Coleman, Mary
Jackson State University
Jackson, Mississippi
Beyond Indifference and Loss: Civic Education in Higher Education
This paper raises many questions about the content, means, and ends of civic education on college campuses throughout the United States. Its tone is exploratory and its queries are numerous. Attached to the questions about civic education is its nexus to reflexive and reflective scholarship and service learning.
Sowing the Seeds of Education: Equipping those Not to the Manor Born for Citizenship
Mary DeLorse Coleman
Presented at the 2004 Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association
What oneCivic education as herein examined encourages young people and their parents, policymakers, and the otherwise disaffected, to ask who U.S. citizens are as a matter of experience, discursive practices, collective intentions and strivings. How, if at all, should colleges and universities speak to the background of citizenship in America?
From the Background to the Foreground of Citizenship
What one is accustomed to thinking and doing without thinking are is “Background”“phenomenamatter; these phenomena as they exist as are deeply personal, but they are not all matters of explicit acknowledgement, rules or expressions. How do we in our personal lives as family and neighborhoods and in our collective civic life as a nation and world, bring the background into the foreground? I think in the latter instance that we begin doing so by investigating the presumptions that we take as truths about our nation and others’ nations and the people of those nations and our own. College seems a pretty good venue for this kind of reflection. We must be encouraged in our schooling to know more than we actually do about privilege, its use, and presumptions and strive to reduce structural disadvantage and their cumulative effects in our everyday lives as citizens and decision makers.
If this schooling process results in unmasking presumptions it is then the start of an assessment of who we have become as a nation and the legitimate means by which privilege is itself reformed and redistributed and structural disadvantage, lessened. How teachers frame this discussion and how they understand its meaning for their own time and place are contentious issues, worthy of our best minds and emotions. so by investigating the practices, assumptions and unexamined beliefs in political, familial and religious institutions in ways that recognize the dynamism of norms, the ways in which norms are capable of transformation as ideas and practice. Often the Background or unarticulated and assumed understanding, if masked, obscures the realm of articulable beliefs and goals. If the Background is inevitably lurking beneath our consciousness, when are the times, if ever, in the practice of our everyday lives as citizens or teachers, should itthat it should be recovered, contested contested, or lost?
The primary search in this paper is thus for explanations about the likely good that college and university-based civic education would do in creating or awakening both the Background of beliefs and behavior and legitimating beliefs that inform collective and personal intentions. This search helps focus the question of whether young people whose ancestors were intentionally denied citizenship have a conception of the citizen that enables a critical service as well as a critical reasoning, reading and discourse that makes real the implicit assumptions and reasoning in the background that may be we relied y on without quite thinking about it.
What is the background for teaching the construction of citizenship? Can ancestry and the quasi-non-familial institutions—including colleges and universities-- accessible today provide structured opportunities for the learningdevelopment of critical citizenshipcitizenship? Critical citizenship means the reasoning and practice that is explicitly informed by the resistance to continuous servitude/indifference.? Critical citizenship explicitly embraces interest and engagement in civil society and rejects indifference and civic thoughtlessness. What do U. S. citizensAmericans, especially the college educated among them, learn byfrom intentionally examining the cumulative Background and foreground of their nation’s and of their ancestors’parents’struggles for citizenship equalitylives? How can colleges and universities restructure service-learning to address scholarship and civic engagement; deeper intellectual engagement and critical reflection as well as critical action that lead to a network of practices that include ethical problem solving, synthesis, and proposals for change?
The Will to Reason and Deep Intellectual Engagement as Civic Education that we intuit and use as conscious underpinnings in African Americans’ march from servitude/indifference to service and critical citizenship? How, if at all, will that Background actually be deployed in the service of critical citizenship or continuous servitude?
How if at all do inequalitydoes inequality of position, and inequality in opportunity and privilege influence the will to reason critically about scholarship and civic engagement? participate in public service and critical citizenship? Should time be spent examining the personal and collective self-- and helping the off springsdescendaents of the once enslaved and the oppressor and the indifferent conceptualize the cthe content of citizenship beyond rights talk? as personal, materialistic and social/political constructions? I argue that internal conceptualizations and social construction are primary to developing/rethinking what J.R. Searle calls “a network of practices,”[1] personal and collective. These networks and practices can serve as the moral vocabulary of resistance to indifference and form a better foundation for practices of critical citizenship. What is the background for the construction of citizenship? Nancy Rosenblum’s important work makes this question the very center of civic education work. As I interpret it,that very important work it is to thoroughly ground citizens in the knowledge of how the nation aand groups within the nation function and why they function as they do.. Who we are we as a nation is learned by research, as much as by classroom teaching, experiencing, participating or observing others’ lives, memories, and strivings. This notion is consistent with colleges and universities in pursuit of planned programs of undergraduate scholarship with a civic mission. Here the research components become integral to the service provided to the community. Critical reflection of the kind advocated above, then, inheres in civic education in ways that awaken in students a keener awareness of how perennial struggle is and the ways in which primary documents knowing, in part, our strugglesand the documents that codify the accommodations of our struggles.[2]
Thus to the extent that civic education and deliberative processes are discipline instructive to these networks and practices, they must explicitly ask what is the Background for purposes of conceptualizing citizenship and what is the gap between the Background and the foreground of our nation’s conception of itself and its citizens? Background matter is personal/collective and institutional. As U.S. citizens Americans theorize about citizenship (theirsours and others) throughout the world, the territory of the Background provides openings to understand dissonance that can lead to cooperation and consensus as well as the dissonance that requires more of our strivings well beyond the reach of political decisionmaking alone. In any case, this working out of the Background can create enabling contexts for the practices of critical foreground citizenship.
Civic education seems a good conduit for this role at this time in the United StatesAmerican life. [3] Civic education as process and substance in part as I understand it means critical and sustained reflection about the nature of historical and contemporary practices and their short and long–term consequences and notions about the preferred future. Conscious notions of the preferred future enable the mobilization of people and communities, including communities of faith, beyond indifference. Where that mobilization and counter mobilization leads and how theyit influences citizenship and informs civic education is an research and service–learning important question. For the descendants of slaves,where for whom intellectual civic engagementefficacy is manifest, it is premised in part on an adverse past or collective memory of the past and the possibility of new forms of servitude/denial of the practice of full citizenship, except for due diligence, noton the will to reason and sometimes to action. just civic duty. For the faithfulrobust believer, the mobilization of foreground practices and background belief systems may have disproportionate influences on civic life at any given time. How does faith influence intergenerational practices of citizenship? Does religion itself become the civic faith? cross-cutting cleavages as generally understood, do not temper or inform civic belief precisely because religion is the civic faith. The practice of citizenship is wedded to strong belief systems in ways that are not easily decoupled. Civic education is thus pursued as a search for meaning that informs personal and collective behavior, and ideas and ideals.
ThisBackground education provides a compass about that helps usone navigate, along with other tools (moral dilemmas sources), public and personal dilemmas, giving direction and sensitivity to what enrages our sense of justice and injustice. and becomes aCollective and personal political frameworks emerge for clearing up the longer view of world citizenship and the everyday practices of the dominant and emergent powers in community, state, nation, and world. . Sorting out myth and lore from facts and conditions require interest and a willingness to learn to be informed and to think actively and over long periods about what one is learning.
The renaissance of civic education comes at a very propitious time in higher education in the United States. Perhaps more than ever colleges and universities are jockeying for comparative advantage in their instructional, research and service offerings. In one sense colleges and universities are trying to assess what meaning world affairs has or should have on their instructional, research and service priorities. Civic engagement must figure prominently as must national identity and global solutions to terrorism and chronic disease. Citizenship, terrorism, and public health are underscored as perhaps they must and should be. We live in a truly interesting political world: the religious right, the media left/right (radio is especially right-winged; television is mixed, with little in the center); corporate champions, the still civic invested middle, the disinterested, and some of their cousins, the disempowered. Among the disempowered are many voters, civic activists, nonvoters and the indifferent. But also among the disempowered are many whose civic faith is given expression in the popular music culture of rap. Rappers are the visually/audibly discontented, a noisy in-your-face largely wealthy racially diverse subgroup speaking experientially to, if not for, the most dispossessed of the disempowered—young males 8-30. Many members of this subgroup do not enjoy trying to communicate with their parents, the most immediate elders in the disempowered group. Thus, many of the disempowered are not able to have healthy intergenerational communication. This is a challenge to the transmission of critical citizenship and intergenerational continuities. This is also a challenge to critical citizenship and it will remain so as long as the disempowered do not have minimal access to a quality community (moral sources, and possibilities for skill acquisitions that can be exchanged for a paycheck or ownership) and to quality primary and secondary education.[4]
What the disempowered share without regard to age is disrespect and thus a distrust of government and corporate elites, not just healthy skepticism. That is, they believe that rebelliousness against authority is central to democratic strivings. Still, their policy preferences are not favorably acted upon in the concrete arena of politics. They are thus disempowered because the interests their musical narratives highlight and the plight of their age cohort and gender are purportedly precarious at best especially if they grow up in inner cities or small and largely impoverished towns. Their well-being is ostensibly not a part of the dominant legislative agenda in this country and in some cases despite their parents’ best efforts at sustaining human agency the prison complex, the world of gangs, underachievement and unhealthy communities are in their wake. Under what conditions if any is the citizenship of the disaffected fortified?
Civic education of the kind I am advancing would do much to ground members of the society in a value system of ideas and ideals and not just memory, hurt, shame and symbolism. Memory is invaluable for the data provided; however, memory, alone, especially lived memories of slavery, lynching, genocide, injustice, hatred, or discrimination, can lead to a view of citizenship as negative freedom. For example, the freedom from tyranny is a desirable but negative freedom. What is it that those wanting to be free from tyranny seek to create? Do they seek freedom toward engagement, reflection, responsibility, opportunity, nation building, tolerance and mutual respect?
Civic indifference is not the same as well-informed independence. Civic indifference marks mankind for mediocrity rather than greatness because it does not require men and women to choose a positive freedom. Indifference teaches that our life chances will be the same even if we do not choose. Some invisible hand will usher in our improvement as a matter of course. Civic indifference teaches quiet apathy and may trigger disaffection without any appeal to a higher will or authority. Such aggravated indifference can sever the will from the conscience. Civic education has to compete with and win over the indifferent at a time when belief systems are also social systems replete with separations by class, race, religion and language. Citizenship experiences including civic education must work this out explicitly and boldly and both well beyond and inside the brick and mortar of classrooms. [PLEASE CLARIFY THIS NEXT SECTION]Arguably, thoughtful civic education and intense belief systems squeeze out indifference and make indifference more compatible with continuous servitude than critical citizenship. What does civic education/citizenship make people feel and think? Whatever else is true of civic education, it must help people must feel more than patriotism and outrage. Civic education, especially the use of primary documents, teaches that struggle is forever with us and even in the midst of struggle, perhaps even igniting the risk freedom fighters take, It is distrust of political institutions[5] and fear of permanent servitude. that triggers participation if not understanding of interdepencency and connectedness.
Civic education thus attempts to make substantive our visions of civic action and democratic values. As evidence mounts of declining civic participation and ignorance of basic historical and political knowledge, civic education efforts have increased. With service learning at the centerpiece of many of these programs, they educators have targeted populations of college, secondary and primary students. Today’s presentation and the social science and humanities content it traverses will, I hope, help teachers and students in public institutions think more clearly and vigorously about robust public service and service learning. How might public institutions ignite generations of young people to govern as well as they follow and to follow as well as they govern? How can rage or distrust be channeled into a citizenship without perennial losers? When is iIndifference itself a loss of citizenshipis loss and of positive freedom?. Neutrality is not possible and is thus delusory. Religious separation is fine for worshipping but is it fine for citizenship?I turn to John Dewy for advice and guidance.
Argued here is that substantive approaches to deliberative democracycivic education must account for the conditions of intellectual and interest-based plurality; the ways in which proposalspolicies can be made palatable to those who disagree and how public reasoning expands democratic openings and builds a preferred national character. Argued here also is that deliberationcivic education, as practice and instruction, engages reason as well as passion; in particular, citizenship content in America, and especially patriotism, lacks enough well informed reason and intelligent passion and contains too much uncritical emotion. Essential to taming this emotion is an examination of the nNation’s Background and revered self-identity as measured by everyday and intergenerational practices and policies within and without itsour borders. This working out of self and nation-Background is quasi-experiential. Collective history and memory are both crucial to understanding how the Background or various conceptions of it influence the foreground of citizenship, reason, patriotism, civic education, and religious practice and policy.
Experiential Citizenship
Literature Review
Much of the unwritten premise of the nexus of civic education and service learning is found in the idea of experiential citizenship. The phrase “experiential citizenship” is used to refer to the dynamic and transformative process of making and shaping citizenship, experimental inquiry with an implicit telos of “progress” and the cooperative efforts fundamental to democracy. This idea of experiential citizenship intersects with formal education design and practices in the works of John Dewey. From these notions and contemporary literature, three propositions are formed: (1) essential to the survival of democratic regimes is the instillation of civic values and practices in the every generation of citizens, (2) pluralism becomes an asset to experiential inquiry and (3) service-learning advances civic values and practices as well as cognitive development. Macedo’s Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy encourages one to ask: Under what condition(s) does pluralism become an asset to democratic regimes? And what kind of pluralism is an asset in a society with a history of slavery and with a huge capacity and will to bullycoerce others and serve as models to others? Diversity must not be assumed a public good in and of itself. But neither must civic education be taken as a public good, uncritically. Certainly, Macedo rightly warns that itcivic education must not be taken as the new civic religion.[6]