Promoting Civic Engagement and Citizenship Education
By Todd Clark, Constitutional Rights Foundation
Back to Ask the Expert: Todd Clark
It has been widely noted that all forms of civic engagement in the United States, particularly voting and political dialogue, are in decline. Young people, through their expression and their action, demonstrate a desire to improve the quality of life in their communities, but reject involvement in traditional political activity. Even so, a widespread national response to the events of September 11, 2001, provoked many Americans to take personal action, to “do something to help” following that great national tragedy.
This demonstration of a commitment to achieve a civic purpose and a belief that one’s personal action can make a difference strongly suggests the need for a kind of civic education in America that leads to engagement.
Many schools throughout the nation offer traditional civic education courses. The usual curriculum is based on knowledge, skills, and attitudes or dispositions, identified by political scientists as key to preparation for civic life. The most widely accepted national framework for civic education, Civitas (1991), supports this structure adding the element of participation to these more traditional academic aspects of the curriculum. School programs are usually based on textbooks that form a national curriculum. The books begin with political theory and march through the organization of our government, concentrating on academic skills, but giving almost no attention to issues that affect local communities or to skills that will lead to engagement. As an afterthought, near the end of most texts, at a point almost never reached by teachers, local and state government are introduced. Even then, the objective is to impart knowledge rather than the skills of engagement. As many observers have suggested, our schools are teaching government and not civics. To be more precise, they teach only national government. In many states there is no formal instruction about American government at all (ECS scan, 2001).
At Constitutional Rights Foundation, it has always been our goal to help young people, both in and out of school, understand how the principles of American government are implemented through local institutions: the courts, police, city and county government. Only if citizens understand how our national values influence action on real issues do they have meaning.
We believe that knowledge, analytic and participatory skills, and an understanding of the values of our Constitution and Bill of Rights are civic virtues vital to the health of our democracy. We also believe they are best understood by citizens as they relate to local government and local issues, and then to national and international concerns. It is our view that a vital bridge between civic education and civic engagement is built through service.
In a classroom, service alone may be linked to learning in science, mathematics, English, woodworking, or nearly any other subject in a useful and important way. However, for service to stimulate civic engagement, it needs to be connected to civic issues, knowledge, and skills. When it is so connected it can help individuals build a commitment to civic action, a concern for the common good, and a sense of effectiveness as a citizen.
This model for civic education links academic content and skill development with opportunities for the learner to analyze civic issues and practice civic skills in their own communities as a means to develop the civic virtues so vital to our society. We believe this approach will prepare individuals for lives of civic engagement and we have evaluation data suggesting that it does. According to the recent study of one of our programs using control groups, carried out by an independent evaluator (Kahne, Chi, 2002), the most powerful elements that stimulate a commitment to civic engagement are application of knowledge and skills through interaction with resource people from the community, participation in simulations of actual public tasks, and implementation of service projects within a curriculum that focuses on local issues.
We believe that this approach is transferable to any setting that can provide the time for study and application within national service programs.
