The Morality of Democratic Citizenship: Goals for Civic Education in the Republic's Third Century

R. Freeman Butts
Center for Civic Education
Calabasas, California
1988


Chapter Four
What the Schools Should Teach:
The Twelve Tables of Civism
(continued)

The opening of school and university records revealing grades, test scores, and confidential ratings to the scrutiny of students and their parents are examples of the new concern for privacy in education. The most notable and–as it turned out–controversial legislative protection was the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 sponsored by then Senator James Buckley, Republican of New York, and promoted most actively by the National Citizens' Committee on Education. Reacting to the revelations of Watergate and the unrest of the prior decade, Congress aimed at "opening up institutions," making them more accountable, and protecting the privacy of individuals. The Act denied funds to any school that prevented parents of children under 18 from having access to inspect and review any or all of their school records. Such records may not be released to others without written consent, except to school officials and to certain federal or state officials in connection with application for financial aid.

The primary intent of the law was to prevent abuses whereby careless or incorrect materials damaging to a student's chances in further education or career were left in the files; and to prevent releasing files to banks, credit agencies, police departments, and the like without the knowledge of the students or their parents. However, many college and university associations, led by the American Council on Education, protested vigorously that there were many ambiguities in the Act and that confidential recommendations would no longer be useful if the teachers and professors knew that the students could read them. As a result, a long process of rewriting the regulations in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was required.

But the right of privacy has moved much beyond matters of information about a person that should be kept private from government or outside surveillance. It has been applied increasingly to matters of intimate associations that have been deemed beyond the criminal investigation and punishment by law. While "privacy" is a term not contained in the Constitution or Bill of Rights (just as "education" is not), the right of privacy has been brought by the courts and the Supreme Court under the heading of freedom in the First Amendment, of liberty in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments as well as under the Fourth Amendment's protection of the person against search and seizure. The most controversial of these issues in the public eye have had to do with sexual relations, abortion, and homosexuality.

For several decades, the right of privacy in intimate relations among consenting adults has been protected by the Supreme Court when it set aside state laws that seek to place the authority of government on the side of certain traditional moral values regarding marriage and sex. 59  These have had to do with choices fundamental to heterosexual family life involving whether to many, whom to many, whether to conceive or bear a child, or have an abortion. The zone of protection of privacy has gradually been widened despite bitter opposition from pro-family, pro-life, and anti-abortion groups. Some believe, however, that the Supreme Court in June 1986 may have stopped the broadening when it made the distinction between heterosexual privacy and homosexual privacy, declaring that states have the right to outlaw private homosexual acts between consenting adults. 60  Some of the most bitter confrontations in the confirmation hearings on Judge Robert Bork arose over his views that the Supreme Court had wrongly ruled that the Constitution protects certain rights of privacy and had overstepped the boundaries of the original intent of the Framers.

While questions of the rights of privacy of students in elementary and secondary schools may once have seemed rather far removed from such constitutional questions, the demands for "teaching values and morality" have proliferated with the rise in juvenile pregnancy and drug abuse among teenagers. And inevitably, the issues of privacy versus authority and moral values versus excellence have spilled over into the schools. More than one federal judge has had to decide whether a student with a high academic record should be denied admission to the National Honor Society on the grounds that the she was pregnant and thus morally unfit for the intellectual honor. In Springfield, Illinois, District Judge J. Waldo Ackerman decided in 1984 that such an argument violated her rights under Title 1X of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. 61 

Still more to the point of student privacy from search and seizure was the celebrated case of New Jersey v. T.L.O. in January 1985. 62  The case arose when a vice principal in Piscataway High School searched a student's handbag suspecting that she had been smoking in the girls' lavatory, but found evidence of possible use and sale of marijuana. Were her rights to privacy under the Fourth Amendment's protection against search and seizure superior to the authority of school officials to uphold school rules and laws against use and sale of drugs? In a 6-3 decision, the Court affirmed a middle course. It denied that school officials are acting in place of parents (in loco parentis) and thus they do not have all the rights that parents have to control and discipline their children. But it also affirmed that school officials must have "reasonable grounds" for believing that their search of lockers and handbags or persons would provide evidence of breaking the rules or the law.

Students thus do have some, but not complete, constitutional rights to privacy, while teachers, not being parents, do have the obligation to apply the Fourth Amendment's protection of privacy to students, and thus they are in effect "officers of the Constitution"–and, I would say, are thus teachers of civism. Starting with such cases that apply directly to students and teachers in school, the theme of good citizenship could surely come alive and then lead to serious study in school, college, and teacher education.

If teachers are indeed to become teachers of civism, they need to know that the history of the meaning of the right to privacy for individuals includes an understanding of the obligation of government as well as of individuals to obey the law. In 1928 the Supreme Court upheld the right of the government to use wiretapping without a warrant to gain evidence against a suspected bootlegger named Roy Olmstead on the grounds, at least partly, that conversations were intangible and thus not material things that could be searched for and seized. Justice Brandeis wrote a classic dissent, which spoke eloquently of the government as "the potent, the omnipresent teacher" and thus must set the example for all citizens by itself obeying the law:

Decency, security and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means–to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal–would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this Court should resolutely set its face. 63 
This view of the obligation of government to obey the law eventually was upheld by the Court as early as 1967 and then again in the Watergate crimes. Whether it would continue to be upheld during 1987 in the proceedings and Investigations surrounding sales of arms to Iran and of diversion of such funds to aid the Contras of Nicaragua remain to be seen as of this writing. It was certainly clear that charges of the "privatization of foreign affairs" were recurringly disturbing to members of the Congressional Investigating Committees. But it was also clear that other matters of due process were also fundamentally involved.

Due Process

While privacy concentrates on a citizen's right to be left alone, due process has to do with the rights of persons who have been accused of wrongs or injuries they have allegedly committed. Due process values center on the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments with their presumption of an accused person's innocence and their provisions~pr protection of individual rights in criminal cases and civil suits at law. 64  In addition to the useful articles on due process in the Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, many new materials have been developed on the subjects of criminal justice and civil justice designed especially for use in secondary schools. 65 

Of special interest to educators has been the development in recent years of the concepts of due process as applied specifically to teachers, students, and parents. Again, there are excellent materials available. I think especially of the works of Isidore Starr on due process of law 66  and the compilations and interpretations in the books of David Schimmel and Louis Fischer. 67  Study of these materials focusing directly on due process rights for students and teachers would be of immediate interest to them and motivate them to go on to the broader realms of adult citizenship.

For example, I should think that students would be fascinated by the "children's rights" movement, which mushroomed with extraordinary speed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A survey of 24 states by The New York Times in October 1976 revealed that cities in all of those states had active legal groups working for children's rights. It was correctly predicted that aggressive advocacy groups would make this a major concern of federal courts and of the Supreme Court in the following decade in the effort to gain due process rights for children that would be protected by the Constitution lust as much as adult rights are protected:

What they hope to do is establish that a child has a right to a safe, stable home, to a reasonable education, to due process of law and to freedom from abuse and neglect. They hope, in other words, to prove that adults and institutions have obligations to the young as well as powers over them. 68 
A landmark case in the Supreme Court was decided in 1967 when the Court ruled that children hailed into juvenile courts must be given the same procedural rights that adults have with regard to notice of the charges, the right to a lawyer, the opportunity to confront and cross examine witnesses, and adequate warning of privileges against self-incrimination. This case had to do with a 15-year-old boy who had been sentenced to an industrial school in Arizona without such protection. 69  But in 1971 the Court ruled that trials by jury were not required in juvenile delinquency cases. 70 

During the course of the next decade the children's advocates gathered momentum both in research and in courts. One of the most active research organizations was the Children's Defense Fund of the Washington Research Project, and among the scores of legal groups the American Civil Liberties Union was prominent. State legislatures and the Congress were prodded to take action, notably through the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, sponsored by Senator Birch Bayh and passed in 1974, and the Education of All Handicapped Children Act of 1975.

The drive to achieve more protection of due process for children's private rights in the juvenile justice system was directed at students in schools as well as out-of-school youth. The key case here was Goss v. Lopez, which involved nine high school students in Columbus, Ohio, who were suspended (during racial demonstrations and unrest in 1971) for up to 10 days without a hearing as permitted under Ohio law. The students charged that the law was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment because it deprived them without due process of their property (their right to attend school) and of their liberty (by injuring their reputation without a hearing). In January 1975 the Court declared in a five to four decision the law to be unconstitutional and ruled that students in high school were to be granted due process in suspensions. This must include oral or written notice of the charges of misconduct, an explanation of the charges and the evidence against them, and an opportunity to give their side of the story before suspension from school. 71 

The dissent of four justices, all appointed by President Nixon and including Justice Rehnquist, argued that the injury to reputation by suspension was too trivial to constitute deprivation of a constitutionally protected liberty. The decision was an unwarranted intrusion of the federal courts into what was the proper arena of authority for state legislatures and education officials, i.e., school discipline.

But the Court majority held firm when it ruled a month later in an Arkansas case that school board members and educational officials who discipline students unfairly and without due process by claiming ignorance of students' constitutional rights may be liable for damages. 72  The Court argued that school officials must know the basic unquestioned constitutional rights of students. The same minority of four justices argued that this was too harsh a standard for laymen who serve as school board members and who are generally immune from civil suits for their good-faith actions as public officials. When the character of the Court changed with the retirement of Justice Douglas, the new "Burger majority" began to draw back from children's rights, or so it seemed, when the Court decided in April 1977 that even severe paddling of children in public schools was not a "cruel and unusual punishment" under the Eighth Amendment. 73 

I have stressed the due process rights of children and students in this section principally because it may be a subject that would quickly enlist the interest of students, but there is, of course, a vast literature on due process for adults, illustrated by the Encyclopedia articles listed in Note 64. Teachers and officials of public schools have now been put on notice that they must be concerned for the due process rights of children as well as their own. They need to be as clear as possible about the relative allocation of power and responsibility among the parents, the child, and the state whose officers they are. It is now clear that children have constitutional rights as well as adults, and that the state may not be too intrusive into the parent-child relationship, but the state also has the obligation to protect children, when necessary for the child's welfare, even against the parents if they neglect or abuse the child. Children do not have all the due process rights that adults have, but they do have more than they did before Goss.

Property

The purpose of including property rights as a table of civism is not to suggest that students or teachers must take law school courses in property or contracts, but rather to recognize the concept of property and ownership as a basic element in the forming of the American republic and to know some of the fundamental changes that have taken place during the past two hundred years. The emphasis is here not on a course in economics, or free enterprise, or comparative economic systems. Some excellent materials for school use have been developed along these lines, and California has now required a course in economics as part of its three years of history/social science to be required for graduation from high school. 74  Twenty-seven states now require some form of instruction in economics and 15 states require a separate course.

The emphasis here, I believe, is rather upon the rights and responsibilities of ownership of property in a democratic society, the relationships to ownership of individuals, groups, and the state with regard to matters of justice, freedom, equality, authority, privacy, and due process. Rudimentary concepts of "what's mine," "what's yours," and rules about acquiring, using, transferring, and disposing of tangible properties can be developed in early years of schooling, as the materials developed by Law in a Free Society have shown. 75  Rules against stealing, damaging, destroying the property of others and how arguments should be settled, equity achieved, and by whose authority play a large part in early schooling. The inclusion of intangible property (such as ideas or benefits or entitlements or labor) along with tangible property then leads to further consideration of the rights and responsibilities regarding property, the scope and limits of ownership, and other major subjects of legislative and judicial concern since the founding of the republic. 76  It is clear that most of the founders believed that property and liberty went hand in hand.

I can only hint at a most complex and controversial subject by referring to a few recent articles that illustrate a range of views. In an article on "The Commercial Republic" Betty Southard Murphy, former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, recalls how Madison and Hamilton drew from David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Locke to argue that property was a natural right and its security was a primary object of civil society in general and of the new American Constitution in particular. 77  Property was closely allied with liberty; government was to protect property as a means of protecting liberty; but government also needed to regulate commerce and property in the interests of protecting liberty and the common good. She further indicates how the coming of the industrial revolution, capital investment, and corporate monopolies led to the regulatory actions of Congress from the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 (really in keeping with the original philosophy of Madison and Hamilton) to the social legislation of the New Deal, a trend that the Supreme Court eventually approved.

Jack P. Greene, historian at Johns Hopkins, emphasizes the preeminence of private concerns in the colonial period emphasizing the "pursuit of happiness" over the pursuit of public office or "even the active occupation of a public space. So government in early America was conceived largely as a means to protect individuals from each other:

Even more Important, it was an agency for the protection of one's individual property in land, goods, and person, one's property in person including the right of striving, of pursuing (as well as protecting) one's interests, of seeking to alter one's place on the scale of economic well-being and social status. 78 
But, Greene points out, the American Revolution wrought a radical change. Prompted by bitter resistance to British regulation of trade and imposition of taxes, the War nevertheless resulted in unprecedented intrusion of the newly independent states into the traditional private realms. Through taxes, war service, restraints on trade among the states themselves, restraints on trade of the states by foreign countries, and lack of a strong central government all led to intrusive interventions by state legislatures that seemed to threaten the security of property, money, credit–and liberty of individuals and minorities at the will of majorities in state legislatures. Thus, the federal Constitution was designed at least in part to free persons and property from intrusion by the state governments.

Charles A. Lofgren follows on by emphasizing how the commercial problems among the states under the Articles of Confederation led to granting of powers to Congress in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution "to regulate Commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes." The twist of his argument, not often realized, is that the commerce clause was used by Congress in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and subsequently approved by the Supreme Court) to justify the federal government's role in protecting civil rights of interstate travelers regarding segregated accommodations and restaurants. 79 

And Kenneth M. Holland, political scientist at the University of Vermont, carries the argument to the new meanings of property increasingly defined under the welfare state to include social benefits and entitlements (including education). He refers to a formative article in 1964 by Charles Reich who argued that welfare benefits were no longer a charity or government largesse, but a new kind of property embracing rights that cannot be withdrawn or withheld without due process of law. 80  There is, of course, much controversy and debate over such broadening of the conception of property rights, whether justified on grounds of due process, privacy, equality, civil liberties, or justice. All the more reason for students and teachers alike to study these issues along with the other tables of civism. All the better to judge how far we have come from the compromise of the Constitution that regarded slaves as 3/5 of a person and the Dred Scott decision where they were viewed as non-persons, as tangible and exchangeable property belonging to another, the ultimate corruption of property rights.

James McGregor Burns and Richard B. Morris, co-chairs of Project '87, have included "Property Rights and Economic Policy" as one of the thirteen enduring constitutional issues. Under the heading "The Constitution and the Economy," they state:

Can the Constitution be utilized more effectively to provide economic security and promote the well-being of all Americans?

The Constitution was created not in a vacuum, but largely in response to the severe depression which the Articles of Confederation were powerless to arrest. Hence, the charter granted to Congress powers over commerce and taxation and included various fiscal prohibitions on the states in the full-faith-and-credit clause, the export­import clause, and the clause against impairing the obligation of contracts... Thus, from the start the government was a friend of private enterprise. The degree to which the Constitution has been employed to promote business enterprise and yet discipline its abuses has varied with national administrations and the personnel of the federal courts. But the power to promote the general welfare resides in the Constitution, and its use depends finally upon the public conception of its necessary and proper functions, especially in the times of economic crisis. Are we satisfied with its performance today? 81 

This brings us to the role of public opinion and participation.

Participation

The idea of participation has undergone a great deal of modification since the Declaration of Independence asserted that the lust powers of government derive from "the consent of the governed" and the Preamble of the Constitution made it dear that "We, the People" are sovereign. Much of the original notion of popular consent and of sovereignty of the people rested on the idea that the citizens would participate directly in the making of the laws and indeed in the making of the fundamental contract known as the Constitution itself. But the idea of citizen participation had to change from the days of a Creek polls with its few thousand citizens or a New England town meeting with its few hundred citizens. Debates over the meaning of democracy as direct participation by the entire body of citizens contrasted to a republic, meaning participation through selected representatives, has continued from the Constitutional Convention and the Federalist Papers down to the present time.

I am arguing here that the idea of participation as a key value in a democratic political community should be studied, debated, and discussed by students and teachers along with the practice of participatory experience as illustrated in the citizen participation movement in general and its counterpart in community action programs for students in schools. In addition to political campaigning, voting, and lobbying, "participation" of a more direct and active sort has become increasingly important since the decade of the 1960s. After all, sit­ins, lie­ins, mass demonstrations and marches, freedom rides, and civil disobedience were a critical part of the practice of participation in the civil rights movement. Draft­card burnings, demonstrations, and disruptions on college campuses highlighted "participatory democracy" when it became a by­word of the New Left movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The justification, costs, and benefits of these forms of a more direct participation movement along with those being advanced by thoughtful political scholars should be the subject of careful study and analysis in school and college.

But there is another model of participation that its advocates argue is more appropriate for the conditions of a modern technological society where the issues are so complicated that direct decisions by the masses of citizens cannot be the rule. In other words, a representative model of participation should be revitalized to take better account of the expertise of professionals who, along with elected officials, are held accountable by the public. In the mid­1970s, a good example of this model, along with criticism of direct participation reforms, was given by the late Stephen K. Bailey, political scientist in education and social policy at Harvard. He was reacting to the excesses on the campuses as well as the excesses of Watergate:

Fundamental to the success of a free society is widespread citizen participation in the political process. This participation may include voting; party and interest-group activities; performing such public functions as jury duty, testifying as a witness, and serving on public boards and commissions; and carrying out honorably the mandates of obeying laws and paying taxes. Beyond this participation, citizens contribute to the polity by keeping informed about public affairs and by sharing their views with other citizens and with elected representatives. An independent press and a rich smorgasbord of information purveyed by television, radio, journals of opinion, and books, are essential to the maintenance of a politically literate society.

Much of the real power of citizens, however, is latent. It lies in the perpetual threat to politicians of retribution at the polls if citizens, otherwise passive, are outraged by the direction or corruption of public life...

For reasons that are understandable in the sociology of reform, the air is filled with romantic half-truths about the possibilities and desirability of extending and increasing direct citizen participation beyond the activities and latencies just listed. Because the nation has recently been burned by abuses of power, some high-minded reformers and concerned educators have developed ("refurbished" is a better word) a democratic litany as superficially plausible as it is operationally specious and even dangerous. Two propositions seem to dominate: first, citizens should, wherever possible, participate directly in all political decision making; second, where they cannot participate directly, the decision processes of their representatives must be open to detailed and continuous public monitoring....

Because of the ultimate capacity of American citizens to make wise fundamental value choices, attempts to induce them into making superficial technical choices are ill-advised. Representative legislators and officials are supported by an educated bureaucracy, informed by myriad interest groups and experts, checked by an independent judiciary and a free press, and held accountable to the larger public through periodic elections, intermittent correspondence, and occasional face-to-face meetings. All this constitutes not only a reasonable apparatus for conducting modern public business in an economically and technologically complex free society like the United States, but also the only reasonable apparatus....

...democracy is meaningless if responsible majorities cannot be formed and given the power to govern. This is why the health of American political parties–the great organizers of pluralities and majorities–is so important. This is why the antiparty sentiments of the American public are so dangerous. America's general ignorance about the significance and the workings of its party system is a defect so serious as to threaten the viability of the entire democratic enterprise. 82 

In this same statement Bailey goes on to put great emphasis on the development of political skills in civic education programs. Here he is dose to the civic action programs proposed among many others by Edward Schwartz, city councilman in Philadelphia, and Fred Newmann, professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But Newmann has trouble with Bailey's representative approach, which I believe he would call a "pluralist elitist model" of participation. 83  Newmann argues,instead, for more emphasis on what he calls a "participatory idealist model" in which citizens, especially at the local or "micro" level, participate directly with others of like-minded concern for the common good. A sense of community can thus be achieved in ways not possible at the massive "macro" level of national or international issues. Newmann argues for revitalizing the "mediating institutions" (families, neighborhoods, churches, and voluntary organizations) that stand between the individual and the Goliaths of the corporate and governmental bureaucracies.

I am drawn to both of these views and hope that a defensible conception of participation can be worked out to take account of both, i.e., by increasing the role of mediating structures, including more attention to schools as nuclei for such structures at the local level, and by reinforcing the representative accountability of elected officials at the state and national levels. I confess that after living in California and witnessing Proposition 13 in 1978 and a rash of initiatives placed on the ballot since then, 1 tend to agree with Bailey regarding strengthening the party system and accountability of an open legislative deliberative process. "Direct participation" can be manipulated by special interests, selfish purposes, and massive expenditures as readily as unbalanced lobbying can achieve similar purposes through private pressures on legislators. Initiatives designed to amend constitutions by bypassing the deliberative process in legislatures, special conventions, or the courts can be as destructive of the public good as a singular reliance on legislative majorities or bureaucracies can be.

But I have also been heartened by a revitalizing of the movement to increase direct involvement of citizens and to increase the effectiveness of direct participation. A growing body of scholarly underpinning for this trend has begun to replace Bailey's undisguised contempt for the "romantic half-truths" of the starry-eyed reformers of the 1960s and early 1970s. One of the most persuasive of the more recent reformers is Benjamin R. Barber, political scientist at Rutgers, whose Strong Democracy has received wide attention. 84  He argues that representative democracy is scarcely democracy at all and that a strong form of participatory democracy of genuine self-government is not only compatible with the Constitution but the conditions of modern technological society. Ten of his proposed reforms are listed here:

  1. A national system of neighborhood assemblies to stimulate local discussion and deliberation, meeting often, and limited initially to being "talk shops."

  2. A national civic-communication cooperative using technology to stimulate discussion of regional and national issues through telecommunication networks.

  3. A civic videotext service and civic-education postal act to provide free and equal access of all citizens to TV channels for cable companies to air news, forums, and data, and for the postal service to distribute newspapers, journals, and books.

  4. Selective experiments to involve more citizens informally as surrogate judges in the system of deciding minor civil disputes and criminal offenses.

  5. A national initiative and referendum process to go beyond polling and discussion and exercise the power to make decisions regarding national issues on a multi-choice basis (not just yes or no) and based on more than one "reading" of such inflammatory issues as abortion and as complex as nuclear freeze.

  6. Selective experiments in electronic balloting limited at first to polling rather than final voting.

  7. Selective use of election to minor offices by lot, widely used in Greek city-states, used with caution but providing checks on the elitist models that favor wealth and power in election campaigns.

  8. Selective experiments with voucher systems to increase choice in schooling and housing, despite the dangers of libertarian privatizing of choice. (I found Barber's warning of the dangers of relying on the invisible market system more persuasive than his suggestion for its use in a voucher system.)

  9. Universal citizen service including the option of military as well as non-military training and service, for one or two years for all citizens between the ages of 18 to 26. A particularly interesting aspect of this proposal is a three-month training period including civic education in history, elementary social science, and parliamentary skills in preparation for urban, rural, and international projects (like the Peace Corps). Barber views citizen service as the most vital to strong democracy.

  10. Common action programs in the workplace and in the community along the lines of the cooperative movement.
Barber concluded his article in The Atlantic Monthly (from which these ten points are taken):

In sum, the potency of the reforms offered here lies in their capacity for reinforcing and balancing one another when implemented in concert. Adopted piecemeal, they would be assimilated into the representative system and used to further alienate, privatize, and disenfranchise citizens. They might even come to undermine the safeguards of liberal democracy. But taken together, these strong democratic institutions would resist the totalitarian temptations of collectivism and majoritarian tyranny no less than they would resist privatism and elite manipulation. They would check one another even as they strengthened participation, and they would reflect the force of traditional constitutional arrangements even as they served to enhance the quality of citizenship. The idea is not to do away with our democracy but to make it work. 85 
Some significant evidences of making democracy work along the lines of public participation are the National Issues Forums sponsored by the Domestic Policy Association under the stimulus and leadership of David Mathews, president of the Kettering Foundation. The network of several hundred organizations in DPA includes colleges, universities, and schools; libraries, museums, and historical associations; churches, synagogues and theological centers; community television stations; civic and professional organizations; student groups and senior citizen centers. The Forums are decentralized and autonomous, but they all discuss the same three issues each year, based on issue booklets prepared by the Public Agenda Foundation, which provide a basis for reading and discussion. Members of the Forums then meet at one of the presidential libraries and in Washington to bring the fruits of their discussions to the attention of national policy makers. But schools are not neglected. Especially pertinent here is the cooperative program with the National Council for the Social Studies to bring discussion of public policy issues into the social studies classrooms.

And a crucial long-range aspect of the National Issues Forums is that, since their beginning in 1982-83, they not only discuss such vital current issues as freedom of speech, the trade gap, U.S.-Soviet relations, health care, jobs and joblessness, social security, education, the deficit, environmental protection, nuclear arms, the farm crisis, crime, and immigration, but they also attempt, in David Mathews' words, to

renew in people an understanding of the principles of democracy in a way that will lead to more effective citizenship. Actually, that purpose is more fundamental than knowing about issues. There is reason to believe that it is difficult to understand major political issues without understanding the precepts on which our democracy was founded. 86 
To that end Mathews and his associates at DPA and the Kettering Foundation drew up a very useful publication on the principles and practices of democracy, which is used in the training of teachers as well as the Forum leaders. It not only presents Mathews' views on public participation, public talk, public knowledge, public judgment, public power, and public leadership but also contains a significant collection of extended quotations from historical sources like Pericles, Hobbes, Locke, Jefferson, Mill, Rousseau, and Tocqueville as well as from the new scholarship on citizenship, including Hannah Arendt, Benjamin Barber, Ronald Beiner, Bernard Murchland, Parker Palmer, Kenneth Prewitt, Michael Sandel, and Michael Walzer. Not least in importance are the citations in the bibliography of Mathews' own writings on civic intelligence. 87  And not least in the lexicon of "public talk" is the necessity of being able to have access to and discern reliable and valid knowledge.

Truth

On occasion I speak of "significant" truth in dealing with this table. Truth is truth, isn't it? The reason is that I have long been struck by the phrase as it was used by my former colleague at Teachers College, Lyman Bryson, a most effective leader of adult education discussions in forums, radio, and eventually on TV. After his retirement, Bryson edited a book that only a Renaissance man would attempt. He attracted a stellar group of physical scientists, social scientists, philosophers, and artists and authors to produce nothing less than An Outline of Man's Knowledge of the Modern World. In his introduction, Bryson coined the following phrases that have continuing relevance to civic education:

Modern man knows that knowledge is salvation. He realizes that he must learn to distinguish between the significant truth and the plausible falsehood or beguiling half-truth if he is even to survive. 88 
In an earlier section of this book, I tried to illustrate some examples of a "plausible falsehood" and "beguiling half-truths" in dealing with the history of the First Amendment, religion, and education. And we heard much in the Iran-Contra hearings of "plausible deniability." But the point here is that I am especially concerned with the public aspects of truth-telling and its importance for the security of a free society. Bryson's words continue to bear repeating:

It may still be true, as Alexander Pope wrote, that "a little learning is a dangerous thing," but we must also remember that those who are ignorant are always enslaved by those who know. Free men have the responsibility to choose their own way with the best knowledge they can get. 89 
The dangers of popular ignorance have been clear to see since the decay of the Greek democracies:

The educated classes became more and more learned and more and more alienated from the people. And the people fell prey to superstition, to fears, and to half-knowledge. As will always happen, there were clever and plausible demagogues fully prepared to take advantage of such weaknesses, and the Greek city-states were on their way to destruction. There are always three elements in any such situation in any country. They are the general public, more or less informed; the educated group, more or less aloof; and the politicians who, looking for a way to enrage the people against the "egg heads," take over. It can happen anywhere. And it can happen at any time.

Knowledge, freely available to a people who have the right and the will to use it wisely, is the only real safety this world provides. Freedom of the mind is the foundation of all other freedoms, and if it is lost the others are soon found not worth keeping. 90 

If we accept freedom of access to knowledge as the very basis of a democratic society, then the reliability and the validity of public knowledge become of primary importance. The search for truth becomes one of the major goals of democracy. As Meiklejohn put it:

When men decide to be self-governed, to take control of their behavior, the search for truth is not merely one of a number of interests which may be "balanced" on equal terms, against one another. In that enterprise, the attempt to know and to understand has a unique status, a unique authority, to which all other activities are subordinated.... One might as well speak of a judge in a courtroom as balanced against the defendant. Political self-government comes into being only insofar as the common judgment, the available intelligence, of the community takes control over all interests, only insofar as its authority over them is recognized and is effective. 91 
This "search for truth" and respect for truth should begin with the young child, the parent, and the teacher as they try to distinguish the "small fib" and the "white lie," which, while doing little harm to others, may become the "big lie," which may do irreparable harm to others. Then we come to the distinction between a falsification that arises from ignorance, partial knowledge, or mistake and the falsification that is deliberately undertaken with the intention to cover up one's own actions, to control the actions or beliefs of others, or to do actual harm to others. Thus, the laws against perjury and libel incorporate into the polity the moral sense that truth is better than lying and that deliberate untruths are punishable for the sake of the common good and public welfare.

The study and practice of truth-telling become mandates for civic learning at every stage of education for citizenship, not only on the legal stage of "telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," or the philosophical and scientific stage as defined by Mortimer Adler, preeminent encyclopedic philosopher for 50 years:

Just as the truth of speech consists in the agreement or correspondence between what one says to another and what one thinks or says to oneself, so the truth of thought consists in the agreement or correspondence between what one thinks, believes, or opines and what actually exists or does not exist in the reality that is independent of our minds and of our thinking one thing or another. 92 
In this complex and confusing arena of where, how, and why the truth should be told or not told, I can only hint at two aspects deserving of careful study. One has to do with the rights and responsibilities of citizens in seeking or telling the truth about one another; but even more important is the role of government in revealing or hiding the truth from its citizens.

On the first point, I recommend for starters a book entitled Speaking and Writing Truth by Robert S. Peck and Mary Manemann, staff members of the American Bar Association's Commission on Public Understanding About the Law. The book is designed to promote study of such topics as libel, obscenity and pornography, censorship of school library shelves, freedom of assembly and group libel, national security and the press, and legal issues involved in the confidentiality of newspaper reporters' sources. The book suggests various formats for such study, such as mock legislative hearings, town hall meetings, mock trials, and formal debates. Especially useful are the memoranda stating the latest constitutional interpretations affecting each topic. 93 

The second point is not only fraught with fundamental legal and constitutional principles but the most serious political values involved in the control of knowledge and truth by governments. A vast literature has accumulated, especially since World War II, documenting the ways in which totalitarian nations, both Communist and Fascist, and military dictatorships of virtually every hue have enforced controls over the flow of information and use of falsification and lying when it served the purposes of those in control. Deliberately deceiving the public is the essence of a closed society; every coup is immediately accompanied by closing down newspapers and taking over radio and TV stations. We have learned to expect the strangling of truth by dictatorships of the Left and the Right.

What is even more troublesome and alarming is the mounting concern about lack of truth-telling and "plausible deniability" by the governments of democratic and free societies. Major examples in the United States stem from deceptions about Vietnam emanating from the government under Lyndon Johnson, the attempted cover-ups of Watergate under Richard Nixon, and the still unresolved attempts at "disinformation" over Libya in 1986 and the drawn out investigations about who did and who did not tell the truth about Nicaragua and Iran in 1986 and 1987 under the Reagan administration. When trust in the veracity of the presidency and of major government officials declines, the very foundations of a free society are at risk.

As we emerged from the McCarthy era of slander, falsification, and lying, Waiter Lippmann wrote in 1954:

...there are rules of evidence and parliamentary procedure, there are codes of fair dealing and fair comment, by which a loyal man will consider himself bound when he exercises the right to publish opinions. For the right to freedom of speech is no license to deceive, and willful misrepresentation is a violation of its principles. It is sophistry to pretend that in a free country a man has some sort of inalienable or constitutional right to deceive his fellow men. There is no more right to deceive than there is to swindle, to cheat, or to pick pockets. It may be inexpedient to arraign every public liar, as we try to arraign other swindlers. It may be a poor policy to have too many laws which encourage litigation about matters of opinion. But, in principle, there can be no immunity for lying in any of its protean forms. 94 
It should be said that the principle applies no less to those in government who lie to the citizens than to those private persons who swindle on the stock market or on television. Citizens who cannot distinguish between significant truth and plausible falsehoods, beguiling half-truths, or outright lies cannot retain their freedom. Nor can a government that lies to its citizens continue to serve justice and equality, maintain its legitimate authority, or even expect loyalty from its citizens.

Patriotism

This is one of the most difficult of the cohesive values to make clear and persuasive to American students and teachers in the light of the traumatic events of the past two decades. Our predecessors from the time of the American Revolution spoke of the individual's obligation for the public good in terms of civic virtue, of military service, and of patriotism and loyalty to the new emerging nation as well as duty, discipline, and obedience to moral and religious commandments. These were powerful sanctions for civic education prorgams for generations, but they have been weakened in the past 50 years. 95  The military defense of the nation as a reason for civic education probably reached its peak in World War II, when a vast majority of the American people genuinely believed that defense against the Nazi and Fascist aggression and the inhuman persecution of minorities justified war on moral grounds. 96  But the Korean War seemed less immediately critical to the safety and security of the United States; and the Vietnam experience convinced large numbers that it was an immoral war and thus not justified as a reasonable cause for patriotism or military service.

In a quite different way, religious sanctions for civic education have also declined, largely as a result of the very religious and sectarian diversity that made necessary the secularization of public schools and the withdrawal of direct or devotional religious instruction. And the ideological cold war against world-wide communism as a rallying ground for patriotism and civic education, which was so virulent in the McCarthy era, 97  was somewhat muted during an era in which not only co-existence with the Soviet Union but detente in military competition and efforts to conclude strategic arms agreements took on high priority in foreign affairs of both Republican and Democratic administrations. Opening of cultural relations programs with the Soviet Union, the Peoples' Republic of China, and other communist nations reduced the value of anti-communism as the principal justification for civic education. The international crises over terrorism, Lebanon, Libya, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Iran began to stoke anti-communism in the 1980s, but, curiously, this did not become a major stimulus to civic education as it had in the past.

A sense of obligation and responsibility manifested by loyalty, patriotism, discipline, and duty is still needed as a social and political glue if the very structure of the democratic polity is to persist, let alone thrive. The schools, of course, cannot alone instill values of personal obligation and responsibility if and when the other major social institutions are preaching and practicing advancement of self and private interests, an argument so persuasively advanced by Robert Bellah and his colleagues. 98  But this is no reason for the schools not to try, by reassessing what they can do and by seeking the aid of all community and public groups that are committed to the value claims of the democratic polity.

My argument is essentially that loyalty, patriotism, discipline, and duty should be defined in terms of the richest fulfillment of the total set of democratic values in the Twelve Tables of Civism. The qualities of obligation or responsibility, now often thought of as old-fashioned or out-of-date, should be judged by the extent to which individuals seek to put them into practice in their own lives and are ready to defend or promote for others the concepts of justice, freedom, equality, diversity, authority, privacy, participation, due process, significant truth, property rights, and intemational human rights.

The time is past due for bringing patriotism out of the educational closet. The eminent American historian, Merle Curti, put it much more delicately in the Preface to the reissue in 1968 of his The Roots of American Loyalty:

The related ideas of "Americanism," patriotism and loyalty have held a large and important place in our public thought and discussion. When this book was published in 1946 no systematic study had been made of either the roots or the growth of American patriotism and loyalty.... Perhaps the academic world felt that the whole matter of patriotism belonged to the twilight zone of the intellect. 99 
Yet, there are signs of a growing effort on the part of some elements in the academic world to bring patriotism out of "the twilight zone of the intellect" and into the daylight of scholarly analysis as well as public discussion.

This is the major contribution of The Reconstruction of Patriotism by Morris Janowitz, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Sociology and in the College at the University of Chicago. The book will be viewed with suspicion by some in the educational profession simply because they assume automatically that anyone who believes in patriotism as a political value must be coming from a conservative or reactionary ideology. Some historians of education will find fault with some of his history of citizenship education (as I do). Some social scientists will reject his arguments that behavioral and empirical opinion research has damaged education for citizenship, and many will think, "Here we go for indoctrination again."

But I believe that this book should be carefully read, critically analyzed, and used as a springboard for forthright discussion and research to improve our present understanding of patriotism, what role schools should play in promoting civic knowledge and commitment to democratic values, and what appropriate responsibility rests with those who prepare teachers in colleges and universities.

I believe that his book is also important, because it, like Curti's, makes explicit that any defensible conception of citizenship in a democracy must take account of the dynamics as well as the dangers of patriotic sentiments and loyalties and must spell out the educational means by which they are nurtured and energized. Curti defined patriotism as "love of country, pride in it and readiness to make sacrifices for what is considered its best interest." 100 

At the very beginning of his book, Janowitz relates the idea of allegiance and obligation directly to the idea of citizenship and civic education:

A citizen is a person who owes allegiance to a specific government and is entitled to protection from that government and to the enjoyment of certain rights. It is widely recognized that effective citizenship rests on a rigorous and viable system of education which informs the individual of his civic rights and obligations. The long term trend, however, has been to enhance citizen rights without effective articulation of citizen obligations. To restore a meaningful balance between the two is, in my view, the core issue in citizenship and civic education. 101 
The theme of "restoring a meaningful balance" between rights and obligations runs throughout the book. It is a theme that is readily applauded by conservative sources, whether organized on a large scale by politicians in Washington, business, or religion, or whether rising from myriad localities, schools, and families in the call for more discipline, responsibility, hard work, and character. But it is a theme that deserves better than knee-jerk rejection by liberals or mindless acceptance by conservatives.

In the bulk of his book Professor Janowitz deals with the major institutions for civic education: military service as civic education; civic education in school and college; and national or community service as agencies of civic education.

While the sections devoted to schooling may be of greatest interest to educators, it is salutary to be reminded of the role of the citizen-soldier in the American Revolution in which "military service emerged as the hallmark of citizenship and citizenship as the hallmark of political democracy." 102  Janowitz argues that with the decline of universal, obligatory military service through conscription and the rise of an all-volunteer (or mercenary) force, the contribution of the armed forces to civic education has also declined. With regard to the idea of national service, Janowitz speaks wistfully of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the failure to update the CCC as well as the Job Corps, VISTA, the Teacher Corps, and the Peace Corps.

Perhaps Janowitz was more prophetic than he knew. There are signs today of a revival of enthusiasm for public and community service on college campuses. New interest in youth service is illustrated in a research study completed in 1986 for the Ford Foundation by Richard Dandg and Peter Stanton in which four models are outlined: mandatory school-based programs; a national draft, including an option for military or civilian service; federally supported all-voluntary service (as introduced by Con- gressman Leon Panetta (Democrat, California) in the 98th, 99th and 100th Congresses); and universal service that could be completed at any age. 103 

Finally, in his chapter on "Academic Frontiers in Civic Education" Janowitz argues that the decisive element in weakening civic education after 1945 was the increasing reliance upon the behavioral sciences and a behavioral science analysis of contemporary society: "In effect, civic education became mainly the study of a series of discrete 'social' and 'political' problems plus an overview of contemporary pattems of political participation and attitudes;" and "the social science base of civic education increasingly ignored the balance between rights and obligations." 104 

In summary, Janowitz puts the matter this way:

Social and political realism cannot substitute for self-critical patriotism and enlightened nationalism that is, exposure to the materials of civic education designed to enhance civic conscious-ness. In short, if civic education is designed to prepare the student for responsible social and political obligations, it must be more than a series of calls for increased political participation. 105 
This is in effect calling for a more normative approach to the idea of citizenship and to civic education. It represents a growing and, I think, a most important recent trend by liberal as well as conservative journalists and scholars in several of the academic disciplines who are seeking to reformulate a valid normative meaning for citizenship.

I can mention only a few examples of a renewed interest in patriotism across the spectrum of ideological and political points of view: Michael Walzer's course on political obligation at Harvard in the late 1960s; political scientist Duane E. Smith (UCLA) on the case for patriotism in 1973; John W. Gardner on patriotism in his book on Morale in 1978; Norman Lear on founding People for the American Way in 1981, exclaiming "Call me a liberal or a moderate or a progressive, but it's my flag too;" Jack Beatty, in 1981 an editor of The New Republic and now a senior editor at the Atlantic, on "The Patriotism of Values" that are liberal and humane and should not be given away to conservatives; R.W. Apple, Jr. on "New Stirrings of Patriotism" upon returning to the United States in 1983 after seven years in London for The New York Times; Republican Senator Onin G. Hatch on "Civic Virtue" as he viewed the founders of the republic; Neely D. McCarter, president of the Pacific School of Religion, calling on the mainline churches of America in 1986 to reaffirm their role in promoting patriotism; and the call by a newly organized Patriotic Majority to enact a patriotic agenda for the 100th Congress beginning in 1987. 106 

The patriotic revival associated with President Reagan's appeal in the early 1980s, the invasion of Grenada in 1983, the Olympic Games of 1984, and innumerable campaign speeches in 1984 apparently had given the patriotic edge to conservatives. The direct attack by the Patriotic Majority on the policies and actions of the first six years of the Reagan administration warned that liberals would make a "rebirth of patriotism" a fundamental plank in their agenda for foreign and military policies, economic and environmental policies, civil liberties, and international human rights.

The longer term test, however, will be whether American education can strengthen the sense of community and cohesion among succeeding generations through stress upon civic virtue and personal obligation for the public good without weakening the struggle for freedom, diversity, due process, and human rights. The closet door may be opening a bit in the academic world and in the public press, but the task of reconstructing the idea of patriotism and citizenship is formidable, and the task of designing appropriate educational programs dedicated to "civic consciousness," or "civic intelligence," or "civic learning" is even more monumental. Important as Fourth of July statements may be, useful as scholarly analysis like that of Janowitz and others undoubtedly is, the real burden of carrying out long-term effective programs of civic education rests with professionals in education collaborating with their academic and public counterparts.

The book by Janowitz and the shorter articles mentioned here may help to legitimize debate about patriotism and citizenship in the academic world, but they do not formulate curriculum content or substance for educational programs in the schools, in the colleges, or in teacher education.

Human Rights

Today, the obvious interdependence of the world requires that civic virtue or patriotism should encompass a wider moral element than only the need to defend the American public order when it is threatened from within our national boundaries or from without. It reminds us that the super-jingoistic patriotism, which in the past has often been narrowly conceived as loyalty or obligation to one's own nation, right or wrong, must now be imbued with a broader outlook that honors the world's diversity of peoples but also seeks a new and larger cohesion based upon the concepts of common human rights.

So I come, finally, to a value for American civic education that I believe requires a basic change in our historical views and values of citizenship. The idea of national citizenship must now take account of the vast changes in the world situation that have burst on our consciousness since the end of World War II. Increasingly popular terms to define the set of phenomena that began with Wendell Wilke's "One World" in the 1940s are now "global interdependence," "global perspectives," or simply "global education." 107 

I recognize that the term "global education" has been attacked by political and religious conservatives on the ground that it seeks to denigrate true American values, or that it sees no superior values in the American way of life and thus preaches a kind of "moral relativism" or "moral neutrality." 108  I hope that no one could read and understand the first eleven of my tables of civism and still think that I see no superior values in the ideals of American citizenship. But in preference to global education I advocate the term "international human rights" or simply "human rights" as a device to broaden civic education for Americans and yet not get overwhelmed by trying to cover all aspects of study of all the world's peoples and cultures.

In fact, I come very dose to the definition of global education set forth in the report by the Study Commission on Global Perspectives in Education chaired by Clark Kerr, which outlines what students need to know to function as citizens of the United States in an increasingly interdependent world. 109  In this effort, the United States should not try blatantly to export our "cultural" or "political imperialism" to peoples who have chosen a different way. But if the world is truly interdependent and U.S. citizenship is genuinely devoted to democratic values, then global study should be searching for and preferring democratic answers to global issues as well as simply understanding the reasons for diverse views.

The idea and practice of citizenship itself as conceived in various nations could be a major theme for this study. What does citizenship mean for Christians and Moslems in Lebanon, for blacks in South Africa, for Jews and dissidents in the Soviet Union, for ethnic and language groups in India, Sri Lanka, China, or Nigeria, and for new immigrants to the United States? A greater attention to human rights would give opportunities to address the positive aspects of democratic values and the obstacles or threats to such rights in various national approaches to citizenship. There is not only the danger of trying to do too much in too scattered and superficial a fashion, but there is also the danger of competition in the school curriculum between civic education, global education, and multicultural education. These three efforts to redirect the school curriculum are often carried out independently of one another. There has been too little effort to interweave the three and too little recognition of their natural affinity. Indeed, they are often disparate, and even sometimes antagonistic, in their impacts or pressures upon the schools.

Global education includes a variety of efforts to internationalize the perspectives of American citizens in light of the realities of global interdependence of nation states and the need for a peaceful and secure world community. Multicultural education arose from the pluralist effort to enhance the distinctive cultural traditions of the different ethnic and racial groups that comprise American society. And the revival of citizenship education in the effort to generate greater social and civic cohesion and commitment to the historic democratic political values basic to a common American citizenship has often neglected the other two and been neglected by them. Clearly, these three movements all directly address the national interest; they all three should aim to improve our capacities for living humanely and justly with one another; they all three aim to improve our understanding of intercultural and international conflict and our ability to resolve it. 110 

Civic education for interdependence means that basic civic literacy for American citizenship must include a reasoned awareness and understanding of the varying ways of life in other cultures, the emerging world economic and political system, the role of international organizations in intemational cooperation, and the intimate ways in which global problems impinge upon American communities, large and small. Basic questions of foreign policy and America's role in the world constitute a major share of the judgments that American political leaders must make and of the judgments that American citizens must in turn make of their political leaders and their policies. For that reason, the effectiveness of American foreign policy can be no better than the political sophistication of the decisions Americans make about their leaders. And the quality of political decisions made by leaders and citizenry alike may well be more important than a single-minded stress on making America competitive in a world-wide economic marketplace.

The historic pluralism of American society is a striking example not only of the international comings and goings of millions of people across the continents and across the seas but of the successes of the United States in building a genuinely cohesive as well as pluralist democratic society despite persistent racism, nativism, segregation, discrimination, and inequality. 111  While a threefold stress on civic community in the United States, on cultural pluralism, and on the need for world community are important, I believe that we should pay particular attention to building a healthy democratic American polity, serving well the values of cultural pluralism at home and global interdependence abroad.

My principal argument, then, is that these three major drives in American education are rightly interdependent; that keeping these movements separate is essentially artificial and constitutes a distortion of the logic that binds them together; that reasoned awareness of and respect for disparate cultures is increasingly necessary in a world of international conflict; that international security for the United States is inseparably tied to the maintenance of an intelligent, informed citizenry; and that an intelligent citizenry is necessary to the maintenance of a society free of intolerance, racism, sexism, and ethnocentric behavior.

I believe that we should tly to select from the almost infinite masses of information those elements of world studies that focus on international human rights and illuminate the other eleven concepts in my table of civic values. Study of international human rights should be linked to questions of justice, freedom, equality, diversity, authority, privacy, due process, truth-telling, property rights, and participation, illustrating how these values are honored or violated in various nations and in the relations among nations.

Examples of the interplay between cohesive civic values and diversifying pluralist values are especially pertinent in the realm of human rights. They can come from the worst examples of genocide culminating in the Holocaust of Hitler's Germany, or the devastation resulting from arbitrary rule in Amin's Uganda, or outbreaks of terrorism all over the world. They can come from positive gains for human rights in Poland, Argentina, and elsewhere. They can come from study of dissidents seeking and being denied freedom and due process in Iran, China, Cuba, or the Soviet Union, or in military dictatorships in the Philippines or Haiti or Chile.

And closer to home, they can be illustrated by the problems for human rights arising from the influx of Cubans to Florida and Mexicans, Vietnamese, and Koreans to California. Historic problems of immigration, nativism, segregation, and integration are all revived in contemporaty confrontations over international as well as domestic human rights. In accordance with a law passed by the California Assembly in 1985 the State Department of Education drew up and the State Board of Education adopted in September 1987 a model curriculum on Human Rights and Genocide to be incorporated in existing courses in histoty/social science for grades 7­12 inclusive. And, I would urge that a complementary study of some of the basic documents that set forth contemporary statements of international humanliiqhts should be undertaken for the sake of comparison and contrast. 112 

The twofold aim of such study is to consider how to improve the American political system as well as to consider how the United States could play a more constructive and humanitarian role in the world. Of particular interest and importance would be a study of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 in which the Soviet Union and its East European Allies agreed with the North Atlantic Treaty Nations to promote human rights. A comparison of the Final Act with the earlier UN formal documents and with later practices as revealed and discussed at general meetings in succeeding years at Belgrade, Madrid, and Vienna and at a special meeting in Ottawa in 1985 would reveal how far short the Communist nations have fallen from the agreement. Yet, the release of Anatoly Shcharansky, Yuri Orlov, and Andrei Sakharov under Mikhail Gorbachev might also reveal that steadfast promotion of the ideals of human rights was having an effect.

If, in addition, the study of international human rights could follow something like the "Journey Among Tyrants" reported by A.M. Rosenthal, formerly executive editor of The New York Times, the road to civic learning might lead to "standing up for political freedom" against the tyrannies of both left and right, both at home and abroad. 113  Study of the fate of the twelve tables of civism could enhance understanding of South Korea, Haiti, Indonesia, Chile, and South Africa as well as of the Soviet Bloc, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, or Cuba.

A concerted revival of this kind of civic learning at all levels of the educational system could most appropriately take place during the decades that begin with the two-hundredth anniversary of the framing and adoption of the Constitution and of America's own blueprint for a Bill of Human Rights

One of the most extensive and detailed programs that I know about is the two-year course on global studies required in grades 9 and 10 in New York State. The rationale is stated as follows:

The syllabus for grades 9-10 provides students with the opportunity to study other nations and their cultures within a framework that is designed to develop a global perspective. This approach aims to cultivate in students knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to function effectively in a world characterized by ethnic diversity, cultural pluralism, international and domestic violence, and increasing interdependence.

The two-year program is predicated on the assumption that competency for citizenship in the next century has two elements. The first is that the role of Western Europe in shaping our own values and institutions must not be neglected. For example, the Judeo-Christian values of justice, the Greek and Roman contributions to the idea of citizenship, the Enlightenment attitude of inquiry, and the English definition of civil liberties and the sharing of fundamental powers should be fully explored.

The second is that citizenship education must now transcend its customary limitations to the institutions and societal patterns that characterize Western Civilization....

These citizenship competencies require the acquisition of a baseline of knowledge of the major heritages of humankind and of the historical forces that have shaped them. In this regard, no one culture can serve as a surrogate of another. 114 

The two-year course deals with seven major regions of the world and their interrelationships: Africa, South and Southeast Asia, East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Five themes are suggested to run through the study of each region: the physical/historical setting; the dynamics of change; the process of nation-building; economic development; and the region within the global context. This regional or area-studies approach contrasts sharply with the chronological world history approach characterizing the California framework. Whichever is chosen, I believe the citizenship theme offers a coherent thread of understanding for students faced with vast amounts of sheer information.

As the United States embarks upon its third century, the role of education is fortunately regarded as a high priority in our national life. There are clamorous demands that education must sharpen the competitive edge of the United States in the world economy. Others argue that the schools should return to the safe harbors of traditional moral and religious values as embodied in the Judeo-Christian heritage and Western civilization. Still others call for piloting the schools through the uncharted shoals of moral choice by means of cultural literacy, intellectual excellence, or critical thinking. These views have their many persuasive advocates, but I believe there is a still more cogent priority.

This book argues for revitalizing the historic civic mission of American education. This means explicit and continuing study of the basic concepts and values underlying our democratic political community and constitutional order. The common core of the curriculum throughout school and college years should be the morality of citizenship. For this goal to be realized, scholarly study of civic morality should be the first priority in the liberal and professional education of the teaching profession. In the long run, the intellectual, moral, and political agenda for American education, its curriculum, its common life, and its governance must rest upon the study and practice of the obligations as well as the rights of democratic citizenship.


Postscript


59. Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965); and Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).  back 

60. Bowers v. Hardwicke, 106 S Ct 2841 (1986).  back 

61. Wort v. Vierling, U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois, September 1984; 778 F 2nd 1233.  back 

62. New Jersey v. T.L.O., 469 U.S. 325 (1985).  back 

63. Olmstead v. Connecticut, 277 U.S. 438 (1928), p. 438.  back 

64. Levy, Encyclopedia of the American Constitution; see articles entitled: Children's Rights, Double Jeopardy; Exclusionary Rule; Fair Trial; Fifth Amendment; Fourteenth Amendment; In Re Gault; Goss v. Lopez; Habeas Corpus; Juvenile Proceedings; Loyalty Security Programs; Miranda Ruling; Procedural Due Process, Civil; Procedural Due Process, Criminal; Right Against Self-Incrimination; Trial by Jury.  back 

65. Law in a Free Society, Justice (Calabasas, Calif.: Center for Civic Education, 1979); Constitutional Rights Foundation, Living Law: Civil Justice (New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1978); Constitutional Rights Foundation, Living Law: Criminal Justice (New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1978); National Street Law Institute, Street Law: A Course in Practical Law (St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing Co., 1975; 3rd ed., 1986); and American Bar Association, Update on Law-Related Education, Spring 1987 and Fall 1983.  back 

66. Isidore Starr, Justice: Due Process of Law (St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing Co., 1981).  back 

67. Louis Fischer and David Schimmel, The Civil Rights of Teachers (New York: Harper and Row, 1973); David Schimmel and Louis Fischer, The Civil Rights of Students (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); and David Schimmel and Louis Fischer, The Rights of Parents in the Education of Their Children (Columbia, Md.: National Committee for Citizens in Education, 1977).

See also, Alan Levine, et al., The Rights of Students: the Basic ACLU Guide to a Student's Rights (New York: Richard Baron, 1973); David Rubin, The Rights of Teachers (New York: Bantam Books, 1984); and Martin Guggenheim and Alan Sussman, The Rights of Young People (New York: Bantam, 1985).  back 

68. Barbara Campbell, "Children's Rights Drive Is Centered in Courtroom," The New York Times, October 31, 1976. For an excellent variety of articles on a wide range of childrens' rights, introduced by Senator Walter F. Mondale, see two special issues of the Harvard Educational Review, November 1973 and February 1974.  back 

69. In Re Gault, 387 U.S. 1 (1967).  back 

70. McKiever v. Pennsylvania, 403 U.S. 528 (1971).  back 

71. Goss v. Lopez, 419 U.S. 565 (1975).  back 

72. Wood v. Strickland, 420 U.S. 308 (1975).  back 

73. Ingraham v. Wright, 430 U.S. 651 (1977).  back 

74. See, for example, Elmer U. Clawson, Our Economy: How It Works (Menlo Park, Calif.: Addison-Wesley, 1984); and Model Curriculum Standards: Grades Nine through Twelve (Sacramento, Calif.: California State Department of Education, 1985), pp. HS 51-59.  back 

75. See Law in a Free Society, Property (Calabasas, Calif.: Center for Civic Education, 1974); and American Bar Association Update on Law-Related Education, Spring 1987.  back 

76. See Levy, Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, articles entitled Affected with a Public Interest; Contract Clause; Dartmouth College v. Woodward; Dred Scott v. Sandford; Due Process of Law; Economic Liberties; Economic Regulation; Eminent Domain; Freedom of Contract; Natural Rights; Obligation of Contracts; Police Power; Public Purpose; Substantive Due Process; Social Compact; State Police Power; Taking of Property. Matters of property are treated extensively in Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum; The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985).  back 

77. Betty Southard Murphy, "The Commercial Republic and the Dignity of Work," National Forum, Fall 1984, pp. 49-52.  back 

78. Jack P. Greene, "The Pursuit of Happiness: the Private Realm, Commerce, and the Constitution," this Constitution, Fall 1985, p. 40.  back 

79. Charles A. Lofgren, "To Regulate Commerce: Federal Power under the Constitution," this Constitution, Spring 1986, pp. 4-11. See also Kenneth M. Dolbeare and Linda J. Medcalf, "The Political Economy of the Constitution," this Constitution, Spring 1987, pp. 4-10.  back 

80. Kenneth M. Holland, "The Constitution and the Welfare State," this Constitution, Summer 1986, pp. 18-23. See also Charles A. Reich, "The New Property," Yale Low Journal, April 1964, esp. pp. 771-774 and 778-786.  back 

81. James McGregor Bums and Richard B. Morris, "The Constitution: Thirteen Crucial Questions," this Constitution, September 1983, p. 8.  back 

82. Stephen K. Bailey, The Purposes of Education (Bloomington, Ind.: Phi Delta Kappa, 1976), pp. 84-94. This extract from Chapter 6, entitled "The Enveloping Polity" was substantially reprinted in National Task Force on Citizenship Education, Education for Responsible Citizenship (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), pp. 32-40.  back 

83. See Edward Schwartz, The Institute Papers: Towards a Recovery of Civic Idealism (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Civic Values, 1975) and the analysis in Robert N. Bellah, et. al., Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), esp. pp. 214-218; and Fred Newmann, "Visions of Participation to Guide Community Learning," unpublished paper prepared for the Banff conference on Community and the School Curriculum, sponsored by the Department of Secondary Education, University of Alberta, November 9, 1978. For discussion of "mediating structures," see also, Peter Berger, To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures and Public Policy (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1977).  back 

84. Benjamin R. Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1984).  back 

85. Benjamin R. Barber, "Voting is Not Enough," Atlantic Monthly, June 1984, p. 52. Compare with Levy, Encyclopedia of the American Constitutlon, articles on Citizenship, Popular Sovereignty, and Voting Rights.  back 

86. David Mathews, Democracy: Principles and Practices (Dayton, Ohio: Domestic Policy Association, June 1987.  back 

87. Ibid., pp. 138-139. See also David Mathews, "The Independent Sector and the Political Responsibilities of the Public" (New York: Spring Research Forum of the Independent Sector, March 19, 1987).  back 

88. Lyman Bryson, ed., An Outline of Man's Knowledge of the Modern World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), p. 3.  back 

89. Ibid., p. 14.  back 

90. Ibid., p. 26.  back 

91. Alexander Meiklejohn, Political Freedom, pp. 59-60.  back 

92. Mortimer Adler, Six Great Ideas: Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Liberty, Equality, Justice (New York, Macmillan, 1981), p. 34.  back 

93. Robert S. Peck and Maty Manemann, eds., Speaking and Writing Truth: Community Forums on the First Amendment (Chicago: American Bar Association, 1985). See also Levy, Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, articles on Libel and the First Amendment, Seditious Libel.  back 

94. Waiter Lippmann, Essays in the Public Philosophy (New York: New American Library, 1956).  back 

95. For a variety of views calling for a reassertion of religion in public affairs, see Parker Palmer, The Company of Strangers: Christians and the Renewal of America's Public Life (New York: Crossroad, 1981); Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1984); A. James Reichley, Religion in American Public Life (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985); and Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Cromartie, eds., Piety and Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1987).  back 

96. A classic statement on the obligation of schools to teach democracy in a world at war was made by an erstwhile social studies teacher before he won a Pulitzer Prize for his Tales of the South Pacific. See James A. Michener, "What Are We Fighting For?" Progressive Education, November 1941, pp. 342-348; reprinted in The Educational Forum, Summer 1987, pp.331-339.  back 

97. See Levy, Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, articles on Loyalty Oath, Loyalty-Security Programs, McCarthyism.  back 

98. Robert N. Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment In American Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1985). For curriculum materials stressing citizens' obligations, kindergarten through grade 12, see Law in a Free Society, Responsibility (Calabasas, Calif.: Center for Civic Education, 1979).  back 

99. Merle Curti, The Roots of American Loyalty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946; reissued by Atheneum Press, New York, 1968), p. vii.  back 

100. Ibid., p. xiv.  back 

101. Morris Janowitz, The Reconstruction of Patriotism: Education for Civic Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); paperback edition,l985,p.ix.  back 

102. Ibid., p. 30.  back 

103. Richard Dantig and Peter Stanton, National Service: What Would It Mean? (New York: Ford Foundation, 1986).  back 

104. Janowitz, Patriotism, p. 145-146.  back 

105. Ibid., p. 145.  back 

106. Michael Walzer, Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War, and Citizenship (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970); Duane E. Smith, "The Case for Patriotism," Freedom at Issue, May-June 1973, pp. 9-13; John W. Gardner, Morale (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978); People for the American Way, Quarterly Report, June 1981, p. 1; Jack Beatty, "The Patriotism of Values," The New Republic, July 4 and 11, 1981; R. W. Apple, Jr., "New Stirrings of Patriotism," The New York Times Magazine, December 11, 1983; Orrin G. Hatch, "Civic Virtue: Wellspring of Liberty," National Forum, Fall 1984, pp. 34-38; Neely D. McCarter "The Church and Patriotism," Pacific School of Religion Bulletin, Fall 1986; The Patriotic Majority, "Toward a Patriotic Rebirth: A Patriotic Agenda for the 100th Congress," adv., The New York Times, January 25, 1987, p. 24.  back 

107. For emphasis on global interdependence as it relates to education see, for example, Lee Anderson, Schooling and Citizenship in a Global Age (Bloomington, Ind.: Mid-America Program for Global Perspectives in Education, 1978); the Interdependence Series published by the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, especially Ward Morehouse, A New Civic Literacy: American Education and Global Interdependence (Princeton, N.J.: Aspen Institute, October 1975).

For more current studies, see the special issues on international human rights and global education in Social Education, September 1985 and October 1986; the publications of Global Perspectives in Education, 45 John Street, New York, N.Y. 10038; Social Science Education Consortium, Boulder, Colo.; Center for Teaching Intemational Relations, University of Denver; Foreign Policy Association, New York City; Michigan Department of Education, Lansing; and New York State Education Department, Albany.  back 

108. See for example, Gregg L. Cunningham, "Blowing the Whistle on 'Global Education', " (Denver: Regional Office, U.S. Department of Education, 1986). See the responses to Cunningham's study by Barry Simmons, director of the Center for Teaching International Relations at the University of Denver, and Andrew Smith, president of Global Perspectives in Education, in The Social Studies Professional, September/October 1986. In January 1987 the board of directors of the National Council for the Social Studies unanimously adopted the report of its Ad Hoc Committee on Global Education replying to the Cunningham study, "Global Education: In Bounds or Out?" Social Education, April/May 1987, pp. 242-249.  back 

109. Study Commission on Global Education, The United States Prepares for Its Future: Global Perspectives in Education (New York: Global Perspectives in Education, 1987).  back 

110. See, e.g., R. Freeman Butts, "International Human Rights and Civic Education," Margaret Stimmann Branson and Judith Torney-Purta, eds., International Human Rights, Society, and the Schools (Washington, D.C.: National Council for the Social Studies, 1982). For other publications of mine on international education, see R. Freeman Butts, American Education in International Development (New York: Harper and Row, 1963); "Teacher Education and Modernization" in George Z.F. Bereday, ed., Essays on World Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969); "Civilization as Historical Process: Meeting Ground for Comparative and International Education," Comparative Education, Vol. III, No. 3, June 1967; "America's Role in International Education" in Harold G. Shane, ed., The United States and International Education, 68th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); and "Teacher Education in Africa: Modernization and Traditionalism Reconsidered" in Andrew Taylor, ed., Insights Into African Education: the Karl W. Bigelow Memorial Lectures (New York: Teachers College Press, 1984), pp. 75-104.  back 

111. See, e.g., Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York: Knopf, 1986).  back 

112. For a useful compendium of the United Nations documents, see Thomas Burgenthal and Judith V. Tomey, International Human Rights and International Education (Washington, D.C.: U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, 1976); see also Howard D. Mehlinger, ed., UNESCO Handbook for the Teaching of Social Studies (London: Groom Helm, 1981); Donald Vandenberg, Human Rights in Education (New York: Philosophical Library, 1983); and The Atlantic Council's Working Group on the Successor Generation, The Teaching of Values and the Successor Generation (Washington, D.G.; The Atlantic Council of the United States, 1983.)  back 

113. A.M. Rosenthal, "Journey Among Tyrants," The New York Times Magazine, March 23, 1986.  back 

114. Social Studies 9 and 10: Global Studies; Tentative Syllabus (Albany, N.Y.: New York State Education Department, 1987),p. 21  back 


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