Reimagining Civic Education to Produce Justice

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Apr 18

Most of my students say that the main reason for the sorry state of our democracy is that people are “not well-informed.” Usually, the students who say this are not very well-informed, but oddly enough they’re never really talking about themselves. I’m not sure where they came by the notion that being a good citizen is about possessing “information,” but they probably didn’t get it from debating public policy with their friends. That does not seem to be among their favorite pastimes. I suspect that instead, they got the idea from a teacher, or a textbook, or a TikTok talking head. “Well-informed” (or “educated,” which is apparently the same thing in their minds) has acquired the dull ring of cliche. It’s the Correct Answer and everyone knows it. Maybe these students exempt themselves from their diagnosis because their idea of being “well-informed” is just to know that citizens who are “ill-informed” (or perhaps “disinformed”) are the official cause of all our troubles. And who can blame these younger knowers of truth? They have been Informed.

If it is not clear to all by now that “information” can no longer bridge political divides, it never will be. “Here lies a beloved friend of social harmony (c. 1500-2000). It was nice while it lasted” jokes Jon Askonas in the subtitle of a deadly serious essay (“What Was the Fact?” New Atlantis, Spring 2023). In “the before-times,” as we oldsters like to say, citizens with competing opinions were held together, roughly but readily, by what Hannah Arendt called “common facts.” The fact was a common ground on which the political contest could unfold without degenerating into civil war (although we should chasten our nostalgia by remembering that we had one of those). Of course, common facts were never common ground by virtue of their “neutrality,” though most people thought that way, and many still do. Rather, a certain set of facts (and the number of possible sets is always infinite) were held by most people to be the ones that mattered, the ones worth emphasizing, in light of certain values, by which they had been not informed but formed. Properly understood in this way, Arendt was right to stress the importance for democracy of common facts, and to fear their loss. Welcome to her nightmare.

Maybe then it made more sense in the before-times to imagine the ideal citizen as one who is “well-informed.” When facts are what hold citizens together while they work out their differences, knowledge of the facts seems like an obvious prerequisite for good citizenship: necessary, if not sufficient. Even then, the not-so-subtle implication that highly educated people made better citizens was debatable, if not risible. Now, after the Internet, it is not debatable: it is nonsensical. “Facts” are obviously tearing us apart, not holding us together. Crucially, this is not because some people have “the facts,” while others have fact-free “alternatives.” As Askonas argues, it is because all of us have at our fingertips a “superabundance” of facts, none of which need to be false in order to be destructive:

Few things feel more immutable or fixed than a ball of cold, solid steel. But if you have a million of them, a strange thing happens: they will behave like a fluid, sloshing this way and that, sliding underfoot, unpredictable. In the same way and for the same reason, having a small number of facts feels like certainty and understanding; having a million feels like uncertainty and befuddlement.

“Just the facts, ma’am” was a good motto for a cop in the 1950s. It’s a bad motto for a citizen in 2023. To possess “just” the facts today is to have more than anyone can handle.

The problem of the super-abundance of facts raises a question about civic education in the twenty-first century. What exactly is it for? If its aim is to produce “well-informed” citizens, then we should all hope it fails. That project, under these conditions, will only exacerbate the Cold Civil War we all find ourselves fighting. If our goal is to thaw things out, civic education will have to be understood differently.

This is not to say that a different and better understanding will be easy to develop. After all, the conclusion can’t be that we can simply hold all questions of fact in abeyance. The ocean of facts, in which facts become something called “data,” and the deluge of data ends in what L. M. Sacasas (on whom Askonas is drawing in that essay) calls “narrative collapse,” where the stories that bring order to facts get sucked back into the ocean where they dissolve into just another fact – all this makes “facts” not less but more important, in the sense that it becomes all the more important to know how to handle them in the context of their “superabundance.” Civic education will have to teach people how to give facts their due without doing violence to the limits of what facts can do for us under these new conditions. It will have to teach a “know-how,” more than a “know-that.”

Under these new conditions, the first temptation will be to dismiss an alternative narrative by dismissing the narrator’s evidence as illegitimate. Certainly, there will be times when the narrator has made it up or got it wrong. But the democracy-threatening impulse will be to assume that precisely because their narrative is not ours, it can only be because the narrator is either deceitful or ignorant. Unless it is firmly grounded in a clear-eyed view of our brave new world, any attempt by civic educators to make sure citizens are “informed” will only feed this impulse. It will promote the idea that if someone believes what I don’t believe, well, that can only be because they have not been given a proper civic education. Thus their beliefs can and should be dismissed or (if they are “dangerous” beliefs) deplatformed, censored, or outlawed. “If they were well-informed, they would not believe this. Since they have been given “access” to information, the only reason they believe this must be that they are motivated by malice or bad faith. Therefore, we have nothing in common with them, and they must be shoved out of the public square.” We will have to learn how to avoid this temptation, and this is probably the first order of business for a reimagined civic education.

But there is a second and more subtle temptation which not only citizens but civic educators in particular will have to know how to avoid. If the first temptation is to dismiss opponents, to withdraw into our silos where we are assured of our rightness by the presence of The Facts, the second temptation is to “engage” with other citizens in a way that only compounds the problem. There is a way of “engaging” with those who think differently that ends up as condescension. And this, I suspect, will be the special temptation of those who are most invested in the project of reimagining civic education for the Internet age, and thus most resistant to the first temptation.

A good example of succumbing to this temptation comes from Danielle Allen’s latest book, Justice By Means of Democracy. The book is certainly not just about civics; Allen has produced a slim, efficient work of political theory that aims at nothing less than displacing John Rawls’ sprawling A Theory of Justice as the definitive formulation of contemporary liberalism. Rawls’ massively influential book was published a few years before Gerald Ford took office, and in Allen’s telling it has defined “liberalism” ever since – for the worse. Allen faults Rawls for inspiring a vision of “liberal democracy” in which the “liberalism” sits uneasily with the “democracy,” and the role of the good citizen is mainly to let the experts do their jobs.

Dissatisfaction both with the idea of expert rule and with the actual results of expert decisions has played no small part in the recent rise of populism, at home and abroad. Allen, unlike many liberals, largely acknowledges the legitimacy of those grievances. Her goal is to demote the experts and to restore the concept of “political equality” to its rightfully central place in liberal theory. The title of the book makes her argument plain: while the Rawlsian liberalism to which we are accustomed has come to treat democracy as an obstacle to justice, genuine liberalism treats democracy as the proper means to achieving it. Rawlsian liberalism has made citizens into consumers of a product called “justice.” Allen’s liberalism would make them “producers of justice” again.

Such an argument implies that civic education is vital, and it is no accident that Allen has been at the forefront of efforts to reimagine civics for the 21st century. If citizens are mere consumers of justice, they do not need any knowledge or skills. But if they are the producers of justice, they must know how to produce it. They must know certain things, and they must have certain skills. And so they must have a civic education that builds those skills.

A key part of Allen’s argument is that the “production” of justice by citizens requires the production of social capital. Allen calls a society with high levels of social capital a “connected society.” In a connected society, we do not withdraw into those silos of competing narratives. Rather, we have the opportunity and the ability to connect across various boundaries. She is talking here about the “know-how” that makes democracy work, the civic know-how that enables democratic citizens to produce justice.

Allen draws on social capital theorists who distinguish different types of social ties: bonding, bridging, and linking. Bonding ties are those we form with our family and close friends. Linking ties connect people at different levels of hierarchy (such as at work). Both these kinds of ties, according to Allen, tend to take care of themselves. It is the second type of tie, the “bridging” tie, which is crucial for the production of social capital, and which is also most difficult to build and sustain. Bridging relationships are connections across demographic differences - race, ethnicity, class, and the like. But, as Allen puts it, “The critical question for a democratic society is how we can bond with those who are like us so as to help us bridge even with those who differ from us.” (Emphasis added).

This is indeed the critical question – it is the question of civic education. But Allen’s answer shows us exactly what it looks like to succumb to the second temptation. For example, she asks: “If our families and our therapists help us learn how to bond, who helps us learn how to bridge?” Do our therapists help us learn how to bond? Or do they, as Christopher Lasch or Ivan Illich would have it, subvert those bonds by transforming them into the purview of experts? To put families and therapists together in this sentence is telling. Allen seems reasonable when she reminds us that “to say we need an art of bridging is not at all to say that we can ignore the art of bonding.” But it is revealing that when she talks about who will teach us this art in a way that makes it possible to “bond with those who are like us so as to help us bridge even with those who differ from us,” she mentions all kinds of research in various academic disciplines, including “management literature.” Allen talks frequently in this book about the need to build a liberal democracy in which expertise is made into a tool of the people rather than their master. But when it comes to making “the people” capable of handling their political equality, the experts in her vision seem to settle back into the tutelary positions to which they have grown so accustomed under contemporary liberalism.

Allen’s “connected society” is thus a society formed by a certain kind of civic education. To her credit, it is not a civic education designed to produce “well-informed citizens.” It is not about “knowing that”; it is about know-how. It’s about “knowing how” to engage with people who have different narratives, as those separated by demographic differences inevitably do. Of course, we are concerned with more than just demographic differences; we are concerned with the proliferation of divisions by the Internet, by the superabundance of facts itself. The problem is much more acute, the divisions are much more minute, threading not only between classes but within them. It is a kind of social fracking. But Allen’s model could certainly be refined to apply to this fracked landscape. Indeed, a model of civic education that focuses not on producing “well-informed” citizens who know “which product to choose” at the voting booth, but rather on “well-formed” citizens who know how to work together with other citizens across those various differences in order to “produce” justice, becomes all the more important as the differences become all the more numerous and cross-cutting.

The problem is not her emphasis on “know-how,” which is exactly where the emphasis should be. The problem is with Allen’s conflation of know-how with something like “best practices,” with the kind of know-how that is part of the identity of one part of the demos, on one side of the many-sided demographic divide: the know-how of the “knowledge-worker,” of the “professional-managerial class.”

To clarify the problem, it might help to think about the idea of “cross-cultural communication.” In the new “post-fact” environment, each of us increasingly faces fellow citizens who, because of the constant siloing, seem to inhabit something like another culture entirely (and what is a culture except a distinct narrative about the world?). Subcultures increasingly are not “sub” at all; they are just “other cultures,” as anything like a common culture to which they can all relate as subcultures break down. In this context, something like the skill of “cross-cultural communication” becomes all the more valuable.

The irony of “cross-cultural communication” is that people who are trained in this skill, who are interested in learning it, who believe it is valuable, all tend to be very good at talking to one another – and no better than the average person at actually talking to someone across an actual cultural divide. As an ESL teacher in Korea, I was always being “educated” in cross-cultural communication. But for some reason, I often seemed to have more in common with Koreans who had been similarly “educated” than I did even with my own countrymen who had not. And this is common. “People who know how to communicate cross-culturally” seemed to form something like their own culture, and it can be very hard for them to communicate with “people who do not know how to communicate cross-culturally.”

Similarly, the problem with Allen’s “best practices for engaging across difference” approach tends to entrench a more fundamental divide between “those who have learned the best practices and take them seriously” and everyone else. A model of civic education that understands “engagement” as some kind of method, neutral between competing narratives/cultures, handed down by experts for the benefit of the people, is finally no better than a model of civic education that fails to appreciate the death of the “neutral” (or common) fact and still thinks it is enough to inform people of “the facts.” Civic education understood in this way simply drives the wedge between “the elite” and “the people” further in – it makes it even more impossible to “bridge” that tie.

In the Internet age, we need an approach to civic education that is not about “the facts,” one that by contrast is about “know-how,” but one that does not confuse that know-how with managerial “best practices.” What might that look like? That is the question – to which I don’t have an easy answer. We had better start thinking about it.