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Education's got a big hole in it, writes Donald Lazere, and colleges should fill it.
The past few years have seen an outpouring of books and reports deploring Americans' civic ignorance, with titles like Just How Stupid Are We?, The Dumbest Generation, The Age of American Unreason, and Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News. This is a problem that everyone seems to complain about but no one tries to solve through any coordinated, nationwide effort.
National organizations have recently been formed, including the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's Political Engagement Project, and Campus Compact and its Research University Civic Engagement Network. These organizations have published important interdisciplinary books, such as Educating for Democracy, by Anne Colby et al. (Jossey-Bass, 2007), and Civic Engagement in Higher Education, by Barbara Jacoby et al. (Jossey-Bass, 2009).
Many campus programs have also been exemplary, as surveyed in Charles Muscatine's Fixing College Education (University of Virginia Press, 2009). In The Assault on Reason (Penguin Press, 2007), Al Gore praised the American Political Science Association for starting a Task Force on Civic Education. That should prompt similar task forces in the Modern Language Association (my discipline) and other professional associations, along with a unifying interdisciplinary organization for secondary and postsecondary education, a National Commission on Civic Education. Liberal and conservative educators and politicians should collaborate in hammering out their differences on what should constitute a core curriculum for civic literacy. We can hope for sponsorship in this effort by both conservative and liberal foundations, as well as for support from the U.S. Department of Education and National Endowment for the Humanities.
One way to prompt deliberation here is to spin E.D. Hirsch's much-debated agenda for what every American needs to know to be culturally literate: What does every American need to know to be a civically literate, critically conscious, responsible citizen? And, as a corollary, what role should the humanities play in a renewal of education for civic literacy?
My agenda would give priority to the factual knowledge and analytic skills that students need to make reasoned judgments about the partisan screaming matches and special-interest prop-aganda that permeate political disputes. One source for such knowledge and skills...