The Crisis of Civic Education

Nearly a year after the presidential election, many academic leaders and faculty members are pondering the implications for their own institutions. Most of the conversation has to do with what the future holds for research, foreign students, government regulation, and financial aid, but mounting concern over fake news, hyperpartisanship, dark money, and the widespread distrust of government has led some educators to ask what more can be done to prepare young people for responsible citizenship in a democratic society.

In fact, we had plenty of reasons for concern about the state of civic education long before 2016. By 2000, voting rates in presidential elections had already declined significantly since the late 1950s and early 1960s, especially among younger Americans. Investigators reported that college students had remarkably little knowledge about our system of government or about current political issues. Interest in politics and newspaper readership among young people dropped substantially over the past few decades. Responding to those trends, a Task Force on Civic Education for the 21st Century, created by the American Political Science Association, declared two decades ago that it is “axiomatic that current levels of political knowledge, political engagement, and political enthusiasm are so low as to threaten the vitality and stability of democratic politics of the United States.”

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Political apathy is not evenly distributed throughout the population. Very conservative and very liberal voters are much more involved in politics than moderates are, thus intensifying the political polarization that is blocking compromise and bipartisan collaboration in Washington. Well-to-do Americans vote much more regularly than their poorer fellow citizens do, causing lawmakers to be disproportionately responsive to the concerns of special interests and affluent constituents. Uninformed voters can be easily manipulated, thus encouraging politicians and other purveyors of political information to resort more frequently to misleading or even blatantly false assertions. Civic education cannot cure those ills by itself. But improved preparation could help bring about higher levels of voting, a more knowledgeable electorate, and a more accountable government, while encouraging more graduates to become active in politics and public affairs.

Schools have long been the primary source of civic education in America. As an early champion of public education, Horace Mann, pointed out more than 150 years ago: “One of the highest and most valuable objects to which the influences of a school can be made conducive consists in training our children to self-government.” Yet schools cannot accomplish this task by themselves. Many studies have pointed to the difficulties that hamper their efforts, including inadequate funding and pressures on teachers from school boards, parents, politicians, and textbook publishers. In view of those problems, it is not surprising that the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which periodically evaluates the knowledge of America’s schoolchildren, concluded in 2010 that more than two-thirds of high-school seniors scored below “proficient” in their knowledge of civics and government.

Under those conditions, the nation’s colleges must join in preparing students to become active and informed citizens. Granted, not everyone goes to college, and fewer than half of all young Americans graduate. Still, a vast majority of high-school graduates enroll in a college at some point in their lives. Moreover, college graduates make up a disproportionate share of American voters and an even higher percentage of political officeholders and persons active in civic organizations. Professors are also much freer from outside pressures than public-school teachers in determining the content of their courses and the materials they assign their students. Colleges, then, have a vital part to play.

How well are colleges performing this function? One can rarely learn much about the state of civic education from examining course catalogs or reading the pronouncements of campus leaders. Few colleges have an explicit civics program or require students to take courses designed to prepare them for their civic responsibilities. Nor do many faculties engage in any serious discussion of the subject during their periodic reviews of the curriculum.

College officials would point out that many of the skills and qualities of mind that are emphasized in college are important for enlightened citizenship — critical thinking; problem-solving; respect for other races, religions, and points of view; global awareness; and moral reasoning. Many undergraduate courses convey information and knowledge relevant to issues of domestic and foreign policy. Community-service projects, student government, and other extracurricular activities offer practical experience in civic engagement and the exercise of leadership skills.

Those efforts seem to have positive results. In their study of research on higher education, Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini report that seniors in college make significant gains, on average, in critical thinking and problem-solving while increasing their interest in politics and public policy. Once students have graduated, records show that they vote much more frequently than citizens with only a high-school education and are likelier to play an active part in civic affairs.

Although those findings are encouraging, they are not entirely convincing. While numerous college courses would be useful to citizens, many students do not take them. Large numbers of undergraduates do not complete a single course in economics or American politics and government, and only a small minority take a course in political philosophy or international affairs. Although most colleges report that solid majorities of their students engage in some form of community service during college, less than half of these undergraduates have linked their service work with a course that encourages participants to reflect on their experience or perceive its connection with issues of politics or public policy. Most students appear to regard community service as an alternative to politics rather than a stimulus to participate in the political process.

As for preparing students to think critically, investigators have discovered that even though most undergraduates do get better, the average progress is not terribly impressive. Students entering college at the exact middle of their class in their ability to think critically tend to improve over the next four years by only enough to rise from the 50th to the 67th percentile. Many students seem to make little, if any, progress.

College graduates do go to the polls with greater frequency than citizens with only a high-school education. Still, half of all younger graduates did not vote in 2016. Moreover, researchers are divided on whether the higher turnout of B.A.s comes about because of college or simply reflects differences in the backgrounds and dispositions that students bring with them when they enroll. If college truly encouraged voting, one would expect that the large increase since the 1950s in the share of young Americans with undergraduate degrees would have caused election turnouts to rise. In fact, however, voting rates have declined during this period. Researchers have even found that the more courses students take in several popular majors, including business, science, and engineering, the less likely they are to vote after they graduate.

If colleges were truly providing effective civic education, one would also expect that the massive increase in the number of college-educated Americans since World War II would have raised the level of political knowledge among young people. Yet according to Martin Wattenberg, it is no greater than that of high-school seniors in the late 1940s. Though young adults 50 years ago knew roughly as much about politics and public affairs as older Americans did, they now know only about two-thirds as much. More troubling still, according to a recent Brookings Institution study, 44 percent of college students believe that hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment. Fifty-one percent believe that it is OK to shout down a controversial speaker, while 19 percent would even excuse the use of violence to keep such a person from speaking.

Despite the evidence, and the recent talk on many campuses about reviving civic education, not everyone in academia is enthusiastic about such an effort. Robert Maynard Hutchins once declared that “education for citizenship has no place in the university.” Only recently, Stanley Fish argued in these pages that “promoting virtuous citizenship is no doubt a worthy goal, but it is not an academic goal, because ... it is a political goal” and hence an inappropriate aim for colleges to pursue. Such skepticism is not unusual. Carol Geary Schneider, a recent president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, concluded not long ago that after “five years of active discussion on dozens of campuses, ... I have been persuaded that there is not just a neglect of but a resistance to college-level study of United States democratic principles.”

Fish correctly points out that aims such as “virtuous citizenship” can be taken to mean almost anything from unquestioning patriotism to a commitment to pursue some liberal vision of social justice. Both of those alternatives smack of indoctrination and are inappropriate for a university. Yet trying to avoid any goal other than the pursuit of truth is both extreme and impossible, much like the now widely discredited quest for entirely “value free” scholarship. Adopting such a policy would also represent a denial of responsibility to prepare students to uphold the very kind of democratic society on which universities depend for their existence.

Certain basic principles seem widely enough accepted as worthwhile to form a legitimate basis for a deliberate program of civic education. Almost everyone will agree that America is a democracy designed to be responsive to the will of its citizens. If a democracy is to function well, citizens need to be willing to express their preferences by voting. In doing so, they should ideally be reasonably informed and cognizant of arguments for and against important policy questions. To achieve such understanding, they should be free to speak their minds while respecting the right of those who disagree and seeking to resolve differences through reasoned discussion.

Goals of this kind do not presuppose any particular political ends or policies. Nor do they exclude the views of those who argue for some other system of government. As educational institutions existing in and dependent upon a healthy and successful democratic system, however, colleges should endeavor to equip their students to be active citizens who try to inform themselves about important issues of politics and public policy and engage in efforts to improve their communities.

While many colleges claim to be preparing citizens in the sense just described, and although they offer many classes and activities that can contribute to this end, few provide any required courses aimed at achieving that result. Instead, learning to become an active and informed citizen is simply treated as an option — much like preparing to be a doctor or a lawyer or a business executive — even though becoming a citizen is not a choice but a status acquired automatically by the vast majority of undergraduates.

There is consequently something to be said for requiring all students to take at least a few essential courses to equip them to perform their civic functions more effectively. How else to prepare the majority of college students who never take a course in American government or study the reasons for our distinctive political system? How else to arouse the interest of the many entering freshmen who say they do not consider it “worthwhile” to keep up with political issues and events?

Although these arguments may seem persuasive in principle, practical reasons have kept most colleges from instituting a required civics curriculum. To begin with, it is hard to decide what material should be included in the three or four courses that might be set aside for such a purpose. A course on American government and politics? On basic economics? On American history? Sociology? Political theory? International relations? The “Great Books”? Though many professors could supply their own choices, it is far more difficult to obtain agreement from an entire faculty, representing a wide variety of disciplines and educational philosophies.

In addition, students tend to dislike requirements and would almost certainly resist the addition of new ones. While colleges can disregard such opposition, teaching students who resent having to listen is seldom appealing or successful. Doing so could even turn students against politics and civic engagement. Worse yet, in the eyes of many academic leaders, reducing the number of electives to make room for such a requirement might discourage some desirable students from applying for admission.

In view of those difficulties, most faculties will not try to embark upon such a contentious and potentially fruitless undertaking. Fortunately, there are simpler ways to make progress.

For example, virtually every professor argues that “critical thinking” is an important goal of undergraduate education. No wonder. In their analysis of student learning in college, Pascarella and Terenzini define critical thinking as an individual’s capability to do some or all of the following: “Identify central issues and assumptions in an argument, recognize important relationships, make correct references from the data, deduce conclusions from information or data provided, interpret whether conclusions are warranted based on given data, evaluate evidence or authority, make self-corrections, and solve problems.” What an apt definition of the skills required of a competent voter!

Much evidence indicates, however, that most colleges could improve a lot in teaching students to develop this capability. A study from California has found that only 9 percent of professors were able to explain how they taught to encourage critical thinking. Another inquiry reported that 70 percent of instructors at nonselective colleges relied on multiple-choice tests supplied by textbook publishers, even though short-answer exams almost always test for recall rather than careful reasoning. An earlier study of exams at research universities discovered that less than 20 percent of the test questions called for critical thinking. Meanwhile, extensive lecturing remains in common use, especially in large courses, despite persuasive evidence that active forms of problem-solving are much more effective at helping students think carefully and reason well.

The recent election has revealed an additional challenge in teaching students to think about political issues. Because of the increasing use of disinformation and fake news, undergraduates today need more help to learn how to evaluate the accuracy of the statements they read and hear during election campaigns. A few colleges have expanded their introductory sessions on how to use the library and find information by including instruction on how students can tell when to question the accuracy of what they read and how to evaluate the sources and arguments cited to support conclusions. Other colleges would do well to emulate those efforts or find other ways to meet the need.

In today’s diverse and highly partisan society, it is particularly important to teach undergraduates to take account of contrary opinions and arguments and to discuss such differences respectfully. Most campuses are well positioned to encourage these habits. Merely by assembling a student body of widely varying backgrounds and political orientations, colleges can do a lot to help undergraduates learn to engage with points of view very different from their own. While many institutions have introduced programs designed to develop such understanding, most of those efforts have concentrated on developing a greater appreciation of differences involving race, gender, and sexual orientation. The recent election underscores the importance of extending such efforts to encourage interaction among classmates with different political ideologies and socioeconomic backgrounds. Already, some instructors are building those differences into collaborative groups of students created to explore issues and complete projects involving politics and social policy. Campus officials in residential colleges can work toward the same goal by taking care to have their housing units include a mix of students with different backgrounds.

Large numbers of undergraduates now engage in some form of community service during college. As previously mentioned, however, only a minority of students integrate their service with a course that helps them understand the nature of the problems, including their connection with public policy, that the community service is meant to address. Colleges could try to link more service activities with courses, since research suggests that such combinations do more than community work by itself to encourage students to engage in civic activity after they graduate.

Some faculty members look upon service-learning courses with suspicion, fearing that they can easily become forums for persuading students to dedicate themselves to the vision of social justice favored by the instructor. Yet so can courses in economics, sociology, political science, and many other fields. The proper response is to discourage indoctrination wherever it occurs, not to do away with entire categories of instruction simply because it might happen.

Finally, student government offers valuable opportunities for students to learn the skills of politics and community leadership. Researchers have repeatedly found that such experience often leads to greater civic engagement in later life. Some form of student government already exists on almost every campus but is often considered by students to be unimportant and ineffective. Many colleges could do more to raise its status and encourage participation by giving student representatives more say in decisions that affect their lives.

Whether or not all of the actions just mentioned are appropriate for every college, the current condition of our democracy clearly calls for some response. The past 50 years have been marked by a gradually diminishing confidence in the performance of our government, a widening chasm between the political parties, and a growing distrust of political institutions and public officials. The recent election does not reveal new problems so much as expose the damaging effects that existing trends can have on the functioning of our democracy. These dangers should prompt every college to think long and hard about John Dewey’s oft-quoted but oft-neglected statement: “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” Devising special courses on civics or adding programs for students already interested in careers in politics and government can help, but they are not the only ways, or necessarily the most effective ways, to respond. What the current situation calls for most of all is a comprehensive effort by every college to do a better job of what most educators claim to be doing already.

Derek Bok is president emeritus of Harvard University. His new book, The Struggle to Reform Our Colleges, was published by Princeton University Press in September.