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Civic education aims to promote and shape civic engagement by developing citizens’ competencies (e.g., attitudes, skills, and knowledge) needed for participation in community, government, and politics.

Classic Civic Education Theories

Theories of civic education can be traced back to ancient Greece, where Plato argued on behalf of the systematic moral education of young people for citizenship. In The Republic, Plato famously advocates the use of censorship and propaganda as instruments of civic education. In particular, he urges the elimination of most common myths (including those found with Homer, Hesiod, and the tragic poets) because of their portrayal of the gods and heroes as cruel, capricious, unjust, violent, deceitful, and vicious. He also recommends the use of “noble lies,” such as the myth of metals, to accustom citizens to their proper roles in the highly hierarchical society he depicts.

Aristotle believed that civic education must be designed to match particular political constitutions, because the values and virtues required by citizens living under a despotic regime, for example, are very different from those required by citizens living under a democracy. Aristotle describes a scheme of civic education conceived to prepare the male children of citizens (not females or the male children of slaves or foreigners) for life under a mixed constitution in which citizens take turns ruling and being ruled according to law. In other words, they were to be prepared for lives of civic equality, sharing a capacity for moral excellence and sharing a responsibility for promoting the common good, rather than their own self-interests.

Civic education was given a more democratic slant in the eighteenth century by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that teaching people how to be good citizens is a major role of government. A government fulfills this role by educating citizens regarding their civic duties and by teaching them how to discern the common good when they act in their capacity as sovereign people (i.e., when they make the laws under which they will be governed). Additionally, according to Rousseau, the government must make the laws beloved and respected by the people and must take care to correct and improve the mores, manners, customs, and morals of the people, so they will always love liberty and not become corrupt or slothful. Finally, Rousseau argues, government must take special care to manage the education of children, for respect for the law and the common good must be instilled from a very young age.

French writer and politician Alexis de Tocqueville, in the nineteenth century, takes a radically different view from previous theorists, arguing that the most effective form of civic education may be found not in formal schooling but through direct involvement in political life and the civic associations of one’s community, such as religious congregations, clubs, and other voluntary organizations. In contrast with formal instruction in schools, which cultivates attitudes, knowledge, and skills that are not necessarily directly relevant to the learning context, participation in political life and civic associations informally cultivates the particular mores and attitudes directly needed by citizens in those contexts.

In the twentieth century, American philosopher, psychologist, and educator John Dewey reimagined schools themselves as experiential learning contexts that would help students develop practical experience in democratic problem solving. Schools would provide opportunities for the direct expression of democratic virtues and norms, and young citizens also would learn a scientific method of social inquiry that would allow them, later in life, to participate in broader discussions of public values and policies. Dewey’s philosophy of civic education has one primary objective: to encourage and develop a culture of free inquiry that engenders and supports citizens as self-confident political and moral actors, both within and outside of formal academic institutions.

Civic Education Today

Methods of civic education employed today include, but are not limited to, study of government institutions and political processes, study of local and national history, instruction in civic character and values, and experiential or service learning activities. Contemporary educators, however, disagree about what methods of civic education should be employed by democracies and, indeed, whether civic education of any sort amounts to indoctrination or coercion.

Since the 1960s, numerous educators have embraced the importance of experiential learning and have argued for some form of mandatory community service or service learning as a form of civic education. Some critics have charged that such methods amount to requiring volunteerism. Theorists like Benjamin R. Barber and William Galston, however, do not recommend service as a form of do-goodism. Rather, their purpose is to prepare citizens for responsible membership in a community of interdependent equals through experiential learning, allowing the community itself to serve as a context for direct civic learning.

Although civic education can be distinguished conceptually from patriotic education, which is concerned primarily with promoting loyalty to a nation or state rather than active political participation, civic education often includes an element of patriotic education. Galston, for example, recommends a measure of patriotic indoctrination, moralizing, and the teaching of sentimental views of history, in order to strengthen the political order and develop individuals who can function effectively in, and actively support, their political community. Other thinkers, including Amy Gutmann and Jack Crittenden, reject this approach, and argue that young citizens must learn to participate in democratic deliberation in a pluralistic society and to stand apart, critically, from their own communities. They do not go so far, however, as to argue that civic education should promote full-fledged autonomy, as educational theorist Eamonn Callan does.

Some theorists, including Judith Shklar and Richard Flathman, have concluded that the character of individual citizens should be off-limits to government, thereby ruling out most forms of civic education. However, a decision not to provide formal civic education may itself be a kind of civic education, teaching young people that citizenship is not very important and ensuring the continued depreciation of the practice of citizenship. If civic values and virtues do not teach themselves, as Tocqueville argued, then perhaps, as political theorist Stephen Macedo insists, democracies must overcome their squeamishness about intervening in the character of citizens in order to protect themselves from antidemocratic adversaries.

Bibliography:

Barber, Benjamin R. An Aristocracy of Everyone: The Politics of Education and the Future of America. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992.
Callan, Eamonn. Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Crittenden, Jack. Democracy’s Midwife: An Education in Deliberation. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2002.
Galston,William. “Political Knowledge, Political Engagement, and Civic Education.” Annual Review of Political Science 4 (2000): 217–234.
Gutmann, Amy. Democratic Education. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Macedo, Stephen. Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.