The Rebirth of Citizenship

...enter a suburban home and fall into hell...

...Rather, they are part of a broad undertaking which draws out the talents of the community...

...For the past decade, the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute has drawn on such teachings, as well as other democratic traditions, in its focus on promoting "productive citizenship...

...The dominant understanding of citizenship has generally been exercised through community-service programs...

...Calls for "community spirit" in a fragmented, unequal society sound quixotic...

...But historically, American identity--far more fractured by divisions of faith, culture, and ethnicity than the Jerusalemites--was tied to gritty, down-to-earth work for the public benefit...

...we have redeemed our brother Jews...and now you in turn are selling our brothers...

...This gives the lad a new lease on life...

...A number of teachers have become involved with educational issues affecting the larger community, adding a deeper civic dimension to their individual and institutional identities...

...Rather than simply provide services to needy groups, students are engaged with a mix of people in common projects...

...If similar acts of civic renewal were to take place widely, as the National Commission for Civic Renewal, chaired by Sam Nunn and William Bennett, has suggested, Americans would be able to regenerate an understanding of democracy worthy of our great history...

...Boyte is senior fellow and co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs...

...Catholic social teaching is a resource...

...They provide a sort of social and civic connecting tissue...

...Its junior-high heroine, Dawn "Wienerdog" Wiener, isn't surrounded by absolute monsters but only the usual assortment of Philistines, snobs, and slobs we all grew up with (and, upon occasion, were...

...In 446 B.C., Nehemiah, a leader of the Jews living in exile in Persia, sought and obtained permission from King Artaxerxes to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the walls of the city which had lain in ruins for a century...

...Commonwealth is the notion that a society's richness is related to its "public infradtructure"--such things as parks, libraries, roads, bridges--but also to government and other institutions that serve public purposes...

...In recent decades, this understanding of citizenship, Commonweal | 4 December4,1998 which sprang from common projects, has sharply declined...

...he Nehemiah story suggests a path to civic and moral renewal that challenges the "specialized" and fragmented notion of work characteristic of our time...

...The nobles fell silent, but then replied: "We will make restitution" (5:6-12...

...Nothing succeeds, of course...

...Democracy depends on the sort of work that creates a public identity...

...The archdiocesan paper, The Catholic Spirit, reported that Public Achievement's dual emphases--"the secular portion (teaching democratic action) and the religious side (living out faithbased principles)--make up the real story at Saint Bernard's: the demands of faith are not met solely within the walls of one's church...

...The question we face today is: How do citizens, in an increasingly stratified, consumeroriented, depersonalized societyreconnect with a vibrant vision of democracy...

...The Addams School grew out of a partnership among Neighborhood House (a settlement house), the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, and the college...

...What we now call "volunteerism" was once understood as work for a common purpose, not merely noblesse oblige...

...A possible drawback: no one wears as much emotional armor as the revitalized geek, and no one is so concerned with proving that there are no exceptions--nay, none!--to his take on the world...

...One example is its work with the Jane Addams School for Democracy in the West Side neighborhood of Saint Paul...

...There are many examples of public-spirited institutions in American history, including Catholic ones...

...As a result, critics of our fragmented civil society often strike a hortatory tone, calling for a "return to family values...

...In his 1981 encyclical, On Human Work, John Paul II writes that society "is a great historical and social incarnation of the work of all generations...

...In his Outgrowing Democracy (University Press of America, 1984), John Lukacs argued that the 1950s was a critical decade in which America changed from a "democratic order," with a generous, if somewhat facile, estimation of the capacities of ordinary people, to a "bureaucratic state" whose cultural orientation underestimates the capacities of "the democratic masses...

...Catholic social teaching can thus make an important contribution to contemporary democratic movements by encouraging citizens and institutions to reclaim their public purpose...

...Students, faculty, and new immigrants-- Hmong and Latinos--are working to create a "school" where mutual learning about language, culture, and citizenship occurs...

...Human beings combine their deepest personal identity with membership in a people, and intend their work to increase the common good...

...In the concluding shot, our heroine sits on the school bus surrounded by the classmates who still despise her...

...According to Dennis Donovan, a past principal at Saint Bernard's, "faculty meetings have become public meetings...

...The students negotiated use of a lot from the parish, worked with the city for rezoning and street changes, and raised more than $40,000 to create the park...

...The practical work of restoring Jerusalem's walls and rebuilding the Temple is key to the story...

...It describes the reconstruction of a fractured, exiled people in the fifth century B.C...

...Two concepts are central: "public work" and "commonwealth...

...Another group, composed of seventh-grade girls, designed a curriculum about sexual harassment that has helped improve the culture of the neighborhood...

...In his first film, Welcome to the Doll House, Todd Solondz gave us a relatively restrained and often touching example of the genre...

...The Nehemiah story, however, also makes numerous other points, among them that even divinely inspired work projects are messy, complex, and full of human intrigue...

...Public work highlights stake holding, ownership, accountability, and cooperative work.Expertise is important, but the experts do not dominate...

...Geek is Good...

...teachers help to create agendas and they do regular public evaluations...

...To such questions of national purpose, the biblical narrative of Nehemiah might serve as a parable...

...Together, the Covenant and common work constituted the religious and civic foundations of what has been called the "Second Commonwealth...

...Since 1990, Public Achievement, the Center's civic-education effort with young people, has been working at Saint Bernard's School in a working-class neighborhood of Saint Paul, involving students in public-work projects...

...And, "Why should I be labeled a geek when, in their hearts, my jock tormentors and parental accusers are themselves creeps and weirdoes and, unlike me, in denial about it...

...Yet the changes at both Saint Bernard's and Saint Catherine's suggest the powerful lesson of the Nehemiah story: Common work for large purpose, drawing upon the talents and capacities of ordinary people, can rebuild civic cul~res...

...Thus for the concept of civic renewal to really take hold in such an environment, a substantial cultural change is needed...

...How do you get forty disparate groups to cooperate in a single project: merchants, guilds, tribes, priests, all with their distinct constituencies and interests...

...Current discussions of American democracy--and they seem to be legion--neglect such work-centered public involvement as a means of restoring public spiritedness and purpose...

...It stresses that the common good is constituted and enriched through the work of individuals who co-create their world...

...and almost aB Saint Bernard's students have chosen to participate in Public Achievement...

...One thing is certain: Only if Americans learn again that democracy is the work of everyone can we hope to reclaim our collective identity as a free, creative people for whom "democracy" forms a common bond...

...Government, rather than being seen primarily as a service provider, was understood as a catalyst for citizen initiative...

...Public work is a central element...

...Its members include David Sedaris (a frequent monologuist on National Public Radio as well as a playwright), John Waters (director of Serial Morn and Pecker), Tony Kushner (his Angels in America shows what happens when a geek has promethean ambition), Todd Haynes (creator of an extraordinary film, Safe), and the currently most visible ex-geek champ, the screenwriterdirector, Todd Solondz...

...According to Mary Broderick, at the time Saint Catherine's interim Commonweal | 5 December4,1998 president, this involvement is emblematic of the type of education the college is developing: "We link students to collaborative community work where they can experience their own potential for renewing society...

...In the past, ordinary people created and sustained American public goods and institutions---from libraries to schools to fire departments...

...Nehemiah had to craft a public process and hold selfish factions to account...

...here is an as yet unnamed school of American playwrighting and moviemaking which I, of course, propose to name...

...But, in some fundamental way, she will never, never "fit in...

...In a managerial world dominated by the values of the marketplace, it is daunting to imagine a vibrant, citizen-centered democracy...

...Under Nehemiah's leadership, the returning exiles reconstructed the city and built a commonwealth relatively autonomous for its time...

...That work helped renew their bond to the ancient Covenant and reawakened their sense of themselves as creators of a living history...

...One group of fifth and sixth graders has been creating a safe neighborhood playground in an area that because of gang presence was thought to be "too dangerous...

...Ezra, the priest and scribe who immediately preceded Nehemiah to Jerusalem, admonished the people to rededicate themselves to the Jewish Law...

...The Center, working on the premise that substantial change in society depends on civic renewal of service-based institutions, has joined with schools, a nursing home, cooperative extension systems, an African-American hospital, public health departments, and a settlement house to promote grassroots civic involvement and change in institutional cultures...

...Public work means sustained public effort--whether paid or unpaid--by a mix of people who undertake projects of civic usefulness...

...In recent years, the College of Saint Catherine in Saint Paul has undertaken such a process, promoting the concepts of public work and citizenship...

...Moreover, schools themselves are changed through their involvement with Public Achievement...

...He goes on to write books, plays, and movies which prove his suspicions about the world to his own satisfaction and, if the work is funny or probing, to the satisfaction of many others...

...And what happens when the whole thing goes off the track...

...Teams of students between the ages of eight and eighteen, assisted by adult coaches, have designed and implemented a variety of civic programs...

...The herd has marked her as a pariah, and a pariah she Commonweal | 6 December4, 1998...

...It has revised its core curriculum, added a common social justice course, and spawned a number of innovative partnerships with the broader community...

...Scratch a banker and find a serial killer...

...But these are often at a far remove from the institution's core priorities...

...America's democratic spirit grew from the sense that the citizenry as a whole is responsible for the democratic experiment...

...Rather than focus on career preparation, we aim for learning that deepens professional identity and prepares for a life of meaning and purpose...

...She puts herself through a miserable apprenticeship in how the world works by pursuing schemes that she thinks will gain her that world's acceptance...

...In a play or film of the Geek Revenge school, the middle class is composed entirely of practicing or potential psychos...

...But the camera draws dose to her face which we see is stoically set rather than ingratiating, while the soundtrack separates her voice from the others so that she seems to be singing to herself rather than with the others...

...When he learned that the nobles, for example, were making excessive profits from the poor, he called for a public assembly and challenged the leaders: "To the best of our power Harry C. Boyte and Nancy N. Karl are co-authors of Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work (Temple, 1996...

...Is Dawn still aspiring to normalcy...

...and how they rebuilt not only their city, but also their sense of destiny...

...Today's comic strip character Dilbert--lost in a maze of endless human-relations jargon-serves as a model of this new culture...

...Call it Revenge of the Ex-Geeks...

...Such work created a practical quality to democracy and an expansive ideal that was able to bridge great differences...

...n the college level, the institutions themselves O have lost a robust sense of civic identity and involvement...

...Having endured a childhood full of schoolyard taunting and parental beady-eyed suspicion, the geek finally rears up and asks, "Hey, why am I called sick when all of society is sick...

...They sing the school song and she joins in...

...Kari is director of faculty development at the College of Saint Catherine...

...But it was Nehemiah who called them to a work with large purpose...

...More precisely, what has happened to the understanding of ourselves as the bearers of a great and noble mission--to keep democracy alive and well--that comes through so vividly in historical accounts such as Stephen Ambrose's "citizen-soldiers" (see, Commonweal, April 24...

...We sense that she will grow up, probably get slightly prettier and more self-confident, hold down a job, maybe acquire a husband and children, and achieve a generally plausible life...