Saving Democracy with Civic Literacy in America 101

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Starting in middle school and continuing through high school, students should also be required to take classes in current events, at least four semesters over this period. Here the goal is not just discussion of today’s events, but using current events as a means of giving life to the Constitution. A discussion of the Iraq War could be used to talk about war powers, executive powers, legislative powers, separation of powers, decision-making processes, and the role of the courts. Schools should also encourage and aid student participation in extracurricular campus or outside organizations, such as internships and service clubs. While constitutional values must be taught in the classroom, they can be experienced better outside it.

Implementation of this or any such program will take hard work. Complacency about our democracy is its greatest enemy and, ironically, overcoming it requires the very commitment to civic literacy that our complacency obstructs.

America, unlike most of the world’s nations, is not a country defined by blood or belief. Rather, it is an idea, or a set of ideas, about freedom and opportunity. It is this set of ideas that binds us together as Americans. That’s why these ideas have to be taught. Our understanding and appreciation of them is how we grade our civic literacy. We are now failing, and heading toward what the philosopher Michael Sandel has called a “storyless condition,” in which “there is no continuity between present and past, and therefore no responsibility, and therefore no possibility for acting together to govern ourselves.” We need civic education to reverse this course.

Excerpted from Democracy (Fall 2008), a journal that aims to build a vibrant and vital progressivism for the 21st century; www.democracyjournal.org.

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