Civic education reconsidered

Public Interest, Fall, 1998 by James W. Ceaser, Patrick J. McGuinn

The anticivic orthodoxy has thus been anything but antipolitical. An outgrowth of the revolutionary program of the New Left of the 1960s, it sought initially to further that movement's general aims. If the orthodoxy has lost a bit of its ideological edge today, it is because political conditions have changed and because a new generation of educational theorists is now naive and earnest enough to believe in such things as "values clarification training" and "cultural studies" as ends in themselves. But the political connection of these educational programs to the Left, even if slightly attenuated, still lies just beneath the surface.

Collapse of an orthodoxy

This anticivic orthodoxy is now under siege. It was attacked first, as one would have expected, from the conservative side. Lacking a solid base inside the intellectual and educational establishments, conservatives took their case into the broader arena of politics. Revelations of our schools' indifference or hostility to civic education were part of President Reagan's two presidential campaigns, and they became a major preoccupation of the Department of Education under William Bennett. At the state and local levels, conservatives mobilized to bring pressure on school boards to restore the civic idea. Most important, an unknown soldier in the conservative army coined the term "political correctness," which became a mighty polemical weapon, helping to expose the theoretical hegemony of the anticivic position.

Yet, as much as conservative opposition influenced public opinion, it could not seriously breach the citadel of intellectual thought. That could only come from within. As the consequences of the anticivic position began to become evident, a few intellectuals on the left courageously broke ranks to join the assault. One of the earliest, most notable, and most eloquent was Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., whose The Disuniting of America, in 1992, warned against the growing number of educators who "contend that a main objective of public education should be the protection, strengthening, celebration, and perpetuation" of different ethnic and racial identities. This kind of overheated multiculturalism - the "cult of ethnicity," as Schlesinger called it - could destroy the nation.

The way was now open for the emergence of a major intellectual movement: a "newer Left," which has seemed at times to reserve its greatest passion not for attacking the Right but for assailing the New Left. Proponents of this movement have made the restoration of civic education one of their major goals, whether in the form of Paul Berman's plea for a renewed "religion of democracy" or Michael Lind's call for a new "liberal nationalism." The newer Left recently received the blessing of one of America's most celebrated philosophers, Richard Rorty, who begins his recent book, Achieving Our Country, with the provocative observation that "national pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals." This is hardly the language of the Left of the 1960s. Rather than abandoning the civic idea as the New Left had done, Rorty maintains that the goal of the Left should be to recapture it. He calls for a creative melding of Walt Whitman and John Dewey which will enable the Left to tell a new "story" of the nation's past and to forge a new dream of its future. Others in this movement invoke different figures as spiritual ancestors - Herbert Croly and even Alexander Hamilton have found renewed favor - but with the same aim in mind: to return the Left to an older way of thinking in favor of a central democratic version of the civic idea.

It will be some time, of course, before civic education again becomes the norm in American schooling. In contrast to the kind of tight command structures that prevail within intellectual ranks in many European countries, where the word of a leading thinker is quickly disseminated and acted upon, American intellectual life is characterized by weak lines of communication. Years can pass before the second and third tier intellectuals - the NCOs and privates, as it were, of the intellectual armies - receive their marching orders. For the moment, therefore, partisans of the anticivic orthodoxy in America continue to fight on, blithely unaware that a portion of their general staff has deserted the cause. Indeed, they are still winning battles: Multiculturalist forces have more say than ever on what is allowed in textbooks or what is said in classrooms.

Nevertheless, barring some unforeseen event, the anticivic orthodoxy will eventually collapse under the combined assault of the Left and Right. What the new world will look like, however, is another matter. With intellectuals on both sides now embracing the cause of civic education, the stakes involved in controlling this idea have risen dramatically. Each group nurses hope, but is moved by fear. The Left is aware that it is behind. As much as a change of conviction, it has been the Left's sober realization that its indifference to the civic idea was, in Rorty's words, a "political disaster" that has spurred a change of strategy. Intellectuals on the left are haunted today by the thought that they might awaken to find a nation of school children compelled to learn their lessons from a new version of McGuffey's Reader or, worse, from the ever-expanding library of Bennett's books on virtue.