All Americans, and especially American liberals, should respond to our current civic crisis by elevating civic education as crucial to sustaining our democratic republic.
Serious preparation for citizenship is indispensable for the American idea: self-rule by We the People in a complex, constitutional politics. We must develop Americans with the civic knowledge and civic virtues required to operate our political and civic order, so that all citizens consider self-government as crucial for their pursuit of happiness—whether unfolding in private life, civil society, or public affairs.
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Our founding principles entail self-government; per the Declaration of Independence, legitimate government rests upon consent of the governed as well as universal principles of justice. This implicitly calls for citizens to be active in registering consent or its absence, thus participating in the existing modes of government.
This chain of reasoning isn’t natural; it requires a farsighted sense of one’s self-interest in issues of justice. Partly in response, American political and educational leaders held for hundreds of years that education in such citizenship is simply necessary—that is, civic education was understood as the American civic knowledge and civic virtues (demanding civic skills) needed to be a self-governing citizen in our complex constitutional order. Yet across the past sixty years and more, academia largely has been skeptical about citizenship education in any form other than a “democracy education” emphasizing civic participation and engagement.
Who could object to democracy education? An emphasis on equal participation of all citizens, so that all voices are heard, certainly fits with the ideal of equality in the Declaration of Independence. But the democracy education movement, pioneered by philosopher John Dewey, put too low a value on education in our founding and constitutionalism, in American civic knowledge and civic history, thus in the civic virtues needed to operate our complex politics. Rather, “the cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy.” Dewey called for an ambitious program of greater citizen participation and a refining, even a replacing, of the “machinery” of government to empower all citizens more effectively. The Constitution, he wrote, should not be treated as “holy.” The new approach of “civic engagement,” widely adopted in higher education in subsequent decades, has emphasized just such progress toward new vistas: the re-creation of politics by a mass public of active, engaged citizens via the electoral and policy processes.
Given the widespread influence of academic thought in American culture, Dewey’s view has triumphed. Most citizens and aspiring citizens, certainly among younger cohorts, don’t understand or appreciate America’s founding principles, our constitutional forms, our centuries of political development, nor the civilizational tradition that yielded America. Democracy education has tended to produce frustration with our complex forms of separated powers and federalism, and a focus on advocacy for one’s own conception of progress—without the civic virtues fostering appreciation for the slow, hard work of civil disagreement and constructive debate, aiming toward the achievement of governing compromises.
Put another way, after a century of this educational revolution, we mostly don’t understand or appreciate the civic education required for sustaining the American experiment. We don’t much like the word “civics”—and we’re not doing it well.
We should look around at the current state of our polity and grasp the reality that civics, properly understood, is now a matter of political survival.
Recovering a Reflective Patriotism
American educators long understood civics as indispensable, and indeed America’s leading founders wrote seriously and regularly about citizen education. Yet our deteriorating civic culture today, together with the neglected, inadequate state of our programs of civic education in both schools and colleges, now makes this a matter of great urgency. One crucial component of a renewal of American civics, therefore, must be recovery of the rational patriotism vital to both civic learning and perpetuating the American experiment: a blending of gratitude for America with an understanding of—and civil disagreement about—what America means, how we should self-govern, and how to improve.
“Reflective patriotism” (patriotisme réfléchi) is Alexis de Tocqueville’s term, in Democracy in America (1835, 1840), for the public spirit he observed here in the 1830s. Americans love their country but also argue about it, assessing whether politics is serving their rights and interests, given that America is grounded in principles and ideals. Further, he observes that the pragmatic American spirit that moves from ideals about equal natural rights to a realization of one’s self-interest can only be secured through participation in the civic duties of self-government. Common, everyday American citizens calculate, Tocqueville notes, that their civic participation supports a healthy, successful political order, which in turn will benefit their own family and friends.
Tocqueville admired the American spirit of commitment to both liberty and equality. Yet he was concerned that a spirit of self-governing liberty and the discursive, rational patriotism entwined with it would be difficult to sustain. Our egalitarian concern with material prosperity yields a propensity for pragmatic and technological thinking, and a devotion to economic affairs. Tocqueville would thus be dismayed, yet not entirely surprised, by the poor condition of our civic education nearly two centuries later and by the low importance so many citizens assign to self-governing liberty. Tocqueville had described America as a busy, dynamic place that tempts citizens to leave the work of governing to others. He might say that today we’ve succumbed to the temptation.
Anyone who enjoys the relative security, freedom, and equality of American life today should soberly assess the extremes of polarization and passivity that dominate our politics: angry and polarized partisans, especially in national politics, yet also the passivity and civic apathy among so many citizens who’ve given up on the idea of genuine citizenship. That review should lead us to a Tocquevillian call for renewing a robust civic education, including a rational patriotism, in classrooms and in our civic culture, if we are to save our self-government and the idea of America.
Indeed, we must ask: Is it too late for America? Our republic is now commemorating the 250th anniversary of its founding in 1776. Are we now too fractured, too overwhelmed by extremes of anger and regular political violence at one end and civic apathy at the other, and generally too civically ignorant, to restore any consensus on renewing a patriotic, inclusive, and discursive civic education for all citizens and aspiring citizens? We need a renewal of civic culture and civic education that reinstates not only the civic virtue of reflective patriotism but its analogue of civil disagreement. We will need the polarized combatants to be better educated in both civic knowledge and these civic virtues, which likely will produce more light along with the inescapable heat and contention of free self-government. This more constructive spirit of disagreement and discourse might in turn pull some of the apathetic back into thinking of themselves as citizens in a genuine sense.
Compounding these questions is the reality that our new information technologies turn many citizens inward, toward themselves, and to simulacra of communities. These “advances” tend to cut us off from the naturally human communities of family, local community, and civil society, let alone the reality of state and political communities. A renewed priority for civic education, especially in face-to-face learning environments, whether in classrooms or beyond, is thus all the more crucial in reviving a healthy culture of self-government with its perpetual discussions, debates, disagreements, and calls for governing compromises.
The honorable exceptions today of spirited yet civil disagreement and debate, especially in national-level politics, indicate the depths of our problem. America largely is caught between an angry few who drive our further civic fracturing and a large population of the civically apathetic, especially our youth, who are neither informed toward nor committed to citizenship. We have put ourselves into a perilous predicament. Is it too late to forge a consensus on teaching America about America, in our schools, colleges, and culture? Is it too late for such teaching to avert our self-destruction—or our collapse if attacked by a foreign power?
A Pre-partisan, National-Consensus Civics
In Teaching America: Reflective Patriotism in Schools, College, and Culture, I elaborate this diagnosis and the national-consensus remedies we should pursue. A discursive patriotism toward America points to a civics that embraces the American political project while embodying civil disagreement about both the larger meaning of America and particular issues. This is a pre-partisan approach, embracing the perpetual reality of disagreement and partisan conflict, yet educating toward a standard of civil disagreement.
In fact, this approach is my elaboration of a national report on K-12 civics, which I was asked to join in 2019, as the lone classical liberal and academic conservative among the lead authors. It was released in 2021 as Educating for American Democracy, and the most prominent of the co-authors was Harvard’s Danielle Allen. She reached out to me precisely because she was seeking a non-ideological, trans-partisan, national-consensus study.
Our final report emphasizes crucial historical, constitutional, and civic content, yet it also features reflective patriotism and civil disagreement as two of the crucial civic virtues in a serious civic education, across schools and higher education. The final draft already had included the civic virtues of reflective patriotism, civil disagreement, and civic friendship across partisan differences as crucial elements of American civics, yet the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol led us to sharpen some of our phrases in the final version released a few weeks later:
America stands at a crossroads of peril and possibility. A healthy constitutional democracy always demands reflective patriotism. In times of crisis, it is especially important that We the People unite love of country with clear-eyed wisdom about our successes and failures in order to chart our forward path (EAD Report, Executive Summary).
Education in civics and history equips members of a democratic society to understand, appreciate, nurture, and where necessary, improve their political system and civil society: to make our union ‘more perfect,’ as the U.S. Constitution says. This education must be designed to enable and enhance the capacity for self-government from the level of the individual, the family, and the neighborhood to the state, the nation, and even the world (EAD Report, 9).
The America250 period is a perfect time to remember that the founders of our democratic constitutional republic knew civic education must be a priority because our form of politics is difficult to achieve and to sustain. America more or less heeded this lesson across its first two centuries, through the 1950s; but in the name of progressive democratic reform and progress, we largely have repudiated or neglected this crucial insight. It is striking to consider that in 1954 the National Education Association—then and now the nation’s largest teachers and school workers union—could produce national guidelines for schools, Educating for American Citizenship, that showed a bit of Dewey’s influence regarding participation and democracy, but which mostly emphasized the traditional blend of civic knowledge and civic virtues. An early chapter highlights “ideals we live by,” especially commitment to the Declaration and individual rights, the rule of law, and the Constitution and Bill of Rights—to include equality regardless of race, status, or religion. A further separate chapter on ideals includes “the right to be different,” encompassing the free market of ideas, the right to dissent, and the balance of unity and diversity. A prefatory statement “to the reader” asks for “the devoted consecration of each citizen to the basic ideals and values of American life.”
We must renew this comprehensive, balanced approach to the civics of our republic and representative democracy, in both formal schooling and also in civic culture, if we are to shape the souls of our fellow citizens and aspiring citizens so that they care about the demanding yet fulfilling work of self-government. Citizens must be competent as to the knowledge and character needed for their important office. In schools, in colleges, and in civic culture, we need to assess our deficits. Through reasonable argument, we must then forge the compromises and plans of action necessary to restore a robust civic education and a healthier, happier civic culture.
We owe this to ourselves, as a matter of our own dignity and sacred honor. As the Declaration argues, at stake are the equal natural rights endowed to all human beings. We also owe it to our forebears, including our great civic exemplars, and all those who made possible this extraordinary American experiment in constitutional liberty. Further, as the preamble to our Constitution states, we owe to our posterity these efforts to secure the blessings of liberty.
Our republic is imperfect, as all human things are, but it’s worthy of gratitude and of our renewed efforts to live up to its founding principles. Teaching America devotes particular attention to those civic exemplars who were American reformers, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King, Jr. They believed in the common ground of our founding documents and principles, but they insisted that serious reform was needed in our laws or in the Constitution to live up to our essential ideals of justice. King’s famous “I Have a Dream” address of 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., embodies reflective patriotism by praising Lincoln, and “the architects of our republic” who wrote “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” yet it demands reform to live up to these ideals. Even after several years of more strident, even bitter criticism of America, given the Vietnam War and the slow pace of enacting the reforms mandated by the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, King didn’t lose hope in America. In his final public address the night before he was assassinated in 1968, he noted that “when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters” he knew “they were really standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”
Restoring Civics through Civic Hope
Across the two years of preparing the Educating for American Democracy (EAD) report, the lead authors consulted with over three hundred contributors in various committees, sessions, and drafting reviews. We sought to forge an e pluribus unum across philosophical, demographic, geographic, and institutional dimensions. In retrospect I began to think of the report as akin to the great American art form jazz. Only in America did jazz develop, and arguably it could have arisen only here: a blend of African and European civilizational traditions, of the blues and Christian spirituals with Black gospel music, of order and improvisation, altogether turning sorrow to joy, expressing and seeking truths about humanity and divinity.
Perhaps we EAD coauthors were singing the blues about America, especially about the sorry state of our civic education and reflective patriotism. To borrow from the Duke Ellington classic, America’s got it bad and that ain’t good—but we’re not giving up, so we’ve got a story to tell—all achieved through a blend of diverse backgrounds and voices, of group and solo efforts; a harmony comprising complexity.
We need this soberly hopeful spirit to confront what the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor deemed, two decades ago, America’s “quiet crisis”—the deplorable condition of its civic education and reflective patriotism. It’s still a crisis, even if some progress has been made in provoking awareness about needed improvement, and some remedies have been undertaken. Further, the crisis is not quiet anymore. The heated contests of the past three decades over the content of U.S. history and civics curricula in public schools have become only more heated and widespread.
Undeniable evidence of civic ignorance among all ages of our citizenry, linked to widespread loss of confidence in all national institutions and professions—even the military—now combines with alarmingly low levels of patriotism toward America, especially among younger citizens. An angry, polarized politics itself fed by civic ignorance is shadowed by apathy among a vast proportion of citizens. Further, we now are so polarized about what civics is, and how to improve its status and quality in schools and higher education, that our national civic culture might fully disintegrate before the long game of a renewed American civics can produce civic repair.
Teaching America proposes that a more hopeful view can develop, among educators and all serious citizens and aspiring citizens, bringing more reasonable debate and less polarization to consideration of crucial questions facing us. These include how to sustain the American idea; what a reflective patriotism and American civics is; how civics can avoid propaganda and partisanship; what our schools and colleges should teach to forge responsible, informed, discursive citizens; how our civic culture can sustain America’s e pluribus unum; and why commitment to reflective civic learning and civic friendships, the activities of thoughtful patriots and civic friends, is a duty and delight for all ages.
The national traction achieved by the Educating for American Democracy report, a national-consensus effort at civics renewal in a polarized moment, indicates that the ingredients today of a national consensus are readily evident. In the five years since its release, pilot curricula modeled on the broad EAD guidelines have been adopted in 14 states, and 28 states have adopted a total of 40 educational policies aligned with the EAD approach. We’ve even seen left-right consensus on the value of Tocqueville’s peculiar philosophical phrase, a reflective patriotism. This should give inspiration to those who value the liberal principles of civil discourse and pluralism, that Americans still can agree to teach across and through our various philosophical and partisan differences rather than proffer either a left-progressive or a conservative civics.
We should use the occasion of the 250th anniversary of our political founding to renew a rich civic education in our schools, colleges, and civic culture. Given the deep hole we are in, America250 commemorations and the civic-learning opportunities they afford should extend, ideally, from commemorating the Declaration in 1776 through to at least the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791. That suggests a fifteen-year period of civic renewal, 2026 to 2041. Beyond our self-interest in repairing, perhaps saving, our damaged republic, this also would muster the appropriate honor and regard we should show to our founders and their achievements, and to the centuries of freedom, equality, argument, and reform they made possible thus far—and that we should pass to our posterity.
Civic Culture and the American Spirit
Our nation’s 250th anniversary is a great time to renew discourse about the pursuit of happiness named in the Declaration as one of our natural, God-given rights. Discussion of these large ideas about humanity offers higher meaning to students in schools and colleges—including for students focusing on scientific and preprofessional study. Rediscovery of the pursuit of happiness in a sense that fits with civic duties and the sacred honor of defending self-government also offers meaning to an American civil society and culture that faces a crisis of despair, anomie, and alienation, even amid our general conditions of great relative wealth and security.
The intersection of a reflective civics and serious discussion of the pursuit of happiness is evident in another of Tocqueville’s evergreen insights from Democracy in America. He suggests our democratic culture would tend to emphasize, most of the time and for most people, the practical and self-interested dimensions of human activities. Yet he was particularly concerned about the consequences of this democratic, egalitarian, and materialist spirit for education, and for participation in self-government. He counseled Americans to balance the intrinsically worthy and higher dimensions of education and civic participation on the one hand, and with utilitarian, self-regarding rationales for each, on the other.
Restoring a primary place for a reflective, discursive civics in schools, colleges, and American culture is in our basic interest. It’s a matter of civic strength and health, and it will also renew the spirit of our educational institutions and our culture: a spirit of truth-seeking, lively discourse, reasonable debate, and attention to the full human consequences of our theories, approaches, inventions, and technologies.
The activity of self-governing is intrinsically worthy for free human beings, and we should prioritize reorienting ourselves toward it. Whether in resisting tyranny in 1776, or in later crises, or in enjoying the more quotidian tasks and disagreements of self-government, we must perpetually recall that citizenship is a matter of sacred honor.
This will be hard. One reason jazz should be rediscovered as an American civic treasure is that its infectious joy and enjoyable sorrow compensate for the bitter truths of its founding and history. Great Black Americans who pioneered jazz, including Ellington and Louis Armstrong, were joined by white musicians who admired them; altogether they are exemplars of hope and amelioration in our history. They built a popular and artistic e pluribus unum, overcoming racial prejudice and its barriers, bringing good out of hypocrisy and evil.
In the spirit of the national-consensus jazz that my coauthors and I negotiated and forged in the EAD report, I hope that Teaching America encourages consideration of a reflective, enlightened patriotism and civic learning as lifelong priorities for all American citizens and aspiring citizens.
