advocacy" organizations, the main purpose of which is apparently to extract still more money from taxpayers. On the whole, this one gets about a C-. You can find it for yourself at http://www.civicmissionofschools.org/CivicMissionofSchools.pdf.
