MoMent

and to higher education—that were informed by the expertise and experience
of the leaders and essential partners of the civic renewal movement already
underway. A staunch partner in promoting civic learning and democratic
engagement throughout the process, the department nonetheless made clear
that A Crucible Moment was to be the Task Force’s report not the department’s,
prepared in dialogue with a very broad community of advisers.
Those advisers who were participants in five different national roundtables,
and whose names are listed in Appendix C are civic practitioners, scholars,
and administrators. They generated what became an evolving set of specific
recommendations included in this chapter. The National Task Force continued
to refine the recommendations in subsequent drafts. There was consensus
among participants that a successful Call to Action would require multiple
leaders collaborating from varying constituencies both within and beyond higher
education and within and beyond government agencies. The broad swath of
recommendations that emerged reflects that consensus.
Participants in the national roundtables agreed on another matter:
although the charge was to focus on undergraduate higher education, every
roundtable discussion inevitably commented upon the robust civic continuum
whose origins need to be established in K–12. Acknowledging that reality,
we therefore preface the Call to Action for colleges and universities with a
discussion of this understood interdependency.
K–12: The Initial Pathway to Civic Knowledge
and Responsibility
K–12 education is the cornerstone for both functioning democracies and
college readiness. As Ira Harkavy (2011) said in his address at the international
conference “Reimagining Democratic Societies,” “no effective democratic
schooling system, no democratic society. Higher education has the potential
to powerfully contribute to the democratic transformation of schools,
communities, and societies.” Despite all the investment in improving the level
of schooling in the United States, particularly over the past quarter century, far
too little attention has been paid to education for democracy in public schools.
In their foreword to the report Guardian of Democracy: The Civic Mission of
Schools, former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and former Congressman Lee
Hamilton note, “Knowledge of our system of governance and our rights and
responsibilities as citizens is not passed along through the gene pool. Each
generation of Americans must be taught these basics” (2011, 5).
The arguments for the civic purpose of K–12 education and the
arguments for the civic mission of higher education are similar. Education
for democratic engagement is even more urgent than it has ever been,
given America’s current diverse populace and global interdependencies.
Revealingly, the definition of civic learning put forth in Guardian of Democracy
encompasses a continuum across educational levels—in both pedagogy and
curricula—that is consistent with an enlarged definition of civic literacies
cited in Chapter I of this report, the framework for twenty-first-century civic
learning provided in figure 1, and the examples of campus practices featured in
Chapter V.
“Knowledge of our system of
governance and our rights and
responsibilities as citizens is
not passed along through the
gene pool. Each generation
of Americans must be taught
these basics” (O’Connor and
Hamilton 2011).
A CRUCIBLE MOMENT: College Learning & Democracy’s Future 27