MoMent

i. Why education for
Democratic Citizenship
Matters W
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union,
establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common
defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to
ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the
United States of America.
Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America
Did you…suppose Democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a
party name? I say Democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and
come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction
between men, and their beliefs—in Religion, Literature, colleges, and
schools—Democracy in all public and private life.…
Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (2010)
Events “are moving us toward what cannot be,” warns David Mathews,
president of the Kettering Foundation, “a citizenless democracy” (London
2010, iv). The oxymoronic phrase is chilling. Mathews points to numerous
trends in public life that “sideline citizens”: recasting people’s roles from
producers of public goods to consumers of material ones, gerrymandering
districts and thus exacerbating the deep divides that already shape our politics,
diminishing opportunities for civic alliances, and replacing what ought to
be thoughtful deliberation about public issues with incivility and hyperpolarization.
The US Census Bureau’s most recent population survey captures
citizen passivity in its finding that only 10 percent of citizens contacted a
public offcial between November 2009 and November 2010 (US Census
Bureau 2010).
Such troubling phenomena are not necessarily news. A decade ago,
Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone (2000) argued that there was a decline in
social capital, especially in “bridging capital,” which he defined as the capacity
to work across differences. Withdrawal into comfortable enclaves and wariness
of others who appear different persist. Meanwhile, public confidence in
the nation’s political institutions spirals downward: a New York Times/CBS
News poll on September 16, 2011, revealed that only 12 percent of American
approve of the way Congress is handling its job (Kopicki 2011). In 2007, a
conference titled “Civic Disengagement in our Democracy” provided evidence
that “among the 172 world democracies the United States ranks 139th in voter
participation.” Conference leaders also warned that there was a “decline in both
the quantity and quality of civic education” (McCormick Tribune Foundation
2007, 6–7). These assessments echo an earlier warning from the 1998 National
Commission on Civic Renewal, chaired by William Bennett and Sam Nunn,
which asserted, “In a time that cries out for civic action, we are in danger of
becoming a nation of spectators” (1998, 12).
A CRUCIBLE MOMENT: College Learning & Democracy’s Future 1