Saving Democracy with Civic Literacy in America 101

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At the same time, we stopped engaging with one another in civil society. We withdrew from a broader vision of what makes us American and started focusing more on what makes us different. We became more and more isolated, and more and more disconnected from our constitutional conscience.

Concern over the decline in civic literacy has prompted some school systems to reintroduce civics-like courses over the past 10 years, but these efforts have been sporadic, uneven, and obstructed by other priorities. For example, the current emphasis on science and math, retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recently noted, “has effectively squeezed out civics education because there is no testing for that anymore and no funding for that.” This is not related to the cracking of the American consensus; in this era of No Child Left Behind, everyone is left behind when it comes to the unquantifiable learning necessary for civic literacy.

Complacency is now the main problem. Most Americans have absolutely no concern about whether the nation will endure. “Of course the republic will survive, how can it be otherwise? We have always been free, and we will always be free,” I have heard educated, politically conscious people say.

For most Americans, the connection between civic literacy and a healthy democracy is only rhetorical. If they were pressed, they would not know or appreciate what civic literacy means, nor would they concede that what they don’t know does hurt them and all of us. But it does.

Scholars Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter detail this point in their 1996 book What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters. They find that civic literacy provides meaningful understanding and support for a number of constitutional values, including compromise and tolerance, and promotes meaningful political participation. They also argue that “a better-informed citizenry places important limitations on the ability of public officials, interest groups, and other elites to manipulate public opinion and act in ways contrary to the public interest.”

The opposite is also true: Civic ignorance denies us the context through which to understand and measure the conduct of our elected officials. It unleashes our natural instincts to measure governmental processes and decisions in the present tense alone, through the screens of our own self-interests. It curtails our ability to consider what might be good for a larger community or for the country. This is the path to democratic decline—and we are on it.

Take, for example, the war on terrorism and the Iraq War. After 9/11, Americans looked, as they have in the past, to the president for protection. And President George W. Bush, as have earlier presidents, responded. But his response was based on a unique claim of unprecedented constitutional powers to engage our troops, wiretap our citizens, and torture our prisoners.

While the excessiveness of this view roiled even some of the administration’s own loyalists, there was no retreat from it. There was no need to retreat. Congress did not assert itself against this claim, in part because it would not take such a confrontational step without broad public support, and Americans have not been forceful in demanding that Congress protect our constitutional system. While there are various reasons for the public acquiescence, it is hard to posit that civic ignorance doesn’t rank high among them.

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