The Civic Education Crusade: A Heretic’s Analysis

Abstract

In January 2012, the National Task Force on Civic Learning and National Engagement of the Association of American Universities and Colleges released its report, A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future . The report called for a program of civic learning and of training in civic engagement that would pervade every aspect of higher education. This programwould be linked to similar efforts at all other levels of schooling. In the words of the report, “[t]he central work of advancing civic learning and democratic engagement in higher education must, of course, be done by faculty members across disciplines, by student affairs professionals across divisions, and by administrators in every school and at every level. The fourth prominent group of actors are the students themselves [bold in the original]. The collective work of these groups should be guided by a shared sense that civic knowledge and democratic engagement, in concert with others and in the face of contestation, are absolutely vital to the quality of intellectual inquiry itself, to this nation’s future, and to preparation for life in a diverse world” (p. 2). It called for fostering “a civic ethos across all parts of campus and educational culture” (p. 31) (See: http://www.aacu.org/civic_learning/ crucible/documents/crucible_508F.pdf). Although the report was not particularly original or wellwritten, I read it with interest for several reasons. First, I am one of those “faculty members”mentioned in the report, and I always pay attention when people want to re-write my job description. Second, I work in a university in which “civic engagement” became the official dogma a half-decade ago . Third, I recently published a book on education as American civil religion and I see the contemporary civic engagement movement as an extension of our national educational faith. In the present essay, I want to pass over the personal sources of interest and focus on the third. Looking at the effort to use instruction for citizenship training as a development of civil religion can help us understand the reasoning and motivations behind this effort and some of the problems with this type of campaign, particularly in higher education.