|
What We Owe Our Young People
Guest Editorial
By Lee Hamilton, Indiana University
You cannot step into an American community today without finding a lively conversation about educating our children. How to boost math and science learning, whether our schoolchildren are reading and writing enough, what constitutes a "quality" education, all of this figures in the national schooling debate and its thousands of local echoes.
Yet with all respect, I believe this debate is missing a fundamental piece: recognition that a well-rounded education includes the civic virtues. We owe our young people not just a solid grounding in math, science, English and a foreign language, but also an education in democratic citizenship, because in all too many places, they're not getting it.
What would a decent civic education look like? It begins, I think, with a robust account of the American story: the full, unvarnished history of our successes and failures, our ideals and the human flaws that jeopardize them, our progress over the centuries and the detours we've taken along the way.
Understanding that we continue to evolve as a nation is the strongest spur, not just to participating in local and national civic life, but to appreciating the skills democracy imposes on us: consensusbuilding, compromise, civility and rational discourse. The only way to learn them intimately, of course, is through experience: the hard but rewarding work of face-to-face engagement with political leaders and our fellow citizens. But learning how crucial they are to making our system work, both in the trenches and at every level of government, that is something our schools can teach.
So, too, we need to teach that citizenship carries with it certain responsibilities: staying informed, volunteering, speaking out, asking questions, writing letters, signing petitions, joining organizations, finding common ground on contentious issues, working in ways small and large to improve our neighborhoods and communities and to enrich the quality of life for all citizens.
Civic education can help young people feel a part of something larger than themselves by connecting them to the splendid traditions of American democratic involvement, and by showing them how to make the most of their talents to leave their communities better places than they found them.
These are not matters for classroom education alone, of course. For the most important quality a democracy must possess is the ability to transmit its needs and values through the experience of participating in it. Our families, our communities, our political system as a whole, all serve as teachers. We adults have been given the great opportunity of political freedom, and we have a heavy obligation to pass on the knowledge of where it came from and how to sustain it. But teaching our civic virtues has to start somewhere, and I would argue that a key place is in our schools.
|
|
