Educating Citizens for Democracies Young and Old
from the Chronicle of Higher Education
John Dewey once wrote that the "idea of democracy is a wider and fuller idea than can be exemplified in the state even at its best. To be realized it must affect all modes of human association, the family, the school, industry, religion." In looking at the needs of democracies today, we believe that "the school" -- in particular, higher education -- must take much more seriously its responsibilities to produce citizens capable of meeting the varying needs of democracies, whatever their stage of development.
In older democracies, such as the United States, where citizenship has devolved into a bland kind of individual volunteerism -- rather than collective action -- higher education must help students overcome political apathy. In younger democracies, such as South Africa, where violent political protest has been endemic, the strongest tradition of citizenship has been protest by "subjects" excluded from important privileges. In those circumstances, colleges need to teach students more-peaceful forms of political and civic behavior.
In both countries, the mission statements of colleges and universities typically boast that the institutions are responsible for shaping the next generation of leaders. But colleges -- their administrators and faculty members -- must pay more than lip service to their task of preparing leaders and educating the citizens who elect them. Both the United States and South Africa will need citizens who are not passive followers, who do not sit back and pin their hopes on charismatic leaders, who can find ways beyond apathy or violence to deal with elected leaders and the problems facing their countries.
What can colleges and universities actually do to teach students how to be more effective and responsible citizens? As Benjamin Barber, a political scientist at Rutgers University, has observed: "We may be born free, but we are not born citizens -- we have to acquire the traits that enable us to participate effectively in the world." These traits, we believe, are the willingness to engage public issues (which grows out of self-esteem); empathy and respect for differences; commitment to non-violence and conflict resolution; and the ability to analyze information, evidence, and argument.
But rather than consciously accepting the responsibility to help students develop these traits, many faculty members right now are too focused on recruiting majors for their particular departments, so that they can keep classes filled and professors employed. Indeed, about half of the typical college student's curriculum is highly structured, to meet the demands and requirements of an academic major; the remaining half too often is unstructured and conceptually weak.
We suggest using part of that remaining half to focus on instructing students in the four traits of citizenship. We propose that colleges devote the equivalent of one semester's worth of undergraduate courses -- three to five discrete classes, spread across a student's academic career -- to teaching these traits.
In the first class, course work should focus on helping students learn more about themselves and gain self-esteem, so that they realize they have something valuable to contribute to the discussion of public issues. This is particularly vital for female students. As the philosopher Susan James has pointed out: "There are many ways in which it is more difficult for women than for men to gain a firm and comfortable sense of separate identity and, consequently, more difficult for them to act autonomously and take responsibility for their decisions.... A person without this self-understanding will not meet the primary requirement of citizens -- having a voice of their own."
Many young people want to know more about the racial, ethnic, and religious group to which they belong and the region in which their forebears lived. Both women's-studies and ethnic-studies courses can be a good foundation for the initial civic-education classes.
The second trait that civic education must engender is empathy and respect for difference. Thus, a second course in the civic-education curriculum ought to focus explicitly on pluralism and the student's ability to engage intellectually and in daily life with the "other." As Diana Eck, a professor of comparative religion at Harvard University, has written: "In the 1990s, universities have become the microcosms of a new multicultural and multireligious America. It is not uncommon to have a Hindu and Jew, Muslim and Christian in a single rooming group."
Demographers recently found that the United States has more Muslims than Episcopalians. Even Brandeis University, an institution sponsored by American Jews, has more than 100 Muslim students, for whom a new prayer center has been established. Thus, it is not necessary for U.S. students to study abroad to genuinely encounter people unlike themselves. In South Africa, universities are even more likely to be the first institutions in which students from various racial and religious groups live, work, and learn together.
We also believe that experiential learning is an especially powerful pedagogical tool to help students become more empathetic. Imagine the difference between having students read about the problems that disabled people have gaining access to public places, and, on the other hand, encouraging able-bodied students to spend time in a wheelchair. Imagine a service-learning program in which students live as the poor do -- traveling on city buses, living in public housing, and eating only what a food-stamp allowance provides for a month. In South Africa, the parallel would be having students live in a township, take typically overcrowded, unsafe taxis to work, and share a two-room house with eight other people.
No doubt, most parents would fear exposing their offspring to this kind of learning experience, but we know of no better way to instill the trait of empathy. Faculty members and administrators must be courageous and creative in designing courses or programs for juniors or seniors that compel students to live differently and then to reflect on that experience.
Once students have engaged seriously with people from radically different backgrounds, they need a collegiate experience that encourages the traits of conflict resolution and critical thinking. They need to learn how to seek common ground across differences. In South Africa, for instance, university curricula must begin to reflect the fact that all students, regardless of race, are members of an African nation. They need to participate in decisions about what it means to be an African university, not just a postcolonial institution situated on the African continent.
Although it is not clear what the ultimate impact will be, some South African universities are experimenting with "transformation forums," which include students, employees, and representatives of unions and community organizations in some decisions, including the appointment of university leaders and the approval of new policies, such as expulsion for non-payment of fees.
Similarly, American students should have a role in the great academic debates over the core or general-education curriculum and whether it is too Eurocentric for a nation that, by the middle of the next century, will be the most multiracial democracy in the world. In many U.S. universities, students already participate in departmental decisions regarding their major; they should have a similar role in helping to shape a required "civics" curriculum.
While professors have not always demonstrated good conflict-resolution skills themselves in determining what kind of core or common curriculum an institution should adopt, they should welcome students into this process. Students should not have to resort to extralegal means, such as building takeovers, to have their voices heard.
In teaching conflict-resolution skills, faculty members should try to emulate some of the best practices in elementary and secondary schools. Across the United States, teachers and guidance counselors are developing curricula to teach students peaceful methods for resolving conflicts. In the early grades, the stakes typically are small -- what to do about a bully, or how to resolve a disagreement between kids calling each other unfair. In high school and college, conflicts can be more serious -- involving sexual harassment, racial bigotry, homophobia, and religious intolerance.
Members of student-affairs staffs should be enlisted to help faculty members introduce discussion of conflict-resolution skills into their curricula, as well as to help professors display the skills involved. Beyond that, faculty members can teach about conflict resolution in such fields as history, anthropology, sociology, and political science.
Under a Ford Foundation grant, for example, history professors at several U.S. universities are developing a case-study approach to teaching about conflict resolution in American history. Students will be expected to play the roles of politicians, statesmen, activists, and other players in historical episodes such as the Montgomery bus boycott or the Cherokee removal from Georgia in the 1830s. In South Africa, faculty members use films and documents from the anti-apartheid struggle to demonstrate various methods that were used to negotiate the end of white supremacy.
The final trait of citizenship -- critical thinking and analysis of one's own positions and those of others -- should be an underlying part of college education generally, of course, but should be stressed specifically in the undergraduate course work we propose. Students should learn to ask penetrating questions about the positions taken by government leaders, candidates for office, and the authors of books and articles on public-policy issues. What interests are being promoted, and how is the reader or the audience being manipulated?
Especially important in the education of citizens today is a better, more-critical understanding of the role of communications media as transmitters and shapers of political culture, as well as promoters of rampant consumerism. Before they graduate from college, all students should be required to take at least a module or short course focused on the media's impact on democracy. As Judge Learned Hand wrote in 1942: "The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen, and the far-flung magazine, rules the world." All we need add is television and the Internet. People can easily find timely information at low cost on the Internet, but no data-retrieval system can compete with a college that is teaching students to sort through information and to think critically about the conflicting messages they receive from various sources.
Experiential learning is also a powerful tool for helping students to think critically. We believe in requiring students to work off campus in activities that are not tied strictly to future career prospects, to learn some of the responsibilities that we all share as citizens. Colleges and universities might make working on voter-registration drives part of a civic-education course in the political-science curriculum. English majors might fulfill a civic-education module in critical thinking by writing copy or performing other tasks at a local newspaper or television station. Students should then have to submit a paper evaluating how what they did contributed to -- or undermined -- democratic processes.
Such experiences can be just as valuable in established democracies such as the United States, with one of the world's lowest voter-turnout rates, as in South Africa and other young democracies, where turnout rates are higher but where universal suffrage is new and fragile.
If democracies are to flourish, universities must prepare citizens who can look beyond their own borders and understand the global pressures that may undermine the power of individual governments, particularly the growing economic disparities between developed and developing countries and between the wealthy and the poor within each society. Interestingly, politics in the United States and South Africa appear to be going in opposite directions. Americans seem willing to abandon a New Deal consensus about the responsibility of the state to care for its neediest citizens, while South Africans are recognizing at last that the state must insure the social and economic rights of all its people.
But beyond those national differences, we see a growing awareness that no single country can prosper if its neighbors are destitute, that the wealth of one nation is intimately connected to the well-being of the citizens of others. Unless college faculties and administrations commit themselves to producing students who are responsible citizens, they will have no right to castigate the next generation in the United States for its political apathy, or the next generation in South Africa for being increasingly disillusioned with the new democratic state they and their parents fought so hard to create.
Alison Bernstein is vice-president of the Education, Media, Arts and Culture Program at the Ford Foundation, and Jacklyn Cock is a professor of sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, in South Africa.
This essay was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education on November 14, 1997.