Civics Needs Pluralism

America is a beautiful – and decidedly pluralistic – country. Our education system contains 12,546 locally controlled school districts. Charter schools have gained hundreds of thousands of students in recent years. Private school enrollments are up, and the classical school movement has exploded.

Whether one favors traditional public schools or not, those of us doing civics reform must recognize that we are not living in the 1960s anymore, or even the 2010s. This means that an effective movement is going to have to work with our increasingly varied system of education.

My organization, the Jack Miller Center (JMC), hosted a National Summit on Civic Education last fall that aimed to foster genuine pluralism in the civics reform movement.

We sought to highlight current initiatives that are sometimes left out of the national civics conversation. Sessions focused on religious schools, which have proven particularly effective at producing positive civic outcomes through their ability to speak to “good” citizenship, as well as “informed” or “engaged” citizenship.

We had sessions on classical education, which for some is seen as a redoubt of ideological conservatism. But for figures such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr., it proved a pathway to liberation and equality for all.

We discussed community colleges, where 41% of all undergraduates are educated, and civics competitions such as the National Civics Bee, whose rapid growth attests to a strong desire among young people for robust civic learning outside the classroom.

Throughout the conference, the importance of character education for successful civic education was a recurrent theme.

Ian Rowe, the CEO of Vertex Academies, noted during one panel that “school leaders are in the moral formation business” – whether they acknowledge it or not – and should be intentional about the virtues they inculcate. Vertex’s emphasis on character education mirrors the emphasis on virtue in Annie Hsiao’s Capitol Hill Christian Academy. She spoke of her school’s commitment to “excellence in our academics and excellence in our virtue.” As Jake Tawney of Great Hearts Academies described, classical education is committed to helping students become “more fully human.”

Indeed, the subject was brought up again by dinner speaker Bari Weiss, who spoke movingly of the courage needed to defend our free society. “I often think about this pablum ‘the arc of history bends toward justice’ … no it doesn’t,” she said. “People bend the arc, people stand up for good ideas when they’re under assault and give it their all to make those ideas win.”

Bari spoke of how she’s seen courage emulated in figures like Natan Sharansky and Abraham Lincoln. “A little bit of Lincoln can do a lot,” she said. We at JMC are inclined to agree.

And yet, character education has been significantly marginalized in civic education.

In a recent survey of secondary history teachers by the American Historical Association, only 50% cited “instilling civic pride in the nation” as an important or very important goal for U.S. history courses. As Jane Kamensky, president of Monticello, told us at the conference “one reason why civics left the classroom in the 1960s … was that patriotism seemed too close to religion, and as religion was evacuating the classroom patriotism went with it.”

It may well be that in secularizing schools, we’ve gone too far and unwittingly undermined our ability to cultivate civic virtues such as courage. Pete Peterson, Bari’s interlocutor at dinner, noted that “gratitude can be a foundation for courage … how you develop courage is to understand what you’re grateful for and what you might lose.” It’s clear that any civics renaissance will hinge on a recovery of the virtues of courage and gratitude.

This realization may be the distinct advantage of pluralism, and why it’s so important for the civics reform movement. It allows us to see the deficits in dominant educational practices. Indeed, it may offer the best solution for the polarization that plagues civics in America, which was the subject of our closing plenary, with the stated aim of “Depolarizing Civics.”

Too often in this type of panel a conversation is had between two nominal representatives of different political parties or ideological factions who don’t appear to have any significant differences of opinion. Or if they do, they refrain from discussing them. In this way these panels fail to accomplish their purpose – to show that people can disagree vigorously and still be committed to engaging with one another.

Not so with this panel. It featured real disagreement over whether a “purple” civics was achievable or even desirable, whether state standards have a meaningful impact on classroom teaching, and whether teachers should bring contemporary issues into their classrooms. Differences were so great that moderator Checker Finn concluded, “Well I believe we almost depolarized the panel,” leaving the larger goal of “depolarizing civics” to the audience. But that’s exactly the point: if those of us who are working to strengthen civics believe in genuine pluralism, we’re going to have to show it by embracing genuine differences. JMC’s National Summit on Civic Education will continue to do exactly that.

Thomas Kelly is the vice president of academic programs at the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles & History.