Lack of Civic Education = Poverty

 The Scots prized education. It gave them a leg up on the English when it came to needing people to run the British Empire.

Thomas Jefferson thought education was needed for a republican government. The ignorant are the easiest to fall for a demagogue and wannabe dictator.

Indiana's educational system is about jobs; Indiana's economy sucks. Indiana's election turnouts are always low. What follows might explain the connection of those three facts.

Danielle Allen's What Is Education For?  from The Boston Review discusses how the economic and civic aspects of education are not mutually exclusive. 

Yet this is not the only possible response to contemporary inequalities. As economists such as Dani Rodrik have pointed out, gross economic inequalities do not result from an inexorable forward march of technology or globalization or from the nature of markets. They are products of policy choices, which are themselves the outcome of politics. “Inequality,” as Joseph Stiglitz argues in Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy (2015), “has been a choice.” Achieving an economy with more egalitarian outcomes will require different political choices and economic policies. It will require that we choose different rules to govern labor, housing, and financial markets.

Where does education enter the picture? At the most fundamental level.

When we think about education and equality, we tend to think first about distributive questions—for example, how to design a system that will offer the real possibility of equal educational attainment, if not achievement, to all students. The vocational approach imagines that this equal attainment will translate into a wider distribution of skills, which will reduce income inequality.

The civic conception of education suggests a very different way to understand the link between education and equality. This understanding begins with the recognition that fair economic outcomes are aided by a robust democratic process and, therefore, by genuine political equality. Thus an education focused not merely on technical skills, but also on what I call participatory readiness, provides a distinct and better way to promote equality through schooling.

I have been trying to understand how my oldest sister can be such an ardent Trumper. Actually, I have been trying to understand how anyone with any sense is a Trumpist, and she is an example close to home. The most likely suspect I have been able to find is a difference in our high schools. She finished in a Howard County school and I graduated from Anderson Highland. Senior year in my high school, we had a civics course. It is not a solution, only a hypothesis.

My immediate (and still living) family has never shown any interest in education - beyond the vocational. They are not readers of history, philosophy, or politics. They do seem to listen to podcasts. To me, education is living; school is only the start. The schools are the places that instill the desire to learn and think.

If we are to embrace an education for participatory readiness, we need to aim our pedagogic and curricular work not at any one of these three capacities but at what lies behind all of them: the idea of civic agency as the activity of co-creating a way of life. This view of politics supports all three models of citizenship because it nourishes future civic leaders, activists, and politicians. Such an education ought also to permit a reintegration of these roles.

The United States has a history of providing such an education: it is called the liberal arts. How, you may ask, can the seemingly antique liberal arts be of use in our mass democracies and globalized, multicultural world? Let us consider where we find ourselves and how we got here.

Science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine have done much to create the contemporary condition. Thanks to the industrial, aeronautical, biomedical, and digital revolutions, the world’s population has grown from one to seven billion in little more than 200 years, a profound historical transformation. We surely need the STEM fields to navigate this new landscape. But if the STEM fields gave us the mass in “mass democracy,” the humanities and social sciences gave us the democracy.

Or as I like to say, are our schools only for creating another cog in the economic machine or to form people?

To make judgments about the course of human events and our government’s role in them, we need history, anthropology, cultural studies, economics, political science, sociology, and psychology, not to mention math—especially the statistical reasoning necessary for probabilistic judgment—and science, as governmental policy naturally intersects with scientific questions. If we are to decide on the core principles that should orient our judgments about what will bring about safety and happiness, surely we need philosophy, literature, and religion or its history. Then, since the democratic citizen does not make or execute judgments alone, we need the arts of conversation, eloquence, and prophetic speech. Preparing ourselves to exercise these arts takes us again to literature and to the visual arts, film, and music.

In other words, we need the liberal arts. They were called the free person’s arts for a reason.

Cog or human being? 

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