What role can civic education play in polarized times? That is the pressing question posed by Civic Education in Polarized Times, edited by Elizabeth Beaumont and Eric Beerbohm.1 As Beaumont’s introduction explains, “as political polarization has intensified across the world, civic education seems more urgent, but it has also become more challenging.” (P. 1.) The volume brings together an eminent group of education scholars, legal scholars, political theorists, and philosophers to consider challenging questions about how to carry out civic education “in a polarized era” and “for a polarized era.” (P. 2.)
The first set of questions includes the impact of polarization on efforts to teach civic education when “schools, administrators, teachers, parents, and teachers are also operating in a divided world.” (P. 2.) Questions about how to prepare students for a polarized world include determining the aims of civic education amidst hyperpolarization, what types of “civic learning” hold the greatest promise to help students prepare to navigate their way in the current political landscape, and whether civic education should seek to “reduce or counteract polarization.” (P. 2.)
These questions–and the range of answers provided–have much to offer family law scholars and teachers. Civic education implicates the dual authority, in the U.S. constitutional order, of parents and schools for educating children and generating the capacities for democratic and personal self-government. Children are neither, as Pierce v. Society of Sisters famously expressed it, “mere creatures of the state” nor, as political scientist Stephen Macedo aptly puts it (in Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy (2000)), “simply creatures of their parents.” (P. 243.)
The idea that families play an indispensable role in forming good citizens has a long history, evident in references to families as “seedbeds” of civic virtue.2 So, too, does the premise that public education, as Brown v. Board of Education stated, provides the “very foundation of good citizenship” and for “success in life.”
The tension between parents and schools was revisited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision, Mahmoud v. Taylor, which held that religious parents had a First Amendment free exercise right to opt their elementary-school-aged children out of English Language Arts curriculum that featured “LGBTQ+-inclusive” storybooks that (the Court declared) threatened their ability to educate their children about marriage, gender, and sexuality. The Court gave little weight to the civic purposes undergirding this curriculum, such as “promoting diversity, equity, and nondiscrimination” and providing curriculum that “promotes equity, respect, and civility” by more inclusive representation of the school district’s children and families.
Civic Education in Polarized Times confronts how schools can carry out their civic role at a time of “pernicious” polarization, defined as “division into hostile camps with fierce animosities and distrust akin to political sectarianism or tribalism, by its entrenchment in political dynamics, and by its array of harmful effects” on democratic citizenship, norms, and institutions. (P. 6.) Civic education “has become part of the political tug-of-war.” (P. 8.) There is widespread agreement on the crucial role of educating school children about civics and history, but sharp disagreement over the how and what.
A sobering example is the competing narratives about the January 6th insurrection—a violent effort to stop the certification of President Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election. Some educators called January 6 a “Sputnik moment” for reviving civics instruction (P. 98), referencing the U.S.’s ramped up investment in what is now called STEM in the wake of the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of a rocket into space. On this logic, a better grounding in basic processes of democratic governance, including elections, might render people less vulnerable to believing conspiracy theories and misinformation—and resorting to violence.3 Robust civics instruction might counter the troubling version of patriotism that animated the “Stop the Steal” movement and January 6th attack on the Capitol: the narrative that because Trump was “chosen by God” to serve two terms (a belief “immune from factual refutation”), “good Christians” must join the battle to fight the “forces of evil” seeking to hinder God’s plan.4 Five years later, with Donald Trump back in office, that dangerous version of patriotism continues: in the MAGA narrative about January 6, the insurrectionists are now-pardoned patriots.
I highlight two of the many timely and insightful perspectives that Civic Education in Polarized Times offers on how to engage in civic education given this political landscape. In Civic Education, Students’ Rights, and the Supreme Court, legal scholar Justin Driver argues for a “student-centered approach to civic education” that centers “the historic struggles for students’ constitutional rights.” (P. 101.) Such education would foreground “the major Supreme Court decisions that have shaped the everyday lives of students across the nation” and use those decisions “as a springboard for discussing the broader issues, arguments, and student activism that fueled those controversies.” (P. 101.)
Driver’s inspiration is Chief Justice Roberts’ 2019 “Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary,” in which Roberts wrote: “By virtue of their judicial responsibilities, judges are necessarily engaged in civic education.” (P. 97.) As an example, Roberts offered Brown, concise enough to be reprinted in major newspapers and provide “every citizen [an opportunity to] understand the Court’s rationale.” (P. 98.) Roberts cautioned that “civic education has fallen by the wayside.” (P. 98.)
Building on Roberts, Driver argues that “the facts of leading cases involving students’ constitutional rights will fascinate and captivate students in a visceral fashion that no other civic-education topic can match,” raising “scintillating” questions about (among other things) whether students’ constitutional rights constrain school authority to limit student protest and speech (including off-campus) or to compel speech, to physically discipline, strip-search, and drug test students, or to ban unauthorized immigrants from obtaining a K-12 education. (Pp. 101-102.) Students would learn about the role of prior generations of young people in standing up for their rights and shaping the constitutional order. They would evaluate the “sharply divergent views” among the Justices about what citizenship for young people means. (P. 106.)
On the one hand, there is the “robust conception” of student citizenship in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District and other cases: American schools are “the nurseries of democracy.” As Justice Jackson wrote in West Virginia Board of Education v Barnette, “[t]hat [public schools] are educating the young for citizenship is a reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual…if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.” (quoted on P. 105.) On the other hand, the Court sometimes espouses a “Report Card Citizenship”: a thinner, “even anemic,” view of citizenship that suggest schools should concentrate on imposing “order” and “discipline,” which are “integral” and “important” to “training our children to be good citizens.” (P. 106.)
Such civic education, Driver suggests, could help to reduce political polarization and increase empathic understanding. (P. 104.) As students engage in “active debate” about the proper scope of constitutional rights in schools in “novel factual scenarios,” they would learn to “disagree with each other’s constitutional views respectfully, and thereby aid our ailing democratic experiments.” (P. 104.)
The tool of debate is also central to the contribution by political scientists Sigal Ben-Porath, Amy Gutmann, and the late Dennis Thompson, Teaching Competition and Cooperation in Civic Education. Given that the politics in which young people will participate “is likely to remain hyperpolarized and competitive for the foreseeable future,” they argue that a civic education focused only on the skill of cooperating for a “common good” cannot meet the task of developing “effective democratic citizens.” (P. 221.) Instead, students should develop “the skills and attitudes of both competition and cooperation.” (P. 222-23.) Further, both competition (as in voting) and cooperation (working together to find common ground) are important components of democracy; each has an ethical dimension, such as “fair play and mutual respect.” (P. 228.)
Classroom debates can be an effective method for teaching competition: while competition’s aim is to win, competition should be “fair,” opponents should not be demonized, and participants should accept the results. Learning effective competition can be motivating and empowering for all young people, and for “marginalized students” in particular: they can learn how to defend their interests by engaging in practices like “nonviolent protect, political campaigning, and turning out the vote.” (Pp. 228-29.)
To teach cooperation for the common good, students could follow a classroom debate over a controversial issues with an exercise of trying cooperatively to “reach a collective decision” about those issues (for example, by drafting and enacting a bill). The authors contend: “by teaching competition, we bring out the difficulties of polarized politics, and by then teaching cooperation, we try to determine how they can be overcome.” (P. 229.) Students also learn about compromise, which requires both cooperative and competitive skills and attitudes. (P. 230.)
This review has provided a small sampling of the contributions included in Civic Education in Polarized Times, which explore topics like the challenges posed for civic education by racial, gender, and socioeconomic inequalities in U.S. schools and society and how best to cultivate more informed and participatory citizenship, including critical reflection about the gap between the Nation’s ideals and practices. I recommend the entire volume to those interested in how to bolster civic education in the current challenging political climate—and the relationship between parents, child, and state.
- Civic Education in Polarized Times is the sixty-sixth volume of NOMOS, the annual yearbook of the interdisciplinary American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy and grew out of a 2021 conference (xi). The volume includes an introduction by Beaumont and chapters authored by (in order): Seana Valentine Shiffrin; Brandon M. Terry; Robert L. Tsai; Justin Driver; Jennifer Morton; Lisa García Bedolla; Ilana Paul-Binyamin, Wurud Jayusi, and Yael (Yuli) Tamir; Rima Basu; Kristine L. Bowman; and Sigal Ben-Porath, Amy Gutmann, and Dennis Thompson.
- See Linda C. McClain, The Place of Families 50-84 (2006).
- Anthony W. Crowell, Civic Anemia: Law Schools Should Give Boosters to Counter Its Effects, in Beyond Imagination?: The January 6 Insurrection 231 (2022).
- Robert K. Vischer, Christian Nationalism and the Rule of Law, in Beyond Imagination?: The January 6 Insurrection 141-149 (2022).
