This chapter reprises the arguments advanced in the first four chapters of the book, and assesses the question of what “lessons” history can teach on that basis. It argues that the habits and methods of analysis, interpretation, open-ended inquiry, and intellectual flexibility that study in History cultivates are uniquely valuable in the specific circumstances of our own time, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It argues that it is these habits, rather than any specific political values, that make History uniquely valuable as a form of education for citizenship. It argues, finally, that this is the only approach to the civic value of history education that is compatible with the ethical principles foundational to the discipline of History. In closing, it presents the case for viewing the understanding that history offers us no lessons as the most important lesson history can teach us. This is a lesson that can teach us to think and act with due deliberation, to inquire more deeply before acting, and to act in full confidence that our actions will have unintended consequences.

Action civics is a model for civic education that offers youth opportunities to participate in authentic democratic activities. In this chapter, we trace the origins of action civics and explore the field’s defining features, strengths, and challenges. We frame our analysis through two case descriptions of action civics intermediary organizations: Generation Citizen and Design Your Neighborhood. We discuss action civics education as a psychologically empowering process, and we illustrate tensions that arise as youth develop psychological empowerment. Through these examples, we reveal features of the action civics process model that support community power in the situational, institutional, and systemic domains. We explore empowering characteristics of empowering settings that are present in Design Your Neighborhood and Generation Citizen. These include common belief systems, a relational environment that supports intergenerational partnerships, opportunity role structures, opportunities to develop local leadership, and external linkages to community stakeholders. Our chapter concludes with recommendations for practitioners, researchers, and other stakeholders to consider as the field of action civics expands.

This chapter explores the relationship between education and a school’s punishment and disciplinary practices. Distinct from discipline, punishment is defined partly in terms of its attempt to express moral disapproval. While there are serious criticisms of the use of punishment in educational settings, punishment is largely justified in school in terms of its ability to foster certain sorts of educative conversations. Not all punishment is justified: the particular sort of punishment, and the context that surrounds it, must match the educational nature of the school environment. The punishment must send the right educational messages and accomplish legitimate educational goals. The context of punishment that best supports these goals can be found in the restorative justice framework.

In this chapter I identify several important questions consumerism raises regarding moral education, and conclude by considering how moral education can address consumerism in several important ways. In doing so I explore the extent to which the moral and political aims of education intersect, noting consumerism’s moral implications for democracy, citizenship, and public life in general. Not only are advertising and marketing the “new educator” but consumerism is also undermining the more conventional or noncommercial kinds of education. Moral education always takes place in a social and political context, which today is increasingly dominated by consumerism. I argue that schools, which are foundational in the formation of the moral and civic identities of future democratic citizens, are still a crucial locus of resistance against the forces of consumerism. Given the moral implications of the dominance of consumerism in the contemporary world, there is an urgent need to address consumerism in modern moral education.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between consent and the moral educational aims of the liberal state. Consent is oft-cited as a condition for the legitimate use of coercive state power. Moral requirements are generally non-coercive on the face of it; nobody has the right to rule over our conscience. Curiously, liberal states often see the moral formation of citizens as subject to political requirements (e.g. compulsory civic education). How does the consent condition bear on these requirements? The general argument is that reasons for withholding consent to a liberal state moral education are often motivated by a specific worry about the relationship between morality and political authority, that is, that such authority will have undesirable downstream effects on these norms and attitudes. The chapter characterizes this worry in philosophical terms and proposes a solution in the form of a consent standard specific to the justification of a liberal state education.

When teachers address controversial issues with their students in class, parents, society, and the teaching profession often expect them to adopt a neutral or impartial pedagogical stance. However, scholars have expressed doubts about whether this duty of impartiality is realistic and questioned whether it is educationally desirable. This chapter defends the duty of impartiality by arguing that the key reservations voiced against it in the academic literature are based on different misconceptions about impartial teaching and teacher neutrality: about the meaning of “controversial issue,” about the educational value of being flexible about neutrality in teaching situations, and about what constitutes a reasonable standard of impartiality. Drawing on the legal concept of evenhandedness, the chapter concludes by putting forward an alternative standard of teacher impartiality that walks the line between the inevitably value-laden nature of teaching and the expectation that teachers exercise their authority in a reasonable and responsible way.

One of the most fundamental challenges to democratic education is the “epistocratic” challenge. According to proponents of epistocracy, the ordinary citizenry is too stupid, irrational, and demotivated to vote intelligently and better-quality government would result if the franchise were restricted to a small elite of the best informed, most rational, and best-motivated citizens. If correct, epistocracy would imply that many of the ideals of democratic education are misplaced and that the educational practice of preparing all citizens to vote would be pointless. In this chapter, I review the theory of epistocracy as it is presented in the work of historical and contemporary philosophers from Plato and John Stuart Mill to Bryan Caplan and – most notably – Jason Brennan. I also discuss the implications of epistocracy for democratic education. I hold that, even if Brennan is right that the franchise should be restricted to a small cognitive elite, the question of how one should educate that elite becomes even more important. In the final analysis, I hold that Brennan’s scheme for ensuring that the cognitive elite is representative of society will require a broadening of political education opportunities that will result in a reintroduction of a democratic form of education through the epistocratic back door.

In many policies for and practices of education for democratic citizenship it is assumed that the democratic community is a community of shared democratic values. On such an account, education has the task of including “newcomers” into this community by ensuring that they adopt and internalize the common democratic values. In this chapter, I discuss the work of two authors, Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière, who both have challenged this understanding of democracy and the democratic community. Both authors highlight the contested (Mouffe) and sporadic (Rancière) nature of the democratic community, thus bringing into view the work done to constitute the political community. They also highlight that this constitution does not happen before democratic politics can take place, but actually is an essential part of it. I provide a reconstruction of Mouffe’s and Rancière’s ideas and explore the implications for education.

The current retributive system of school punishment conflicts with the aims of democratic education because it impedes the cultivation of essential democratic values and capabilities. To be legitimate, however, school punishment in democratic societies ought to align with, or at least not impede, the aims of democratic education. This suggests that punishment should be consistent with the communicative and inclusive nature of democracy and support the cultivation of essential democratic capabilities. Restorative justice provides such a model of school punishment by prioritizing communication and inclusion, facilitating the cultivation of democratic capabilities, and legitimizing punishment as a means of communicating remorse instead of inflicting retribution to wrongdoers. The authors argue that for school punishment to align with and support the aims of democratic education, it must shift from the retributive justice model currently employed in most schools to a restorative justice model.

The concept of political plasticity leads us to identify areas of human behavior that are highly resistant to change and need special planning in order to bring about reforms, and also areas that have more potential for change and, through their change, will bring about larger transformations in societies. In domains such as ethnicity, leadership, rich–poor divide, and religion, planning for change must be undertaken taking into account, first, the great obstacles to change and, second, the possibility of backward movement away from democracy. But there are other domains where political plasticity is much higher and which can bring about more widespread transformations. The illustrative example of women in education is discussed in this chapter. The rapid progress of women in education throughout much of the world since World War II has been truly astonishing. If managed well, the progress of women in education can lead to progress in other areas, including population control and global warming.

As the preceding chapters have suggested, there might be merit in paying some attention to the virtues when discussing global governance, both in the abstract and in highly concrete manifestations. Those merits can come in various forms and guises, and can probably be grouped neatly together under three headings. First, the virtues can have some explanatory force: they can help us to understand things we would otherwise be unable to grasp. They can help us understand why Finland’s wartime president Risto Ryti made his “personal” deal with Nazi Germany, or why Sergio Vieira de Mello decided to persuade Cambodian refugees to return to their country of origin.

Democracies provide civic education in order to support young people as they emerge as responsible, well-informed and effective citizens. In this chapter, we critically assess the idea of civic efficacy as it pertains to young people in an era characterised by ongoing economic, political, social and environmental crises, as well as uncertainty, precarity and inequality. Civic education proposes an optimistic, progressive perspective at a time when young people may well be pessimistic about their future prospects and sceptical about the likelihood of positive political change. In this chapter, the authors explore ways in which young people make sense of the future through dystopic and pessimistic imaginaries. Drawing on comparative fieldwork in the UK and Greece to illustrate the concepts, we examine how the social construct of imaginaries can inform our concept of the role young people play in contemporary democracies in crisis. We argue that civic education, and democracy more widely, can empower young people during times of crisis through a new civic approach that accommodates critical – and sceptical – thinking among young people, and supports a wider repertoire of young people’s civic and political action.

This concluding chapter reviews key findings and implications of partisan citizenship, namely, that democratic threat fractures consensus over core citizenship values, in which only some citizens recognize and respond to threat. I also argue that this divided citizenship makes democratic problems worse: it undermines an objective definition of what constitutes a threat, exposes fundamental disagreement over what democracy is, and the solutions itself become politicized. I raise skepticism that civic education or natural cycles can repair these deep divisions but, nevertheless, point to the necessity of trying.

Public administration might be viewed as a potential victim of populist-inspired backsliding. This chapter argues that when considering how to respond to populism public administration needs to recognize that some of its practices may have created an opening for the populist charge. Public administration may be a victim but also may have been an unwitting harbinger of the populist surge. The public administration reforms in vogue over the last two decades helped to create the conditions for populism. Performance management, citizen consultation, and evidence-based policymaking were popular managerial tools, but the evidence presented in this chapter suggests they may have encouraged a loss of public trust due to the way they were put into practice. The threat of democratic backsliding, driven by populism, should stimulate public administration not to hunker down but to search for better ways of operating in order to rebuild public trust.There are some positive signs of new thinking and practice.

This chapter investigates civil society efforts to cultivate civic virtue through voter education programmes. We distinguish between five types of voter education: information, mobilisation, decision-making, comportment, and vigilance. Despite important differences within and between countries, we highlight how voter education efforts across all three countries seek to create "good citizens" who vote for "good leaders" by encouraging voters to internalize a civic, rather than patrimonial, register of virtue. This work has an important electoral effect and helps to imagine the Idea of civil society as a form of associational life that is of, and for, society and separate from, and capable of checking the state. At the same time, we show how, while these efforts have had some successes, they often inadvertently help to reinforce a patrimonial register – with voter education campaigns often undermined by a misunderstanding of the “problems” that need to be solved, by a failure to provide clear moral direction when other actors do not adhere to official rules, and by the complex and often contradictory roles played by civil society actors themselves. Thus, while voter education is broadly similar across all three countries, the impact is contingent on local contexts