Civic education reconsidered

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

Private or public?

The issues at stake in the conflict between a unitary and a pluralist approach to civic education go well beyond current policy debates about vouchers to the very idea of how the "civic" should operate in American education and political life. These questions, nevertheless, have a bearing on discussions of the place of private - or, as we shall say, nongovernment - education in our society, as well as on the degree of curricular centralization and hierarchy in government education.

Since the beginning of the present decade, conservatives have warmed to support of nongovernment schools but without defending the benefits of civic pluralism. They argue that nongovernment schools can provide what government schools sometimes have failed to offer: a sound education, including a sound civic education. But conservatives continue to speak of a common civic idea that would be taught in the private, as well as in the public, schools. Intellectuals on the left have become, if anything, more insistent on a unitary vision of civic education. This position fits better with their renewed emphasis on a national civic idea, which they also connect with support for the public school system. Benjamin Barber has expressed this sentiment perfectly in his recent book, A Passion for Democracy:

Public schools are not merely schools for the public, but schools of publicness; institutions where we learn what it means to be a public and start down the road toward common national and civic identity.... Without citizens, democracy is a hollow shell. Without public schools, there can be no citizens.

Claims of this kind build on the logic of the unitary idea and employ with full force a rhetoric of the "common" and the "civic." Civic education, in this view, takes place only in the common school or, at any rate, only according to a commonly conceived curriculum. Nongovernment schools are seen if not as illegitimate then as representing a withdrawal from the civic enterprise. Surprisingly, many theorists of political liberalism accept the spirit of this argument, even if they reject the conclusion. They do not deny that sending one's children to nongovernment schools withdraws them from civic life but argue that it is a freedom that a liberal society must permit because of liberalism's commitment to the private rights of belief and association. Permitting withdrawals constitutes, in this liberal view, the core meaning of "pluralism" in the educational sphere. The civic here is connected to the public and the governmental, while rights and pluralism are linked to the private. As Eamonn Callan has expressed this view in his recent book, Creating Citizens: Public Education and Liberal Democracy, the state "must permit communities of like-minded citizens to create educational institutions that reflect their distinctive way of life," although this "accommodation to pluralism" creates the dilemma of producing "alienation from the political culture of the larger society."