With Americans across the political spectrum increasingly agreeing that democracy is on life support, effective, nonpartisan and intellectually serious civic education is the most urgent task for higher education. There is no institution better equipped to rescue our public argument — our ability to reach across disagreement — than our colleges and universities.
Well before Harvard became ground zero in the battle over American colleges and democracy — before the cacophony of executive orders, revoked visas and grants, and encampments — left- and right-wing educators were working on how best to educate a new generation of good citizens. Many college mission statements commit their institutions to civic education, and that goal is one of the few ambitions both right and left agree should be at the center of students’ education.
For decades, colleges have sought to instill civic spirit in their students through service-learning opportunities and voter-registration drives alongside classes on democratic citizenship. Broadly oriented toward the left, these programs have tended to focus on civic action, giving students the tools to advocate and organize for social justice.
These classes, whether in the social sciences or the humanities, emphasize the ways groups are excluded from civic power and the importance of removing those barriers. Inequity and exclusion are presented as the primary civic threats; the most important civic education is obtained when engaging with communities and exposing exclusion. To revive our democracy, students need to learn to rigorously root out the vestiges of exclusion in their own behaviors and in the structures of American politics and society, according to the civic action model.
Many recently formed civic institutes in red-state public universities have rolled out a dramatically different vision. As that faculty sees it, students rarely gain an understanding of the philosophy of civic life, much less an appreciation of America’s founding principles or the ideas behind them. They seek to remedy this failure by teaching a renewed respect for those texts and principles.
The solutions are not so different from those proposed during the canon and culture wars of the ‘80s and ‘90s. More great books, a deeper understanding of our institutions and their founding documents, and a good dose of classical liberal philosophy are the cornerstones of this approach. If colleges hire enough right-leaning humanist professors, students will emerge prepared for good citizenship by developing the necessary knowledge and virtues through reading and considering the “right” texts.
Ironically, it is a version of identity politics all its own. The left-leaning vision of training students for community engagement and social activism is tinged with implicit identity politics: Students should inspire change in communities by responding to social inequities rooted in race and class disparities. Meanwhile, the right-leaning version of civics as recollection of the texts and ideas that animate American liberalism relies on venerating America’s European Enlightenment heritage, posing the virtue of the founders’ philosophical inspiration over a divisive vision.
Each approach casts itself as an answer to the divisive politics of the “other side.” Calls to return to the wisdom of the founders serve as a counterpoint to DEI run amok, while calls for more socially sensitive action via community engagement invoke the looming specter of America’s founding sins. But they share something: A common assumption that ideas animate practices. Each sees training in essential civic habits as a byproduct of either understanding founding ideas or developing good intentions to fix inequity. They assume that once students internalize the right curriculum, the core habits — listening, speaking, engaging in democratic argument, and revising one’s opinion by considering other evidence and perspectives — will emerge spontaneously.
Neither of these approaches is wrong, but neither is adequate to the urgent challenge of creating a generation of civically minded, democratically competent young alumni. In an important sense, all the components of an excellent college education — asking good questions, grappling with evidence and investigation, developing deep knowledge, making good judgments, and acting on those judgments — combine to support civic life. Investing in high-quality college education is, itself, investing in citizenship.
Civic education, though, deserves its own focused effort to cultivate the core habits of democratic life. It should absolutely include grappling with the texts that founded our democratic tradition and those that criticize that tradition. And it should absolutely include understanding who is included and who excluded, and engaging with communities nearby and far from campus. But neither of these addresses that most urgent, deepest problem: the utter disrepair of our public arguments.
The good news is, we know how to teach good civic argument, and it’s right in line with quality education in general. Students need the skills to listen carefully to arguments they disagree with; to construct their own arguments in ways that are compelling, authentic, responsive and responsible; and to build and refer to evidence as they do all that. This isn’t civil discourse training, where students learn above all to perform politeness at the expense of passion and commitment. It’s academic training in the work of disagreement that matters.
The most important theorists of civic education — from Dewey and others appreciated by the left to Madison and the Founders promoted by the right — acknowledge the need for citizens to develop specific habits and practices to make democracy work. A pedagogical approach aimed at those habits is worth a try: Teaching students to listen, to argue productively, to evaluate claims and evidence and to work together even when they disagree should be the core of a revitalized university civic education. Such a curriculum would engage sociology, communication and psychology, alongside philosophy, economics and political theory. It would build robust democratic habits that are informed by, but not reducible to, realizing the philosophical ambitions of our founding and also addressing our shortcomings. It would address the reasons for civic engagement — for recovering the ideal of shared citizenship and for working in communities and rooting out injustice.
Training for democratic citizenship can only be effective by cultivating real disagreement over evidence and questions that matter. That ambition for civic education can unite left- and right-wing educators and produce a generation of young citizens ready to address the civic challenges they will face in the coming decades.
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