Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 3 | Civic Education in Schools The Right Time is Now, page 2

This unique set of parallel circumstances—a decline in civic education coupled with an upswing in youth interest in community involvement—may indicate that this is the time for renewal in civic education.

"Young people today are engaged in their communities, doing real work that leads to concrete results," says Cynthia Gibson, Carnegie Corporation program officer in the Strengthening U.S. Democracy program. "That fact, coupled with the decline in civic education, may offer unprecedented opportunities to strengthen our nation's educational system and provide these youngsters with opportunities to learn firsthand how to participate in a democracy in a caring and responsible way—one that involves respect for and involvement with both the civic and political processes and institutions of a healthy democracy. We need to work with our schools to provide young citizens with the tools and knowledge to do just that."

Gibson is co-author with Peter Levine of The Civic Mission of Schools, a joint project of Carnegie Corporation of New York and CIRCLE (the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement; www.civicyouth.org), which is based at the University of Maryland. The report, which grew out of meetings with 55 of the nation’s top education experts, recommends renewing civic education and political engagement with “real life” learning opportunities, not simply reviving the traditional civics class.

“Instead of stressing the deficits of young people, we need to help them get involved in a deeper, richer civic engagement, which is the focus of our report,” Gibson explains.

Building a Bridge
Scholars and practitioners stress the need to develop an amalgam of education and service activities outside the classroom. Establishing a bridge between the two worlds, it is thought, will prompt youth to become engaged and energized participants in the democratic process.

“There is a level of service that is simply about doing good deeds. But if service is going to have implications for civic engagement, it has to go more deeply into the political and social dynamics that surround it,” says Sheldon H. Berman, superintendent of the Hudson School District in Hudson, Massachusetts. “A service project should combine research, service, and report implications. It should also combine reading in an area, so that it is a study of an issue that has service as a field component of that study.”

National Attention
On May 1, 2003, the national spotlight was focused on the need to study the issue of civic education at “We the People,” a daylong White House Forum on American History, Civics and Service. Leslie Lenkowsky, chief executive officer of the Corpor-ation for National and Community Service (www.nationalservice.org), says that the forum represented “an effort to build on the outpouring of patriotic sentiments that we’ve seen since September 11th, 2001, and transform that into a real spirit of patriotic action. By that I mean, essentially, a kind of active citizenship that President Bush spoke about in his inaugural address. It is one thing for people to sing ‘God Bless America,’ for everybody to display the flag and for people to say they support our American troops, but we also need to do the things in our own lives that are essential to being an engaged citizen.” The forum was hosted by the U.S. Department of Education, the Corporation for National and Community Service, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the USA Freedom Corps.

The need for studying history and civics is emphasized by “The American History and Civics Education Act of 2003,” a bill introduced in March by senators Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Harry Reid (D-NV). The bipartisan act is designed to allow teachers to attend two-week summer academies to learn more about American history and civics. In May 2003, Senator Alexander and Senator Bill Frist (R-TN) announced a Department of Education grant program that will award about $100 million to schools that submit successful applications for three-year projects in civics and American history.

Putting Civic
Education into Action
There are a number of creative and innovative ways that civic engagement is being approached in the nation’s schools. Among them:

• Peace Games (www.peacegames.org), an in-school violence prevention program started in 1992, develops curriculum about peacemaking as civic engagement and works with elementary schools to improve communication, cooperation, conflict resolution and engagement. The nonprofit organization helped youngsters cope with the trauma of September 11th, through the creation of community service-learning projects. Some of the students chose to assemble Peacemaker Care Packages with messages of peace and gave them to firefighters, police, emergency workers and other peacemakers.

• The ten-year-old nonprofit Earth Force (www.earthforce.org) helps young people take on projects that make lasting improvements to their environment and the community. The group works with about 35,000 young people and 1,500 educators in after-school and summer programs as well as in other educational settings in school districts across the country. One recent undertaking involved the Walnut Creek Middle School in Erie, Pennsylvania, where students in Judy Jobes’ science class have been working for a few years to study the quality of water in their local creek and to educate the public about the importance of reducing pollution in their water. The class, which calls itself Walnut Creek S.E.W.E.R. (Saving Erie’s Water & Environmental Resources), has had many initiatives to educate the community about cleaner water, including a billboard and brochures, such as Your Lawn & Pesticides: What Goes Around, Comes Around. They have also worked with local officials to increase street sweeping, which reduces runoff into the water.

• In the summer of 2003, Virginia high school students spent two weeks attending the inaugural High School Leaders Program, sponsored by the Virginia Citizenship Institute and the University of Richmond. The July institute provided an array of opportunities for interaction and debate among the students about public challenges facing their state; students also met with many elected officials including those serving their state in Congress.

• The First Amendment Schools (FAS) Project (www.firstamendmentschools.org) uses the five freedoms of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition to the government as a lens to help youngsters become responsible citizens and leaders. “Those five freedoms have been the instrument for advancing democracy and justice for greater numbers of people throughout our history. They are inalienable rights and the basic tools of democratic citizenship. We see that as a starting point for helping young people understand how to be active and effective citizens,” says Charles Haynes, senior scholar of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center, which together with the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) created the FAS Project.

The group has awarded three-year grants to eleven elementary, middle and high schools to help them become laboratories for democracy and freedom. A reporter recently visited two of these schools to see how they are combining their classroom lessons with active citizenry.

Next page: Learning simple and important social skills is part of a commitment in the
Hudson schools to help youngsters learn to build a community and express mutual respect.

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