front cover of Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education
Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education
Rob Reich
University of Chicago Press, 2002
What should the civic purposes of education be in a liberal and diverse society? Is there a tension between cultivating citizenship and respecting social diversity? What are the boundaries of parental and state authority over education?

Linking political theory with educational history and policy, Rob Reich offers provocative new answers to these questions. He develops a liberal theory of multicultural education in which the leading goal is the cultivation of individual autonomy in children. Reich draws out the policy implications of his theory through one of the first sustained considerations of homeschooling in American education. He also evaluates three of the most prominent trends in contemporary school reform—vouchers, charter schools, and the small school movement—and provides pedagogical recommendations that sharply challenge the reigning wisdom of many multicultural educators.

Written in clear and accessible language, this book will be of interest to political theorists, philosophers, educators, educational policymakers, and teachers.
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Civics in a Digital Republic
A Transformative Curriculum
Robert A. Waterson
West Virginia University Press, 2012

This innovative curriculum book provides key materials, resources, and tools to help secondary educators prepare their students to be engaged citizens of their community, state, nation and world. Five complete units of instruction, based on West Virginia Content Standards and Objectives, provide meaningful lessons while being mindful of the transition from tangible text to more digital curricula:

•Rights of the Individual 
•Freedoms of the Individual
•Responsibilities of the Individual
•Beliefs Concerning Societal Conditions 
•Financial Literacy
 Additional features of the curriculum include:
•24 lessons that provide specific teaching and learning strategies
•4 culminating activities for enrichment opportunities  
•A matrix illustrating the West Virginia Content Standards and Objectives covered
•A matrix illustrating compliance with the National Council for the Social Studies Standards  
•A curriculum toolbox that provides over 70 engaging web sites to visit and explore.
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Creating Citizens
Liberal Arts, Civic Engagement, and the Land-Grant Tradition
Edited by Brigitta R. Brunner
University of Alabama Press, 2016
In Creating Citizens, professors and administrators at Auburn University’s College of Liberal Arts recount valuable, first-hand experiences teaching Community and Civic Engagement (CCE). They demonstrate that, contrary to many expectations, CCE instruction both complements the mission of liberal arts curricula and powerfully advances the fundamental mission of American land-grand institutions.
 
The nine essays in Creating Citizens offer structures for incorporating CCE initiatives into university programs, instructional methods and techniques, and numerous case studies and examples undertaken at Auburn University but applicable at any university. Many contributors describe their own rewarding experiences with CCE and emphasize the ways outreach efforts reinvigorate their teaching or research.
 
Creating Citizens recounts the foundation of land-grant institutions by the Morrill Act of 1862. Their mission is to instruct in agriculture, military science, and mechanics, but these goals augmented rather than replaced an education in the classics, or liberal arts. Land-grant institutions, therefore, have a special calling to provide a broad spectrum of society with an education that not only enriched the personal lives of their students, but the communities they are a part of. Creating Citizens demonstrates the important opportunities CCE instruction represents to any university but are especially close to the heart of the mission of land-grant colleges.
 
In open societies, the role and mission of public institutions of higher learning that are supported by public subsidies are perennial subjects of interest and debate. Creating Citizens provides valuable insights of interest to educators, education administrators, students, and policy makers involved in the field of higher education.
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Flunking Democracy
Schools, Courts, and Civic Participation
Michael A. Rebell
University of Chicago Press, 2018
The 2016 presidential election campaign and its aftermath have underscored worrisome trends in the present state of our democracy: the extreme polarization of the electorate, the dismissal of people with opposing views, and the widespread acceptance and circulation of one-sided and factually erroneous information. Only a small proportion of those who are eligible actually vote, and a declining number of citizens actively participate in local community activities.

In Flunking Democracy, Michael A. Rebell makes the case that this is not a recent problem, but rather that for generations now, America’s schools have systematically failed to prepare students to be capable citizens. Rebell analyzes the causes of this failure, provides a detailed analysis of what we know about how to prepare students for productive citizenship, and considers examples of best practices. Rebell further argues that this civic decline is also a legal failure—a gross violation of both federal and state constitutions that can only be addressed by the courts. Flunking Democracy concludes with specific recommendations for how the courts can and should address this deficiency, and is essential reading for anyone interested in education, the law, and democratic society.
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Going Public
Civic and Community Engagement
Hiram E. Fitzgerald
Michigan State University Press, 2013

The terms “civic engagement” and “community engagement” have various definitions, but they are united by the sense that individuals who are civically engaged not only are concerned about the quality of life in their communities but also take action to improve conditions for the common good. In the United States, to be civically engaged means to actively participate in a civil democratic society. Going Public examines programs related to civic engagement and the ways in which faculty and students participate in communities in order to improve them. Engagement scholarship is a scholarship of action, a scholarship of practice that takes place both in and with the community. Within the framework of this new scholarship, the mission of the academy does not begin and end with intellectual discovery and fact-finding. Rather, the academy joins forces with the community, and together they use their knowledge and resources to address pressing social, civic, economic, and moral problems. Each chapter in this book tells a unique story of community engagement and the scholarship of practice in a diverse range of settings, documenting successes and failures, the unintended consequences, and the questions yet to be answered.

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Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement
Randy Stoecker
Temple University Press, 2016

Randy Stoecker has been “practicing” forms of community-engaged scholarship, including service learning, for thirty years now, and he readily admits, “Practice does not make perfect.” In his highly personal critique, Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement, the author worries about the contradictions, unrealized potential, and unrecognized urgency of the causes as well as the risks and rewards of this work.      

Here, Stoecker questions the prioritization and theoretical/philosophical underpinnings of the core concepts of service learning: 1. learning, 2. service, 3. community, and 4. change. By “liberating” service learning, he suggests reversing the prioritization of the concepts, starting with change, then community, then service, and then learning. In doing so, he clarifies the benefits and purpose of this work, arguing that it will create greater pedagogical and community impact. 

Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement challenges—and hopefully will change—our thinking about higher education community engagement.

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Neglected Policies
Constitutional Law and Legal Commentary as Civic Education
Ira L. Strauber
Duke University Press, 2002
In Neglected Policies, Ira L. Strauber challenges scholars and critics of constitutional jurisprudence to think differently about the Constitution and its interpretation. He argues that important aspects of law, policies, and politics are neglected because legal formalisms, philosophical theories, the reasoning of litigators and judges, and even the role of the courts are too often taken for granted. Strauber advocates an alternative approach to thinking about the legal and moral abstractions ordinarily used in constitutional decision making. His approach, which he calls “agnostic skepticism,” interrogates all received jurisprudential notions, abandoning the search for “right answers” to legal questions. It demands that attention be paid to the context-specific, circumstantial social facts relevant to given controversies and requires a habit of mind at home with relativism.

Strauber situates agnostic skepticism within contemporary legal thought, explaining how it draws upon sociological jurisprudence, legal realism, and critical legal studies. Through studies of cases involving pornography, adoption custody battles, flag burning, federalism, and environmental politics, he demonstrates how agnostic skepticism applies to constitutional issues. Strauber contends that training in skeptical critique will enable a new kind of civic education and culture—one in which citizens are increasingly tolerant of the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in the law and politics of a pluralistic society.

Using insights from the social sciences to examine the ways constitutional cases are studied and taught, Neglected Policies will interest scholars of jurisprudence, political science, and the sociology of law.

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Ordered Liberty
Rights, Responsibilities, and Virtues
James E. Fleming and Linda McClain
Harvard University Press, 2012

Many have argued in recent years that the U.S. constitutional system exalts individual rights over responsibilities, virtues, and the common good. Answering the charges against liberal theories of rights, James Fleming and Linda McClain develop and defend a civic liberalism that takes responsibilities and virtues—as well as rights—seriously. They provide an account of ordered liberty that protects basic liberties stringently, but not absolutely, and permits government to encourage responsibility and inculcate civic virtues without sacrificing personal autonomy to collective determination.

The battle over same-sex marriage is one of many current controversies the authors use to defend their understanding of the relationship among rights, responsibilities, and virtues. Against accusations that same-sex marriage severs the rights of marriage from responsible sexuality, procreation, and parenthood, they argue that same-sex couples seek the same rights, responsibilities, and goods of civil marriage that opposite-sex couples pursue. Securing their right to marry respects individual autonomy while also promoting moral goods and virtues. Other issues to which they apply their idea of civic liberalism include reproductive freedom, the proper roles and regulation of civil society and the family, the education of children, and clashes between First Amendment freedoms (of association and religion) and antidiscrimination law. Articulating common ground between liberalism and its critics, Fleming and McClain develop an account of responsibilities and virtues that appreciates the value of diversity in our morally pluralistic constitutional democracy.

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The Place of Families
Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility
Linda C. McClain
Harvard University Press, 2006

In this bold new book, Linda McClain offers a liberal and feminist theory of the relationships between family life and politics--a topic dominated by conservative thinkers. McClain agrees that stable family lives are vital to forming persons into capable, responsible, self-governing citizens. But what are the public values at stake when we think about families, and what sorts of families should government recognize and promote?

Arguing that family life helps create the virtues and character required for citizenship, McClain shows that the connection between family self-government and democratic self-government does not require the deep-laid gender inequality that has historically accompanied it. Examining controversial issues in family law and policy--among them, the governmental promotion of heterosexual marriage and the denial of marriage to same-sex couples, the regulation of family life through welfare policy, and constitutional rights to reproductive freedom--McClain argues for a political theory of the family that embraces equality, defends rights as facilitating responsibility, and supports families in ways that respect men's and women's capacities for self-government.

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The Politics of Truth and Other Timely Essays
The Crisis of Civic Consciousness
Ellis Sandoz
St. Augustine's Press, 2016

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The Politics of Truth and Other Untimely Essays
The Crisis of Civic Consciousness
Ellis Sandoz
University of Missouri Press, 1999

A fascinating collection of studies, The Politics of Truth and Other Untimely Essays explores the historical and theoretical underpinnings of personal liberty and free government and provides a trenchant analysis of the crisis of civic consciousness endangering both of them today. The book addresses a range of issues in contemporary political philosophy and constitutional theory. These are seen to be all the more urgent in importance because of the surging aspirations for liberty in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet empire and the post-Cold War anomaly of crisis, malaise, and disarray in free government itself in America and in other bastions of modern democracy.

While each essay can stand alone, there is an underlying thematic unity to the collection. The fundamental problem considered throughout is whether and to what extent the fall of communism may mark an epoch in world history. These questions are applied to the East Central European nations struggling to achieve free government and personal liberty. The elements required to identify the preconditions of liberty are addressed and specific attention is given to the terms of institutionalization in the American founding.

Several essays focus on American political thought, with emphasis on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Two elements, in particular, are treated: the jurisprudential and common law background to the American political tradition and the centrality of religion within the unfolding of the American political experiment. Sandoz explores the uncommon alliance of philosophers, statesmen, and evangelists during the nation's founding. This alliance, nurturing communities of persons bound together by their faith and a mutual regard for one another, played a vital role in the establishment of the system of freedom under law.

Sandoz sees the tension between religion and natural law as a constant in the human struggle for freedom. That the preservation of liberty under law is no easy task is acknowledged and addressed as it can be seen in the American founding, in the post-communist struggle of East Central Europe, and in the deepening contemporary crisis of American society. Anyone interested in the "politics" of "truth" will appreciate this volume.

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The Reconstruction of Patriotism
Education for Civic Consciousness
Morris Janowitz
University of Chicago Press, 1984
"A meticulous, well-tuned examination of what Janowitz says is the decline of civic thought in America, and what might be done to restore it. . . . The patriotism Janowitz proposes to reconstruct is not the sort of narrow nationalism your political science professor may have warned you about—patriotism as 'the last refuge of a scoundrel.' It is instead a patriotism that intelligently appreciates life in a (however imperfect) democratic land."—Robert Marquand, The Christian Science Monitor

"In The Reconstruction of Patriotism, Morris Janowitz . . . places a national-service program on the national agenda. . . . Like William James, Janowitz envisions government enrolling young people to work for a year or two at subsistence pay, doing jobs that benefit society—working with, say, 'conservation, health, or old-age problems.' He believes that we need a service program because since the end of the Second World War our citizens (and, indeed, citizens of almost all the advanced industrial nations) have become more keenly aware of their rights than of their obligations, and generations are growing up with little or no understanding that they are members of a national community and have responsibilities to it—that they must give as well as take. . . . Because it reopens discussion of our wider obligations and how to fulfill them, Mr. Janowitz's thoughtful book is in itself a national service."—Naomi Bliven, The New Yorker


"Morris Janowitz examines an issue that seldom is subject to social and political analysis—patriotism. His thesis is clear: The long-term trend in politics has been to enhance citizen rights without effective articulation of citizen obligations. A meaningful balance between the two, he contends, must be restored. . . . The strength of this study lies in Janowitz's persuasive argument that the durability and vitality of democratic institutions require that a sense of community, or shared values, be preserved. Without civiz consciousness, he rightly observes, social and political fragmentation ensues. . . . A lucid and impressively researched polemic."—W. Wesley McDonald, American Political Science Review


"Janowitz addresses a seminal issue: how to restore the sense of shared civic responsibility that has fallen victim in recent years to our growing preoccupation with individual rights and the rise of special-interest groups. . . . Central to his prescription is the revival of the concept of the citizen soldier, whose importance since pre-Revolutionary War days Janoqitz discusses at length. He concludes, 'There can be no reconstruction of patriotism without a system of national service.' . . . An important book. I highly recommend it."—Washington Monthly
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Schooling and the struggle for public life
critical pedagogy in the modern age
Henry A. Giroux
University of Minnesota Press, 1988

front cover of Transformative Civic Education in Democratic Societies
Transformative Civic Education in Democratic Societies
Tetyana Hoggan-Kloubert
Michigan State University Press, 2023
Democracy is neither inevitable nor guaranteed to last. To survive, democracy needs people adequately prepared to enact it. Such preparation for effective citizenship in a complex and plural world requires an adult civic education, one that goes beyond simple knowledge acquisition. It requires a transformative education to help learners become agents and co-shapers of their worlds. This book offers examples of the roles that civic education has played and can play in different communities. In this collection, scholars from around the world report and reflect on civic adult education, examining approaches, paradigms, and concepts that help us to act in culturally, ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse societies.
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Young Activists and the Public Library
Facilitating Democracy
Virginia A. Walter
American Library Association, 2020


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