Getting Real about Civic Education

Guest Blogger

This post was prepared for a roundtable on Civic Education, convened as part of LevinsonFest 2022—a year-long series gathering scholars from diverse disciplines and viewpoints to reflect on Sandy Levinson’s influential work in constitutional law.

 Lief H. Carter 

Introduction

While zoomed in for the LevinsonFest discussion of civic education this past November 18, I was keenly reminded of my participation on a civic education task force organized by the late Elinor Ostrom when she was president of the American Political Science Association some two decades ago. That effort ended in a whimper. As a member of the task force, I objected to the overly academic approach that, understandably, the task force’s academics took to the problem. The persistence of Donald Trump’s Big Lie, the rising appeal of “Christian nationalism,” and the staying power of Vladimir Putin’s claim that his Ukrainian adversaries are the equivalent of Nazis has made this topic more urgent than ever, so I deeply appreciate the chance to revisit the topic. I describe in what follows a less overtly academic approach to civic education. Instead, I describe a public language more solidly rooted in the daily experiences and analytical skills of most Americans.

A Civic Education Checklist 

For starters, I imagine a checklist of basic pedagogical issues that must be addressed when pondering how to teach people something. To each I append an appropriate civic education response. 

Is the target subject matter clear?—Teach the rule of law.

“Civics” of course is a vast and sprawling subject. To advocate better ways to teach it is a bit like advocating better ways of teaching mathematics. Civics encompasses political and cultural histories, legal, economic, constitutional, and organizational structures of public life, access points for civic participation, ideologies that encourage or discourage democratic political engagement, and so on. No doubt the fuzziness and the sprawl of “civics” discourages the average American from learning much about its multiple basic elements. For reasons outlined below, teaching civics should be anchored specifically in teaching the rule of law. 

What is the target age group?—K-12

I understand that most important learning happens in the human brain through its first 18 years. Eighteen is of course the point where we politically empower people to participate as voters, but it also determines the level at which civic education messages must be shaped and aimed. Since most Americans do not attend college, and high school levels are the best most achieve, I pitch what follows to that level. Moreover, if the goal is to make civic discourse more coherent and constructive at the public level, some shared civic wisdom needs to be accepted and absorbed by many tens of millions of people. 

Why bother?—“Your life may depend on it.”

When adults tell them they must become civically wise and engaged, brains that are still developing will respond about as eagerly as they would if they were told they must all learn how to play chess. In fact, the insistence that someone learn chess is probably easier to sell than the message to “learn civics.” Learning chess is a concrete physical engagement with a game. It appears to be “fun.” It builds both self-confidence and interpersonal social skills. When adults exhort them to “learn civics,” most high schoolers would respond—and presented this way, they should respond—along the lines of “Hey, why should I bother? I’ve got homework, and then I want to practice my free throws/I want to finish memorizing every Cardi B song/I’ve got one more level to go on my latest Xbox game. What good will learning chess do me? You’re making me tired just thinking about it!” But while it may be less obvious to that minority of Americans whose affluence protects them, political forces directly affect most people’s life chances and too often their lives themselves. Becoming civically savvy reduces the chances that political powers beyond one’s direct control will kill or otherwise make lives in many ways miserable. Russian males drafted to fight in Ukraine by Vladimir Putin have learned this lesson all too well. Self interest, more than patriotism, is an acceptable motivation for civic engagement. 

What proficiencies does the audience possess?—Fairness and the language of games.

I take as a basic principle of educational psychology that teaching people anything builds from what they already know. If the goal is to teach civics at the teen and preteen level, lessons must start with their basic common experiences, e.g., parental rules, rules in organized settings like schools/classrooms, and above all, the rules and adjudicative practices that they experience in organized competitive games. Academic analysis—formal theorizing, data collecting, and statistical analysis—will not directly reach this audience. Instead, civic lessons should tell stories about fairness and unfairness in the rule-driven disciplinary situations and games that young people all experience. 

What hurdles must be overcome?—Face common misconceptions of politics.

To study civics is to study politics. I hope readers will excuse my digression here to vent my long-term frustration with my chosen profession: political science. Specifically, the discipline does not define clearly what it is and is not about. Its boundaries are too fluid and fuzzy to enable beginners clearly to know which elements of politics they need to know. The very word “politics” brings to the ordinary mind images of a morally bleak and dishonest enterprise, one corrupted by money on one hand and mind numbingly complex organizational layers and actions of government bureaucracies on the other. In fact, people “ought to know better.” They know about family politics, church politics, school politics and maybe later office politics. My robust definition connects politics with basic life experiences, which we can imagine starting when a parent first threatens child with “consequences” if they forget to brush their teeth.

What follows is hardly the only useful definition of “politics, but in the context of facilitating effective civic learning, I propose this definition: 

“Politics” describes the processes by which people try to get other people to do things those other people do not, at least initially, want to do. Political behavior ranges from those who use their political power to gain purely selfish ends to those who promote the social coordination and cohesion necessary for group survival and advancement. At heart, politics is about humans coercing other humans. It contrasts with “economics”, which deals with processes of creating and trading goods and services voluntarily.[1] 

Teachers who tackle “civics” will choose for themselves in which order they satisfy the checklist. I discuss some of the specific building blocks of the civics course I would teach in the following sections.[2] 

The Game of Politics

Modeling civic life as playing in a game capitalizes on the finding that humans need and crave the protection that belonging to some tribe gives them. Indeed, if I were asked to name the topmost lesson taught by the Donald Trump era, it would be the appreciation of the centrality of tribalism in human affairs. The collection of self-interested goals that a person shares with others becomes the tribal equivalent: a “team.” The need for tribal belonging and acceptance explains the persistence of churches and related religious activities. Tribal loyalty explains why the Big Lie persists. Election deniers are members of one of many teams that compete in the political game. Those who remain politically passive will likely be manipulated for others’ benefits. But by voting and by developing and using political power resources like time and money, civic life offers a chance to be an active player in the political game. As in all games, some teams win sometimes and lose other times, but the commitment to the game itself can, like chess, motivate continued participation by virtue of being “fun.”

Civic Education Through Stories—An example

Since this essay will strike many as unconventional, I hope providing the concrete example “up front” in this section will clarify my approach to civic education. How could many millions of Americans believe, in spite of conclusive evidence to the contrary, the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Donald Trump? Why has not the repeated demonstration that this factual evidence is false taken hold? What rhetoric could break the strong tribal ties that lead so many to adopt such a magical view of the world? I suspect this is because current progressive rhetoric, cloaked in abstract phrases like “defending our democracy,” misses some basic truths about how people learn. I have suggested that storytelling, and particularly stories rooted in personal experience of competitive games, can do this. I imagine a campaigning politician who opposes the Big Lie would effectively address an audience like this:

Friends, pick your favorite sport or contest and your favorite competitor in that arena. Here I'll use college football. Imagine you cheer, root for, and support, as I do, the University of Georgia Bulldogs. Imagine your team playing in the CFP national championship game against an archrival--in this case Alabama. Your team leads Bama by four points as the clock runs down at the end of the fourth quarter. The rivals, with the ball on fourth down but with no remaining timeouts, run a play that gains first-down yardage, but as it does so, the game clock expires. The many thousands of people in the stadium see the clock expire on the scoreboard and the referees whistle the end of the game. But as UGA players start for the sidelines, The Tide’s quarterback quickly sets his team up in formation and runs a play unopposed for a touchdown. The press and the league of course declare UGA national champions, but some rabid Alabama followers insist that they really won the game. They claim, but based only on rumors and innuendo of their own devising, that the game clock mut have been fraudulently rigged by UGA, that its electronics were altered by some unseen electronic surge, or that the referees deliberately subtracted seconds from Alabama’s time to make the clock run out faster so they could go home. Tide fans insist that the record book be corrected and that gate and other award monies be distributed accordingly. When the authorities refuse, some fans threaten the lives of game and league officials. Fan riots ensue during which several law enforcement officers and civilians die.

Of course you would be outraged if your winning team had to confront this nonsense. But now suppose you are a loyal Alabama supporter. What would you most likely feel about the effort to change the championship result, given the lack of any evidence to support that position? You might not shout your opposition as loudly as do Bulldog fans. Might you not even see that your team's' behavior so threatens the integrity of the entire game, and for years to come (including your chances for legitimate future victories), that your team's behavior in this particular case is simply unacceptable?
 

Some of you in the audience might object that football is just a game, that politics is “real” but games are not. But we have designed our political system, and indeed our economic and legal systems as well, to be competitive games. Our political system's elections are contests with winners and losers and races and rules. And as a character says in Ted Lasso, "Football is life!" We say the core value in our economic system is free and fair competition.

There are some on the right who complain that liberals are wrong to claim they are defending a democracy. The United States, they say, is a “representative republic” and is created that way by our Constitution. Of course, in the high school civic sense these critics are correct. But we are trying to win something more precious than academic labels. We fight to preserve the rule of law itself. Without rules applied equally to both sides and enforced impartially by unbiased referees, both athletic and political competitions fall apart. Down that path lies the mayhem we saw on January 6. Political experience abundantly shows how that path leads to the triumph of brutal dictators and, eventually, wars in which too many blameless people die. So friends, however you vote in the upcoming election, please cast your vote against anyone of any party who endorses or is unwilling to contradict the Big Lie. Reject anyone who says that the political scoreboard was rigged when we know it wasn’t. Too much that we love in and about the United States depends on rejecting this threat emphatically! Thank you. 

Civics delivered via stories like this will embody the elements that good political games need to succeed. And the next section shows that this education will necessarily expose to students the deep flaws in the American political game. 

Civics Course Basics: The World Is Political 

Throughout the higher animal kingdom, animal social arrangements including our own grow out of power struggles. Animals compete for food and mates. They compete for power, that is the power to coerce others to do what the power user wants. Political actors, including voters, can develop coercive powers by building up as many as five political resources. These are: 

1.    Muscle and weapons. In the past, westerns movies often told stories of cattlemen or railroad men or other bad guys with guns out muscling sheepherders and homesteaders and struggling family farmers before a rescuer, perhaps on the white horse, came along to outshoot them.

2.    Wealth, usually measured in money. Wealth, left unregulated, tends to accumulate, hence antitrust policies

3.    Legal authority. The authority of law licenses some who themselves lack coercive political resources to call on the muscle of law enforcement to get their way.

4.    Popular reputation or status (sometimes called “legitimacy”). When Trump was president, no one doubted, and indeed many feared, the power his legal authority gave him, but he had virtually no legitimacy among his administration’s personnel and was frequently thwarted, often behind his back, due to his lack legitimacy.[3]

5.    Information, the resource that underlies blackmail. J Edgar Hoover in effect used his vast information base to blackmail many political figures into giving him the support he demanded as long-term FBI Director. 

The civics reading list need not get as sophisticated as Machiavelli. At this point in their civic education, students should play with each of the five power resources to see how political actors wield them in their struggle for power and wealth. The western canon political story begins when God threatens Adam and Eve with punishment if they disobey His law. From Adam’s and Eve’s perspective, God’s muscle was exceeded only by his authority as the lawgiver and his unquestioned legitimacy. God-fearing indeed, anthropologist’s show, explains why religion is found in most cultures. Imagining supernatural judgmental powers who punish those who deviate from acceptable group norms or fail to contribute to society makes the cost of keeping community “law and order” manageable. 

For most people, the political world begins when parents first coerce them to perform routine tasks like brushing their teeth. Without the ability to force other people to do things they would not voluntarily do on their own, social arrangements to create cooperation and physical security would not happen. “Utopian” communities attempted by people who forsake politics and depend only on voluntary cooperation routinely collapse. 

Civics Course Basics: Civilization as the Taming of Lethal Political Power 

Human political history is at heart the story of how power, because tends to accumulate and become abusive so that the lives of most are “nasty, brutish, and short”, can be tamed so as to achieve greater net social benefits—in a nutshell, “civilization.” The words “civics” and “civilization” are obviously related. These English words are rooted in Latin, where the word “civis” denotes a person (citizen) of a community bound by its laws and customs. 

Many thousands of books tell the story of human civilizing, but how much of this vast story does a modern average American need to know in order to be civically aware? One way to simplify that story is to see the story as a movement from coercion to trade. The world is political, but it is simultaneously an economic world where people freely exchange things and services that both parties want. And beyond economics there is of course the world of friendship and love. Specifically, while the current Ukrainian war is a leap into the barbaric past, we should accept Steven Pinker’s basic thesis that humans increasingly arrange their lives via trade and love and less via brutal power struggles.[4] How has that come about? By developing “the rule of law,” which means seeing how political and economic life has adopted the features of a good competitive game. Telling that story should be the heart of civic education. 

To create more peaceful societies, all three of these structures—electoral democracy, the “adversary system” rule of law, and the modern system of regulated economic market competition—have adopted the structural features of good competitive games. Ideal forms of government articulate and publish, as do good games, detailed “rules of the game.” They create impartial umpires, referees, and other final arbiters (judges in courts, the voters in a democracy) of disputes. Perhaps most important of all, they require substantial levels of political equality to function effectively. People do not bother investing time and money in games where one side is guaranteed to steamroll over the other. The case for civic equality is as much a practical one as a moral one. 

Governments have come to model themselves as competitive games. Why? People have not developed any political system better able to resolve conflicts short of violence. The natural world, as best we can tell, does not and cannot contain any single, universal, and objective and “true” moral, religious, or empirical standards by which a well-meaning authoritarian ruler—a “philosopher king”—could govern “justly.” For the same reasons that metaphysics fails, context is everything in civic life. It is said that the United States has contributed two new things to the world: jazz and pragmatic philosophy. Since new contexts constantly arise, the best humans can do when conflicts arise is to work to resolve them pragmatically, one at a time. 

Particularly in the United States however, political structures and practices are often inefficient or ineffective at formulating coherent public policy and addressing specific public problems and conflicts. American politics does not consistently check the natural impulse of those with more wealth and power to use them for their selfish advantage, ways that subvert the basic equality necessary for any good competitive game. Enhanced civic awareness will clarify the many deficiencies in the American political game that make it too often badly played. 

Teaching the Rule of Law 

We now come to the core of my argument: The structural features of the rule of law describe “the good” in civic life itself. What are these features that manage competition in such a way as to move participants away from atrocities and brutality and righteousness?[5] A civic education would teach the following specific elements of good games. 

Uncertainty, contingency, and the acceptance of losing. Religious fundamentalists, and indeed fundamentalist magical thinkers of all stripes, cannot accept loss because their framework for organizing the world around them contains no place in which they can see how they might not be right. But those who enter into games know they have no “right” to win, and that the prospect of losing is the price they pay for the satisfaction of playing with a chance to win. In many games such as marathon races, most of the contestants lose, but they accept it. 

Equality. A one-sided game—a rout or a foregone conclusion—is no game at all. To give each side a realistic chance to win, good games seek to ensure that the players and teams have relatively equal access to resources and talent. (The word “equal” derives from the Latin aequalis, meaning “level,” as in a level playing field.) It is the heart of the concept of political equality, where no individual is, by virtue of things that they cannot control such as their race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, denied the resources to give them a chance to “win” in the game of life. A loser more easily accepts losing when he or she knows he has the resources to win another day. A robust appreciation of the importance of the centrality of equality to good games helps explain why the electoral college, with its foundation in the politics of slavery, is no longer politically acceptable. The norm of equality would not tolerate the bizarre outcome in a case like Citizens United. This decision, which equates the political power resource of wealth and money with the political right to speak and otherwise participate in politics wildly tilts the playing field against most people and creates more a plutocracy than a democracy.[6] 

Precision of rules. Rules and their means of enforcement must be clear enough to the players that the game does not decay into a fight over what the rules mean. The ambiguities in the 12^th amendment procedures for designating and recording electoral votes gave cover to the mayhem of January 6. 

Unquestioned authority of referees/judges. For the same reason that the rules should be as precise as possible, players must accept the finality of the decisions of referees or the game will collapse. The rioters in the insurrection on January 6 obviously violated this basic principle. 

Referee/judicial independence, impartiality, and the perception of fairness. Game fans who believe that “the fix is in” or that the referees for whatever reason have predetermined (that is “prejudged” or “prejudiced”) the game’s outcome in favor of the opponent will quickly leave, if they do not riot outright. As I write, the legitimacy of the United States Supreme Court is at an historical low point after mounting evidence—the transparent incoherence of its reasoning defending recent decisions—that the justices pursue a partisan political agenda. 

Transparency. Games take place in clearly framed spaces and in bounded times. To trust its outcome, participants and fans alike must believe that they have seen what actually happened. Hence appellate judges are expected to deliver opinions explaining how they reached their result, and these opinions should not be demonstrably incoherent or illogical. 

Deception. This may be the most difficult element of good games to understand and accept. But the main goal of “civilizing” is to move away from human lethal violence and such violence is closely related to a feeling that one’s righteousness has been injured. Competitive games are amoral in all respects. Anything goes unless a rule prohibits it and a player gets caught violating it. Games capitalize on the human tendency to better oneself by deceiving others, but in doing so they remove the temptation for players to act “righteously.” They reduce the impulse to defend an action by claiming that it was morally correct and thus restarting the righteousness-atrocity cycle. 

Minimization of chance. Games of pure chance, like games of dice, may be pleasant pastimes, but they hardly count as good games. Except where a coin flip helps promote game equality, as in designating which football team can choose how to start a game, good games minimize the impact of chance elements and maximize the role of skill and strategy. No fair claiming victory because it is “God’s will.” (I have long believed that the most important element in the Bill of Rights is the robust separation of church and state.) Repeat players learn soon enough that magical thinking doesn’t win games. 

I have suggested above how each of these elements reveals shortcomings in the American political system. Structural reform should indeed be a primary goal of improved civic education. However, the main lesson is that civic literacy can indeed build on popular experiences, not academic frameworks. 

Conclusion 

Readers who object to the approach I take here may well have better approaches to civic education, and if they do I hope they will email me with their criticisms and suggestions. I am, however, convinced that what we call “postmodernism,” ancestors of which we find in both Socrates and Shakespeare, has effectively ruled out metaphysical approaches to public problem solving. We are left with the kind of pragmatism endorsed by my particular intellectual hero, Richard Rorty, in for example his “Justice as Larger Loyalty.”[7] In Rorty’s world, normative or “objective” definitions of justice are themselves hotly contested political food fights. But seeing that strangers belonging to different teams can, by competing, collectively belong to a larger “my team,” makes each other less likely. After all, the ultimate goal of “civics” is civilizing the species, to move us all toward more peaceful ways of living. 

Lief H. Carter was Professor Emeritus at Colorado College. This essay is published posthumously, with great appreciation for his contributions to this and so many other LevinsonFest panels.