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Wishful Thinking (At Best) on Civic Engagement

The American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) is working hard to promote civic engagement in college. But AAC&U seems to undervalue the great prerequisite of informed citizenship, namely civic knowledge. AAC&U avoids the self-evident necessity of a required course that focuses on understanding American civic institutions.

"Knowledge is important, but it is equally important to work on public problems that help democracy," said Carol Schneider, the AAC&U president, thus undercutting a crucial part of her agenda. AAC&U makes a "clarion call," and gets organizations to "pledg[e] to take civic learning to another level," and encourages colleges to make it "an integral component" in college study.

But the rhetoric runs the danger of ultimately signifying nothing. In contrast to AAC&U, some schools went right to the core to ensure knowledge of our nation and its institutions of government. Hunter College, for example, requires a course that "introduces portions of the history of the United States covering periods of time sufficiently long to reveal the historical dynamic and bring understanding of the historical contexts that have created our social and political institutions."

Indeed a few states, such as Texas, Georgia, and Nevada established such requirements in statute. Sadly, however, ACTA's study of core requirements at over 1000 colleges and universities reveals that only 20% now require a foundational course in American history or American institutions of government. The rest either have no requirement that specifically address American history or have a distributional requirement so broad as to be meaningless, something like "America on Film: Performance and Culture" or "Country Music" or "Jazz."

Instead of holding national conferences on civic engagement, AAC&U could do immensely more good for civic literacy by encouraging the AAC&U membership, in the clearest of terms, to walk the walk of civic literacy. Make it a required course. Simply require it.

Posted by dburnett on January 10, 2012 at January 10, 2012 03:25 PM

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