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Teaching About and Educating for Citizenship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 November 2022

Mary Cornelia Porter  and
Corey Vanning
Mary Cornelia Porter
Affiliation:
Barat College
Corey Vanning
Affiliation:
Loyola University of Chicago
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Extract

The objective of liberal education is, surely, to help students develop the skills, capacities, perceptions, and imagination to enable them to enrich and enhance not only their own lives, but the life of the community as well. Educating for citizenship, thus broadly defined, is an endeavor shared by political scientists with colleagues in related fields, in the arts, the sciences, and the humanities. Citizenship as subject matter, however, has fallen within our purview. Put differently, as educators all of us consider, in a diffuse sort of way, the relationship between our teaching on the one hand and the polity on the other. Those of us who are political scientists must consciously concern ourselves with matters that fall under the rubric of citizenship. Notwithstanding the high purposes of the Academy as a whole, citizenship has for all practical purposes been defined in terms of the political, and political science has been charged with providing an academic experience that should inform and inspire the citizen experience. A tension, therefore, may be said to exist between political science's competency to teach about and its more general responsibility to educate for citizenship. The writers here address the question of how we can best teach about citizenship, ply our trade as it were, in ways that educate for citizenship.

First, it would be useful to remind ourselves how we typically teach about citizenship. That some subfields of the discipline lend themselves more readily than others to the enterprise is not at issue. Whatever the emphasis in a wide variety of courses, our students should leave our tutelages with an understanding of citizenship as a status, a cluster of activities, a concept, and a value. More tellingly, most of us would like to think that we expose our students to frames of reference and modes of analysis that encourage them to make and act upon informed, critical, and sophisticated judgments about political phenomena and public affairs.

Type
Educating for Citizenship: What Should Political Scientists Be Teaching?
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , Spring 1984 , pp. 216 - 219
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1984

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References

1 John Dewey, of course, believed that primary and secondary schools should, as part and parcel of the curriculum, educate for democracy. For Dewey, learning how to be a citizen was inextricably bound up with the process of human development. “One of the most important instruments for producing democratic men, Dewey has consistently argued from virtually the beginning of his work, is a school system designed for that purpose. In the schools the future citizens must be so formed that the society they will create as adults will be somewhat better than their parents' society.” Horwitz, Robert, “John Dewey,” in Strauss, Leo and Cropsey, Joseph, eds., History of Political Philosophy (Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1972), pp. 804–820.Google Scholar In particular, see Dewey, , Democracy and Education (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916).Google Scholar For a more recent attempt to synthesize the educational and political experiences of secondary school students, see the suggestion that students be required to spend a portion of their time performing community services, in Boyer, Ernest L., High School: A Report on Secondary Education in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1983).Google Scholar

2 The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 270.

3 In his Legislature: California's School for Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), William K. Muir makes the point that a good legislature, by performing an educative function for its members, produces superior public servants.

4 Because he refused to say whether or not he was a Communist, Anastapto was refused admittance to the Illinois Bar. The U.S. Supreme Court sustained the action, which had the effect of denying Anastaplo not only the right to practice law in Illinois, but also the opportunity to teach in law schools. In Re Anastaplo, 366 U.S. 82 (1961). While it appears likely that Anastaplo would now be admitted to the Bar (the Illinois Bar Association is eager to right past wrongs), he refuses to reapply, preferring to remain a “sober and salutary reminder of the capriciousness of the McCarthy era.” The University of Chicago Magazine, 76 (Winter 1984), p. 7.

5 Anastaplo, George, Human Being and Citizen (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1975), p. 45.Google Scholar

6 For a lively discussion relating to the extent to which schools impart democratic values, see Merelman, Richard M., “Democratic Politics and the Culture of American Education,” The American Political Science Review, 74 (1980), 319–332 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; M. Kent Jennings, “Comment on Richard Merelman's ‘Democratic Politics and the Culture of American Education,’” ibid., 333–337; and Merelman, “A Reply to Jennings,” ibid., 338–341. Professor Jennings maintains that “we must give the education system some credit” for teaching democratic values. However, he also believes that “[w]hat seems to be less well inculcated is any thorough understanding of such concepts [as political equality and popular sovereignty], their philosophical underpinnings, the tradeoffs among them, the conditions that give rise to our threatening them, and their translation from belief into action,” ibid., p. 336.

7 “He had stood up for his eighteenth century, his Constitution of 1789, his George Washington, his Harvard College, his Quincy, and his Plymouth Pilgrims, as long as anyone would stand up with him. He had said it was hopeless twenty years before, but he had kept on, in the same old attitude, by habit and taste, until he found himself altogether alone. He had hugged his antiquated dislike of bankers and capitalistic society until he had become little better than a crank.” Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1974), pp. 343–344.Google Scholar

8 It is to be hoped that there has been change for the better from the situation described by a widely cited study which indicated that rank-and-file Americans generally professed support of the Constitution, but many were unaware of its guarantees, and believed that such principles as freedom of speech should not be extended to those who espouse socialist or Communist beliefs. Better educated and politically active respondents were much less likely to hold such misconceptions. Stouffer, Samuel A., Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), pp. 52, 104–107Google Scholar. See also Inter-University Consortium for Political Research, The Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties Study, Leadership Samples and Cross-Section Samples (Ann Arbor, Mich.: I-UCPR, 1974).Google Scholar For a different interpretation of the data derived from the Stouffer study, see Spinrad, William, Civil Liberties (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970)Google Scholar, ch. 5.

9 Henry Adams, op. cit.