Against Civic Education in Public Schools

Abstract

Both liberals and conservatives agree that civic education must go beyond civic knowledge and civic skills to include proper civic motives and dispositions; that is, they all properly agree that civic education must aim at civic virtue, even if they disagree about which precise virtues ought to be learned. Unfortunately, both liberals and conservatives also agree that such an education in civic virtue is the responsibility of public schools. But just because civic virtues must be learned does not mean that they can be taught—let alone that they can be taught in school. By assessing the best empirical studies of the effectiveness of civic education in schools, I show that civic schooling aimed at civic virtue is at best ineffective and is, indeed, often counterproductive. Moreover, advocates of civic schooling argue that schools need a compelling moral purpose and that civic education is the most appropriate moral purpose in a diverse democratic society. These normative arguments fail to grasp that academic schooling already has a compelling moral purpose, namely, to impart the intellectual virtues, that is, those dispositions making us conscientious in the pursuit of truth. Civic schooling is either irrelevant to the intrinsic moral purpose of schooling or positively subversive of it. I show that the history of civic schooling is a history of the subordination of truth-seeking to some civic agenda, leading to the whitewashing and distortion of academic knowledge. Finally, I argue that civic schooling aimed at civic virtue is inherently partisan and thereby violates the civic trust that underpins vibrant public schools.