Can Civic and Moral Education Be Distinguished?

Abstract

Civic educators seem to be faced with an insoluble set of related problems. For example, they can teach students about the civic ideals of their particular nation as a set of empirical facts, what the people of this particular place at this particular time happen to believe about the political and social roles of government and the obligations of citizens to that government and to one another. Alternatively, to provide a moral foundation for civic education, they can teach students a particular comprehensive moral theory—Locke’s liberalism, Mill’s utilitarianism, or Kant’s deontology, for example—from which principles of government, many of which coincide with the nation’s civic ideals, can be deduced. The problem with the first approach is that the resulting civic ideals lack moral authority; they are only anthropological observations about the beliefs that we hold. The problem with the second is that, although the principles thus derived do make genuine normative claims upon students, they are based on controversial metaphysical premises that not all students can accept, especially in a nation of diverse cultures and religions.