Reviving a Civic Sense

...After property qualifications for officeholding and voting were dropped, every man was eligible to be a magistrate and to pass judgment upon the weightiest questions of state It was felt, therefore, that all should acquire the intellectual equipment to act competently And, as on so many other matters, the instinctive American response was, "Let the schools do it " The eager curncular reformers who promoted the civics course almost never reflected that the Yankee farmers of the 18 th century had not required formal instruction to become adept at politics, establish their independence, and form a permanent government If the reformers did occasionally cite the America of an earlier era, it was only to emphasize the diffeiences between that golden age and their own more troublesome times The problems of urbanization and indus-trialization, ethnic conflicts and global commitments nurtured their certainty that only the schools could prepare the young to cope with the complexities of the modern day It was of course not easy to devise ways to develop the civic consciousness of pupils, and the difficulty increased as the schools took in an ever increasing percentage of American youth The need seemed greatest among the underpnvileged children of immigrants, Negroes and Indians, who had to be Americanized so that they could live, work and vote as citizens in the republic Yet it existed also among the offspring of the well-to-do, with their greatei privileges and correspondingly broader responsibilities, who had to be tramed to handle both Despite the educators' best efforts, the end product turned out to be a narrow, lifeless semester course describing the formal political system Civics thus shared the fate of all too many educational experiments In fact, only rarely have attempts to revise the curriculum brought satisfying results Most often reforms conceived with good intentions have either gone down to defeat or, what is worse, have been altered beyond recognition in the process of being put into practice Exhausted by the struggle, those who fought for the innovation lost interest as compromises changed their original intentions and as their attention shifted to other causes Consequently, the new proposals soon became part of the status quo, vulnerable to attacks from the next geneiation of reformers The old civics course failed partly because it lacked bureaucratic support, its unenthusiastic teachers, diawn from other departments, generally regarded it as an exile from their proper assignments Furthermore, the subject never commanded the faith of the students, who were not too young to peiceive the discrepancies between the textbook accounts in the classroom and the realities of political life Above all, the running controversies over curriculum reform obscured the function of the course Good citizenship became a catchword, as slippery then as relevance is now Appeals to it could serve the purpose of any interest group The journals were filled with sober articles demonstrating that history or Latin or English 01 mathematics deserved support because they turned their students into honest, rational patriots Even the advocates of athletics hastened to argue the virtue of team spirit, rugged individualism, and strenuous labor Perhaps this did not matter in the 1920s and '30s, when high school students, particularly in the big cities, learned about society and how to behave in it from other sources Indeed, the lessons of the street and the press may have been more real, more likely to provide guidance in future life, than the chapters ot the civics book On the other hand, perhaps it did matter that the civics course failed The separation of real life from the school produced a parochial view, with the block and the neighborhood central to the consciousness of young people, the city more remote, the nation still further away, and the world abroad incredibly distant American society was a long time paying the price of that failure IN THE last two decades the situation has deteriorated Civic education, a valid objective earlier has become still more necessary in our own times And the prospects of obtaining it in an adequate form are no brighter at present than before Evidence is all about us that social relations today are less orderly than in the past Crime in the streets, intergroup tensions, the nation's inability to formulate a foreign policy that will command public assent—all are symptoms of the growing incapacity or unwillingness of individuals to relate their lives meaningfully to some entity larger than themselves Unless one hides behind the Utopian dogma that only a total change in the system will make a difference, there remains an obligation to help young people establish that relationship Increasingly the task falls upon the schools, which now accommodate practically the whole youth population during the bulk of its available time All alternative agencies for education have steadily grown weaker Formerly, children learned thiough the church, the family, and their work experience as well as, or instead of, in class Civic consciousness was the piod-uct of shared feelings and common experiences in those institutions But given their present feebleness, it is truer than ever before that what young people do not learn in school they do not learn at all The influences that do play upon youth outside the school are of another character—undirected and unpredictable in their thrust The mass media, particularly television, stress violence, conflict and the tactics of expose Everything stinks' The rage generated by the repetitive close-ups, out of context, of one rotten mess atter another leads either to apathy and withdrawal or to a desperate detense of the pure ME besieged by the enveloping power of the forces of evil Nor are the ethics of the armed camp conducive to the development of attributes that favor social peace and accommodation On the contrary, the persistent sense of tension evoked by sensationalism exposes its victims to transitory fits of fashion that can take them m any direction Under these circumstances, the recent revival of interest in ethnicity has had some unfortunate side effects Genuine ethnic divisions are scarcely novel in American history, yet the current emphasis is new So long as the dominant social forces pushed people toward assimilation, ethnic impulses were defensive Groups concerned with preserving their cultural identity did not argue for separatism or seek to exclude outsiders They stressed the desirability of participating m the general activities of American life, but maintained that their own cultural traits and values were in harmony with those common to the whole society Immigrants invariably accentuated the characteristics they thought demonstrated that they belonged in the United States, and they set a high store by every token that established a link to the nation's history Native Americans who stood apart by virtue of either religion or color did the same The long struggle of Roman Catholics for legitimacy m the United States hinged upon their insistence that they had a place m the national culture By the same token, Indians and Negroes, although victims of exclusion, devoted themselves chiefly to gaining integration This posture affected attitudes toward education Ethnic groups sought special kinds of trainmg supplementary to, not exclusive of, that received by everyone else Although there were differences among them, the pattern was typical of immigrants, Indians and blacks While "realists" like Booker T Washington were aware that the problems of Negroes would not speedily be solved—and, for a time at least, might require acquiescence in segregation—their ultimate objective was involvement and integration Certainly when WEB DuBois thought of the preparation of the talented tenth, he focused on the acquisition of the cultural skills shared with the whole society It is in this respect that attitudes have most decisively changed over the past 20 years Emphasis has steadily shifted toward separatism —cultural as well as social What were at first the far-out demands acquired currency and respectability with time, spreading downward from the umversity to the high schools and below Blacks, Chi-canos, Puerto Ricans and other ethnic groups demand their own "studies," and their calls for isolated patterns of upbringing are received more attentively than ever before If each group trains its children in its separate way to speak its own language, what will happen to the possibility of communication across group lines9 The trend toward inwardness and separatism has a personal as well as an ethnic dimension Only blacks can really understand the black experience, only Chicanos the Chicano experience We move from these half-truths to others only Catholics, only Jews, only Poles, only Italians Then to still others only women, only youth And so on, perhaps until finally only I, ME IN FACT, in a curious and semiconscious way, we have practically arrived at this stage Increasingly the educational process is internalized, relying on personal rather than social points of reference Behind the plea for relevance lies the ideal of a curriculum custom-tailored to the seeming needs of each client It is assumed that the objectives of learning are contingent neither upon the requirements of the external world nor upon the contours of any body of knowledge as such, but rather upon the inner —that is, the immediately felt?needs of the individual Each is a detached Adam, circulating through the society without predictable contacts with others and therefore capable of establishing catena of his own to which he can expect the schools to conform Two major consequences result (1) Everyone is, or seems, a victim Blacks, browns, reds, whites, females, young, old Each keeps the score of his own grievances and never sees any column but his own No one recognizes how many of the wrongs he suffers are experienced by all (2) Pride becomes the cardinal virtue I must be proud to be ME, whatever I am If that sounds plausible, think of what pride goeth before and consider how useful a little humility might be A vague, inchoate longing for community follows from this exaggerated individualism The isolated ego reaches out to others because, in the end, humans are social beings who only acquire the means of assertmg their identity when they discover their relationship to their fellows Hence the pathetic floundering of many youths who cannot tell in what direction to reach They may not know it, but all these Adams adrift are utterly interdependent In earlier, simpler societies relationships were thin and widely spaced The rural family saw few others and then at infrequent intervals Now, the city dweller makes contact with scores of strangers every hour of the day, and strangers depend upon one another in numerous complex ways Nearly all of us stake our survival on the continuing flow of goods to the shopping center and on services available by telephone These matters are grave enough, for we no longer know how to feed or clothe ourselves, how to nurse our sick or extinguish our own fires But in addition, we risk our very lives on the gamble that all will adhere to a common code of behavior Who cared on what side of the lane the farmer drove his cart 100 years ago...

...We need no new subjects of instruction, we have plenty of old ones inadequately taught The imperatives of life in society define the requirements Civic consciousness demands that the individual be capable of communicating with others, that he understand why he and they are the way they are, and that he have sufficient knowledge of the system by which they interact to operate within it or to change it Since there are committees enough to translate these requirements into units of instruction and course credits, I see no reason why one master formula should bind all schools But the continued failure to respond to these imperatives will do us all incalculable damage Our civilization has moved irreversibly toward interdependence It is too late to think of winding down the process that has brought immense numbers of people to live in close proximity to one another with tasks so specialized that no one can survive without the collaboration of many Social units of this size can function effectively in either of two ways Men and women can be mobilized, divided mto companies, lined up in ranks, uniformed, and ordered to march to the beat of a drum The individual obeys either because he fears punishment or because he has been conditioned to do what everyone else does Statecraft, past and present, as well as manipulative psychology in the fashion of B F Skinner has been directed at controlling the drum Alternatively, men and women can move in obedience to their own impulses, receiving guidance from their own sensors, proceeding at their own pace, open to mistakes as well as to innovation and discovery They can do so, however, only if they have learned to locate the direction in which they are moving and know how to help each other—or at least how to keep from stumbling over one another...

...Today the driver who disregards a traffic signal or who goes in the wrong direction on the highway is an immediate danger to the lives of others NO AMOUNT of fun and games in the curriculum committee will by itself alleviate the problem I venture to suggest a few guidelines, not as proposals for specific reforms but as a recapitulation of general principles that are rarely disputed yet are all too often taken for granted and forgotten The child, the adolescent, and the adult generally think they know what they want They must learn what they cannot have Some objects of man's desire are out of reach or simply too costly The philosopher's little daughter yearned to grasp the candle's pretty flame He let her pay the painful price, another way would have been less expensive Some wishes that are attainable involve conflict One person's desires are not always compatible with those of others, what you take, I won't have Everyone must learn to limit his will by calculating the probable resistance to be encountered m exerting it Here the teaching of books can be less painful and almost as effective as brutal direct contacts with the world Just as one has to understand others to understand the self, so one must know the whole to know the parts Thinking out from the small group to the large, from the family to the village, from the clan to the tribe, from the community formed by common ancestry to the nation formed by history and common destiny, broadens the US The process is also an exercise in self-defimtion because it compels us to consider what is particular to the little us and what is general to the bigger US By opening an outward view, education may reveal the common purposes that can unite in action a community, a nation, even that one world envisioned by earlier Americans When John F Kennedy exhorted his countrymen to ask not what others could do for them, but what they could do for others, he could not have imagined the next generation's inward turn to egocen-tricity The accent has now shifted from national purpose to priorities, from what can be achieved together to who gets what first In the deals endlessly haggled over, everyone thinks he is the loser, even those who do best never feel they come out well enough Suppose the focus of teaching was moved from the causes that divide to the goals that unite, from the source of conflict to the basis for collaboration, not by falsifying reality, but by viewing it in the whole No miracle would follow, only a dawning awareness of what it takes to act together freely rather than through compulsion How can this be done...

...Reviving a Civic Sense BY OSCAR HANDLIN THE CIVICS course--for many people one of the more dismal memories of high school--has been a central subject in most systems of educa-tion, formal and informal, through-out history...

...Almost every society has expected the young to learn not only the skills for survival and the rituals of faith, but how to rec-ognize their rights and responsi-bilities in relation to other members of the community...

...With the spread of democacy, 19th-century America attached spe-cial importance to the need for citizenship training...