CPN is designed and maintained by ONline @ UW: Electronic Publishing Group.

Contemporary Theory

A Different Kind of Politics
John Dewey and the Meaning of Citizenship in the 21st Century

Harry C. Boyte
Dewey lecture, University of Michigan, November 1, 2002

We need a wide-ranging debate about the question, “what does citizenship mean in the 21st century?” I am convinced that we need bold, savvy, and above all political citizens and civic institutions if we are to tame a technological, manipulative state, to transform an increasingly materialistic and competitive culture, and to address effectively the mounting practical challenges of a turbulent and interconnected world. Political citizens require, in turn, a politics that is based on the assumption of plurality, widely owned by citizens, and productive. Such a politics, simultaneously drawing on older conceptions of politics and also adapting politics to the rapidly changing contours of an information age, is different than the conventional, state-centered, distributive politics of left and right. The work of John Dewey, a pioneering theorist of knowledge and democracy, is useful as a take off point for thinking about citizenship and politics, both for its strengths and for its limits.

Dewey sought to extend the democratic project as America changed from a society of small towns and rural life to a technological, urban, professionalized nation. He made several major contributions that point toward a different view of citizenship and, implicitly, a different politics. Dewey had a deep respect for ordinary citizens that is sorely needed today among intellectual and professional groups. He advanced conceptions of situated inquiry and the social nature of knowledge that challenge contemporary academic detachment. He held a view of knowledge production as a democratic power resource different than zero-sum distributive power, here anticipating the power dynamics of the information age. And he had an understanding of education as a vital process of work and engagement, connecting students with the world, creating public spaces for democracy.

Dewey was also limited by his time and context. He acquiesced in understandings of civil society that removed it from “politics,” if he did not invent them. As a result, his conceptions of citizenship, community, and democracy often have an abstracted and idealized quality. I will argue that to renew and extend Dewey’s democratic project and democratic aspirations we need to bring politics back into all of our civic and economic environments, with a deeper, grittier, and also wider sense of politics than Dewey’s.

Politics in 2002: The view from South Africa

Today, politics in America has become like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland, disappearing until only a grimace remains. As E.J. Dionne observed with prescience some years ago in Why Americans Hate Politics, people are willing to tolerate a great deal of unpleasantness in politics if they see politics as productive. But increasingly, politics has seen its productive side virtually collapse. Today’s problems – whether corporate scandals or global warming or the growing numbers of Americans lacking health coverage or living in poverty – quickly become yesterday’s forgotten headlines. In the 2002 election, the accusation of “being political” was hurled back and forth by both Democrats and Republicans.

The world looks different from South Africa where I spent last summer as a visiting scholar with the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, a remarkable organization which played a key role in the struggle against apartheid and now has projects across the continent. South Africa proclaims politics from telephone poles. Banner newspaper headlines, used as ads, detail political developments like sports coverage in the US. South Africa reminds the visitor that politics at its best is not only productive and visionary. It can also be fun and full of life.

The trip also dramatized, as the anniversary of the attacks on September 11th drew near, how America’s professions of innocence in the world are not innocent. They are products of careful political calculation backed up by the technologies and techniques of modern public relations and marketing. From South Africa, the neat parsing of humanity into an American-centered alliance of altruistic good guys versus an axis of terrorist evil seems unreal. Even conservatives in South Africa were alarmed by the Bush administration’s war talk. President Thabo Mbeki, a moderate among Third World leaders, was furious that the US downplayed the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. George Bush vacationed and raised money while 40,000 world leaders and activists discussed such problems as the 1.1 billion people who lack clean drinking water or the 2.2 billion who lack adequate sanitation.

The point here is not to construct a moralized division of the world with America as the evil empire. Rather it is to suggest that from abroad it seems surreal to profess that global problems can be reduced to an almost singular focus on “terrorism” disconnected from other problems such as poverty, sectarian violence, environmental degradation, disease, corrupt governments, or crime cartels. The decontextualization of terrorism seems an egregious example of an expert approach which disaggregates complex problems into isolated elements and treats those with one-dimensional interventions – in this case military action.

That fact points to other dynamics, especially the ways in which politics has become structured by a thin conception of citizenship, the citizen as apolitical volunteer engaged in service. In this civic landscape, it is the policy maker as expert who purportedly “knows best” (and often tries to keep information secret) about the tough, difficult decisions that must be made and the problems that must be tackled. A sentimentalized and purified version of American citizenship has become a resource for a dangerously unilateralist foreign policy specifically, but it is also tied to the loss of productive approaches to public problem solving generally.

President Bush has used the idea of the citizen as apolitical volunteer since he began his run for the presidency. In his campaign announcement, Bush articulated “the noble calling of a nation where the strong are just and the weak are valued.” He used citizen-service as the center of his Inaugural Address. “I ask you to seek a common good beyond your comfort,” Bush proclaimed, “to be citizens, not spectators, to serve your nation, beginning with your neighborhood.” And he explicitly separated, indeed contrasted, such citizenship from politics. “My opponent is being political” was a stock accusation.

Since the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration has continually stressed the need for a patriotic spirit in which voluntarism and service are central. On November 8th , 2001, outlining the nation’s course in facing the “terrorist threat,” Bush used the concept of “a nation awakened to service and citizenship and compassion” to define “American civilization” itself, at war with a ruthless enemy. “We value life,” Bush declared. “The terrorists ruthlessly destroy it.” To enlist Americans in the fight, he called for “all of us [to] become a September 11th volunteer, by making a commitment to service in our communities.”

President Bush is not alone in this pattern. American politics is now framed in Manichean terms associated with the mobilization of “innocents” against “evil doers” across the spectrum. Citizen groups on the left, like those on the right, demonize their opponents and proclaim their own virtues and blamelessness for society’s troubles. What is left out of citizenship both left and right is the concept of the citizen as a creative, intelligent, and, above all, “political” agent in the deepest meaning of the word, political – someone able to negotiate diverse views and interests for the sake of accomplishing some public task.

This pattern has a common conceptual root across ideological divides in the assumption that political action is almost entirely about distributive questions – who gets what, when, how? And it has a common social origin in the replacement of the productive political dimensions of mediating institutions, from political parties and settlement houses to unions and universities, with an anti-political language of service. Mediating institutions once furnished spaces for everyday practical problem solving and the creation of public goods. They also taught everyday skills of dealing with others with whom we may have sharp disagreements. They generated a sense of citizens’ power in the larger world. Today, educational institutions (such as the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota) which will be crucial for the reconstruction of politics in productive terms and for the education of citizens in the skills and habits of dealing with a world roiling with diversity are largely removed from the fray. The predominant language of civic engagement itself is service, not politics.

Dewey’s conceptual legacy can contribute to moving beyond distributive and Manichean politics and the culture of innocence. It can help us to re-engage our scholarship and teaching with the world. In the largest terms, it can help provide a democratic vision of the meaning of democracy and abundance, different than a culture dominated by values of savage competition, consumerism, and “get rich quick” which have come to predominate in the last generation. To reconstruct politics in productive terms both for immediate challenges and for the largest shape of our civilization requires a fresh and deep look at civic agency. Who does the work of democracy in the information age? What is that work? Where does it take place? In addressing such questions, John Dewey has much to say.

Information age populist – before the information age

“Democracy must be reborn in each generation. Education is the midwife.”
John Dewey

As James Farr has recently demonstrated, John Dewey was arguably the most important architect of the concept of “social capital,” perhaps the leading concept in the broad camp of communitarianism, a branch of political theory espoused by both Bill Clinton and George Bush. But for Dewey, social capital had a critical and feisty edge largely lacking in current usage. Dewey’s deployment of the term was associated with his challenges to racism, poverty, rural backwardness, and his advocacy of radical changes in education. Perhaps most dramatic in contrast with current uses, Dewey drew on a long line of economic reformers and radicals, from Karl Marx to Edward Bellamy, to challenge the logic and dynamic of private capital and the deification of the marketplace. As Farr summarizes, “the political economists of the nineteenth century” on which Dewey drew for his critical stance, “took capital – and its associations – from the social point of view. It might be said that today’s social capitalists take ‘the social’ – and its associations – from capital’s point of view.”

To return to the formative period in Dewey’s intellectual life is to go back to young intellectuals involved in what Lewis Feuer called the “back to the people” movement. “The depression of the 1880s, the riots, the waves of immigrants accumulating in the new slums, and the stark drama of the Haymarket anarchists, shook America out of its complacency,” as Feuer put it. Jane Addams, a leading voice of this generation, said, “[We were all motivated] by a desire to get back to the people, to be identified with the common lot; each of [us] magnified the obligation inherent in human relationships as such.”

Henry Demarest Lloyd called the mood “the New Conscience.” Proponents of far ranging economic reform like Edward Bellamy and Henry George were widely respected. Articulating the sentiments of young intellectuals such as Jane Addams and John Dewey, Lloyd expressed widespread sentiments when he said, “I am on the side of the underdog. The agitators on that side make mistakes, commit crimes, no doubt, but for all that theirs is the right side.” There was, in Lloyd’s view, a “renaissance of moral inventions.”

All these themes were vital currents at the University of Michigan when he arrived. Michigan was a pioneer in the emerging model of public universities as deeply engaged with the problems of democracy and the rapidly changing society.

John Dewey, coming to Michigan in 1884, had been shaped in his own self-description “from persons and from situations more than from books.” His youthful experiences in Vermont can be taken, in important respects, as emblematic of the social background that was the seedbed of American populism, an outlook he brought with him to Michigan.

Populism constitutes a political tradition much wider than simply the People’s Party of the 1890s. In that period, it also included groups as diverse as the Farmers Alliances cooperatives, the Knights of Labor, and leaders in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Moreover, as a political tradition, it powerfully shaped such 20th century efforts as the New Deal and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

For white farmers, small business groups and skilled and semi-skilled workers, populism was an idiom, a set of organizing strategies (for instance, a focus on cooperatives) and a legislative program, all together. The overall thrust was an effort to bring the economic and social transformations associated with emerging industry, monopoly capital, and urbanization under control. White populists took a prophetic stance which claimed the legacy and aspirations of American democracy as a resource to be adapted to the challenges of a radically changing world. Blacks, Latinos, and other racial minorities had a more complicated and ambivalent relation to American populist and democratic traditions – what Frederick Harris has called the “orderly and disorderly oppositional civic culture.” For minorities, populism and related civic traditions furnished resources for a complex political balancing act that included alliances and the simultaneous pursuit of racial justice.

Populism built on a legacy of rough hewn democratic practices that many immigrants of middle peasant and artisan backgrounds brought with them. These backgrounds, as Rowland Bertoff has argued, resonated with democratic political themes well into the 20th century.

Dewey’s father and mother both came from farming family backgrounds. Archibald Sprague Dewey, his father, had left the family farm and entered the grocery business in Burlington, just as the town was changing from a village to a city of fourteen thousand. His social environment was unusually diverse for Vermont, including French Canadian and Irish immigrants alongside the old “Yankee” English, as well as different income groups. In some respects it foreshadowed the diverse “civic community” which his close associate Jane Addams would create at Hull House in Chicago. After graduating from the University of Vermont in 1879, he taught high school two years at Oil City, Pennsylvania, a heavily industrialized town, where he combined his classes in the classics, algebra, and the sciences with his first efforts to write philosophy. He subsequently taught briefly at Lake View Seminary in Charlotte, Vermont, and then went to graduate school in philosophy at John Hopkins, before accepting a position at the University of Michigan in 1884.

Populism as a broad political approach is focused on developing the power of the people (“return of power to the people”). As such, as Saul Alinsky once put it, it furnishes a distinctive democratic alternative to conventional politics of left and right by emphasizing development of civic capacities and civic muscle. The salience of particular programs, blueprints, and policy plans are judged against the question, what do they contribute to civic power and learning?

What made Dewey’s populism prophetic is that he understood, far better than most of his contemporaries, key dynamics of power in an information society, where power is not simply a scarce good that requires a bitter struggle in which gains are matched by losses on the other side. Rather, knowledge power is increased through sharing transactions. Dewey believed, in particular, in what he called “the social” quality of knowledge production and dissemination through education. He argued that recognition and development of knowledge’s social quality was key to the future of democracy itself. These insights about knowledge, education, and power began to take shape during his Michigan years.

Dewey in that decade, from 1884 to 1894, was an ardent champion of public engagement by higher education. He founded a group called the Schoolmasters Club, which brought together teachers and faculty to discuss questions of democracy. He also had stranger enthusiasms, such as his brief intoxication with the idea of Franklin Ford, a New York publisher, who wished to awaken the masses to syndicalist socialism through a nation-wide newspaper. The object was for intellectuals, “the men of letters, to take their proper leadership as ‘the Intelligence Trust.’”

The launching of the enterprise was planned for the spring of 1892, with Dewey as the editor. A prospectus circulated in the state brought considerable mockery. The Detroit Tribune editorialized, “It seems that Mr. Dewey is going into the newspaper business…just how Mr. Dewey is to report thought no one seems to exactly understand.” Dewey dropped the newspaper idea (later he wrote it had been an “over-enthusiastic project” not only “too advanced for those days, but…too advanced for the maturity of those who had the idea in mind.”) Yet his self-defense, published in the Tribune, could serve as a manifesto for his entire academic and intellectual career. The purpose of the effort, he explained, was

“…to show that philosophy has some use [beyond] a matter of lunar politics. When philosophic ideas are not inculcated by themselves but used as tools to point out the meaning of phases of social life, they begin to have life and value.

The point had not been to seek to change newspapers, but rather “to transform philosophy…”

This passion for the relevance of ideas, for intellectual work that actually makes a difference in the real world, was a constant theme for Dewey. “The work of history,” he argued, “was to free the truth—to break down the walls of isolation and of class interest which hold it in and under.” But truth only becomes free, he added, when it “distributes itself to all so that it becomes the Commonwealth.”

Such a perspective on “truth” and “knowledge” made Dewey a sharp critic of knowledge “for its own sake,” removed from consideration of human ends and human effects. Thus, he compared religious evangelists (whom he did not hold in high regard, perhaps due to his mother’s “parochial” evangelism about which he complained all his life) to detached scientists,

“The evangelist, ignorant though he is, who is in constant contact with the needs, the sins, the desires, and the aspirations of actual human nature is a better judge of religious truth than the man of science, if a truly speculative life has shut him off from sympathy and living intimacy with the fundamental truths of the common nature of man.”

There was also, throughout Dewey’s career, a democratic respect for ordinary people’s values, their activities, and their intelligence. Dewey expressed a Jeffersonian faith in ordinary people as the “only safe repository of the powers of the society,” whose judgments, however flawed they may be, were likely to be sounder than those of any elite. Thus, in his introduction to a collection on The Living Thoughts of Thomas Jefferson, Dewey extolled Jefferson on the ground that “His faith in the right of the people to govern themselves in their own way and in their ability to exercise the right wisely, provided they were enlightened by education and by free discussion, was stronger than his faith in any article of his own political creed – except this one.” He praised Jefferson’s plans for daily self-government, such as his concept of local ward government where people were to exercise power with respect to their own affairs (such as care of the poor, roads, police and the like) on the grounds, as he paraphrased Jefferson, that “every man would then share in the government of affairs not merely on election day but every day.”

Dewey’s democratic faith was a matter of his conviction that ordinary citizens have an elemental humanity often missing in more educated or affluent groups. As he put it in a tribute to Jane Addams, co-founder of Hull House, her belief in democracy derived from her “deep feeling that the simple, the ‘humble’ peoples of the earth are those in whom primitive impulses of friendly affection are the least spoiled, the most spontaneous.”

Dewey also sought to ground intellectual life in the activities and work of common people. In his view, the entire tradition of philosophy had made an invidious – and invalid – distinction between thought and action, intellect and work. “The depreciation of action, of doing and making, has been cultivated by philosophers,” Dewey wrote in The Quest for Certainty, his attack on the idea that inquiry can be separated from the social context in which it functions.

“After a distinctively intellectual class had arisen, a class having leisure and in a large degree protected against the more serious perils which afflict the mass of humanity, its members proceeded to glorify their own office. Since no amount of pains and care in action can ensure complete certainty, certainty in knowledge was worshipped as a substitute…the ideal of a cognitive certainty and truth having no connection with practice, and [even] prized because of its lack of connection, developed.”

Dewey was aware of power dimensions of knowledge, especially the aura of infallibility which those armed with “science” or “expertise” could assume. “The dogma worked out practically so as to strengthen dependence upon authority,” he wrote. “Just as belief that a magical ceremony will regulate the growth of seeds to full harvest stifles the tendency to investigate…so acceptance of dogmatic rules as bases of conduct in education, morals, and social matters lessens the impetus to find out about the conditions which are involved in forming intelligent plans.”

Dewey’s basic argument, profoundly democratic in its implications, is that all knowledge – “academic” no less than “practical” – is social knowledge, the product of an interplay of experience, testing and experiment, observation, reflection, and conversation. All have the capacity and right to participate in knowledge-creation. Recognizing the social nature of knowledge is essential to an accurate account. “Consider the development of the power of guiding ships across trackless wastes from the day when they hugged the shore,” wrote Dewey.

“The record would be an account of a vast multitude of cooperative efforts, in which one individual uses the results provided for him by a countless number of other individuals…so as to add to the common and public store. A survey of such facts brings home the actual social character of intelligence as it actually develops and makes its way.”

Dewey’s view of knowledge as a “public and common store” shaped his view of democracy. Dewey is sometimes charged with a naïve or idealistic view of democracy. Yet what critics in this vein overlook is that Dewey was getting at a particular dynamic of knowledge power, different than zero-sum distributive conflicts in which one’s loss is another’s gain.

Dewey did not ignore coercion or violence in public life. His creed was based on the urgency of challenging coercion with what he called “social intelligence” as an alternative. In his political manifesto, “Renascent Liberalism,” he contrasts the two. “It is not pleasant to face the extent to which, as matter of fact, coercive and violent force is relied upon in the present social system,” he wrote. “But unless the fact is acknowledged as a fact in its full depth and breadth, the meaning of dependence upon intelligence as an alternative method of social direction will not be grasped.” Dewey argued that liberals see intelligence “as an individual possession and its exercise as an individual right.” In fact, he proposes,

In Dewey’s view, liberals must recognize the social power of knowledge. They must “assume the responsibility for making it clear that intelligence is a social asset and is clothed with a function as public as is its origin in the concrete, in social cooperation.”

Building on these premises about the social and practical nature of knowledge, or “social intelligence,” as well as his democratic faith in the values and capacities of ordinary people, Dewey developed a rich and dynamic vision of democracy and education for democracy. Democracy was “a way of life” (using a formulation by T.V. Smith), not simply a form of government, about which he spoke with passion. In his famous address, “The School as a Social Centre,” before the National Council of Education, Dewey called upon education to be at the heart of the new civilization:

“Everywhere we see the growing recognition that the community life is defective and distorted excepting as it does care for all its constituent parts. This is no longer viewed as a matter of charity, but as a matter of justice – nay, even of something higher and better than justice – a necessary phase of developing and growing life. Men will long dispute about material socialism, about socialism considered as a matter of distribution of the material resources of the community; but there is a socialism…of the intelligence and the spirit. To extend the range and the fullness of sharing in the intellectual and spiritual resources of the community is the very meaning of the community.”

In Dewey’s view, a commonwealth or socialism of knowledge comes into being when all work is understood in terms of its educative capacities and human and social properties. It is, in short, a mistake to separate “work” from “education.” “In the democracy of the future, goods will be made not primarily as a means to private profit, but because of their service to enriched living…Not only the value of the product for those who use it, but the process of production itself will be appraised in terms of its contribution to human welfare.” Challenging those who focused simply on reducing the work week, Dewey argued in essay, “A Free Teacher in a Free Society,” that “the quality of the work experience” rather than the number of hours worked was the key question. “If work were made a more effective part of the democratic social life…the demand for shorter hours would be far less insistent.”

Dewey stressed the educative dimensions “of all callings [and] occupations.” Thus, professionals, he said, needed to become more conscious of their educative roles and responsibilities. “The professions…not merely require education in those who practise them but help to form the attitudes and understanding of those who consult their practitioners,” Dewey wrote. “As far as science is humanized, it educates all the laymen. Artists, painters, musicians, architects, and writers are also an immense educative force,” in potential, though “at the present time...this educative function is hampered and distorted.”

Education should be seen and practiced as a transformative process, a dynamic engagement with the world, its problems, and its work. Education for democracy – education’s highest and most important goal – had self-consciously to cultivate the habits that once were generated through young people’s involvement in the life and work of families and communities. “There was always something which really needed to be done, and a real necessity that each member of the household should do his own part faithfully in co-operation with others,” Dewey argued in School and Society. Everyday productive work taught habits of cooperation, responsibility, productive outlook. It also meant a deep connection with the world. “We cannot overlook the importance for educational purposes of the close and intimate acquaintance got with nature at first hand,” Dewey argued. Everyday work had once connected young people

“…with real things and materials, with the actual processes of their manipulation and the knowledge of their social necessities and uses. In all this there was continual training of observation, of ingenuity, constructive imagination, of logical thought, and of the sense of reality acquired through first-hand contact with actualities.”

Far from being outmoded, these views have nourished the most innovative experiments with contemporary education for democracy in recent years, such as the pioneering work of Deborah Meier and her associates in Central Park East schools and the Coalition for Essential Schools.

Finally, Dewey saw higher education institutions as playing a central role in democracy. Indeed, their public function was their essential justification. In response to an editorial in The New York Times which argued the University of Pennsylvania’s right to fire the economic reformer Scott Nearing because the trustees disagreed with his views, he argued in a letter,

“You apparently take the ground that a modern university is a personally conducted institution like a factory and that if for any reason the utterances of any teacher, within or without the university walls, are objectionable to the Trustees there is nothing more to be said…[But] the modern university is in every respect, save its legal management, a public institution with public responsibilities. [Professors] have been trained to think of the pursuit and expression of truth as a public function to be exercised on behalf of the interests of their moral employer—society as a whole.”

For Dewey, professors’ public function was the justification for tenure and the rationale for the founding of the AAUP, which he helped to organize.

I believe Dewey was right: higher education does have enormous power, but it is largely invisible. Moreover, what was true in the first half of the 20th Century is far more true in the 21st. Higher education shapes the fabric of our society in a myriad of ways. It creates credentialed knowledge. It generates and diffuses the conceptual frameworks that structure practices of all kinds. It socializes professionals. It is a resource for economic vitality, as scholars such as Richard Florida have documented. The power of higher education was widely understood by ordinary citizens from all sorts of backgrounds in the public forums we conducted at the University of Minnesota over the past two years, as part of our civic engagement process, better understood than by faculty within the institution.

Yet Dewey was much too sanguine about professors being trained “to think in terms of their public function.” His lapse is part of a wider problem in the way he conceived of politics. While Dewey’s theory of knowledge creation and learning adds to our conception of democracy, he focused on knowledge in too singular a fashion, in ways that dropped out the conflicts and negotiations among particular interests, values, power, and viewpoints at the heart of politics.

Dewey was part of a generation of progressive intellectuals who narrowed the orbit of politics, removing it from “civil society,” the realm Dewey called “community.” Yet to imagine oneself outside the messy and deeply political quality of our everyday worlds is to conceive oneself ultimately as innocent. A posture of innocence characterizes our time.

To realize the democratic possibilities Dewey envisioned for education or the world requires a look at how politics disappeared, and what can be done to put politics back in.

Disappearing politics

“Would it be dangerous to conclude that the corrupt politician himself, because he is democratic in method, is on a more ethical line of social development than the reformer who believes that the people must be made over by ‘good citizens’ and governed by ‘experts’? The former at least are engaged in that great moral effort of getting the mass to express itself, and of adding this mass energy and wisdom to the community as a whole.”
- Jane Addams, “On Political Reform,” 1902

Jane Addams, in her essay published the same year as Dewey’s Social Centre speech, voiced another prophecy. She warned about the emergence of a class of professionals, or “experts” as she described them, who saw themselves outside the life of the people. Her warnings directly challenge the politics of innocence, a division of the world into innocents and evil doers. “We are all involved in this political corruption,” she argued. “None of us can stand aside; our feet are mired in the same soil, and our lungs breathe the same air.”

Addams warnings about outside experts bore an interesting resemblance to Dewey’s earlier comparison between evangelist and detached scientist. Yet the irony is that Dewey himself was to suffer some similar degree of detachment when he left Chicago, went to Columbia Teacher’s College and helped establish The New Republic magazine. Dewey became one of the intellectual architects during and after World War I of a new way of seeing the world. In the pages of the magazine and beyond, “politics” was replaced with scientific administration of the state. Academics came to write “about” politics, far more than they practiced it, at least in democratic terms, in their own environments.

As historian Daniel Rodgers has described in Atlantic Crossings, the roots of the academic detachment which Dewey so despised were growing rapidly before the war. In the late 19th century, American graduate students studying in Europe, fired with the same reformist zeal that moved Dewey, Addams and others of their generation, absorbed a model of “scientific objectivity” and policy making in private consultation with political leadership, far removed from public involvement. Young intellectuals had passionate concerns to temper the workings of the marketplace. But more and more, they saw this as an elite activity. As Rodgers put it, “Students of the first German-trained economists…establish[ed] new forms of authority by colonizing the social space between university professorships and expert government service. Their efforts came to define a central structural element of American progressive politics.” The culture of private consultation among progressives had begun to develop before the war. It found new authority and articulation with the founding of The New Republic in 1914.

The magazine was a forum for a stunning array of literary, political, and intellectual leaders – within the first year, H.G. Wells, Theodore Dreiser, Conraid Aiken, Harold Laski, Lewis Mumford and a host of others. However distinguished, the magazine also played a significant role in marginalizing “amateurs’” involvement in public affairs.

“We all have to follow the lead of specialists,” wrote Walter Lippmann, who set much of the intellectual course for the publication. In his view, a growing body of opinion “looks to the infusion of scientific method, the careful application of administrative technique.” In the modern world, science was the model for modern liberal thinking, and “only those will conquer who can understand.” The magazine touted the outlook of engineering and the image of the state as a “machine,” whose workings were best understood by the application of technique. This technical outlook gained considerable impetus from America’s involvement in World War I, which the magazine enthusiastically supported.

The enemy of the war effort, in the editors’ views, was inefficiency. By 1918, mobilization had made the piles of undistributed anthracite coal disappear. “It is a triumph of organized units over unorganized individuals,” wrote one regular writer. An editorial elaborated, “In the last analysis, a strong, scientific organization of the sources of material and access to them is the means to the achievement of the only purposes by which this war can be justified.” By the war’s end, The New Republic was suffused with scientific triumphalism. The war had taught us, it argued “to meet the threatened class conflict by placing scientific research at the disposal of a conscious purpose.” One unsigned editorial argued the consensus: “the business of politics has become too complex to be left to the pretentious misunderstandings of the benevolent amateur.”

John Dewey dissented from the elitist sentiments of his fellow editorial writers, most notably in his book, The Public and Its Problems, written in response to Lippmann’s attack on the very idea of “public.” One cannot fairly blame Dewey, as Randolph Bourne did in his famous essay, “Twilight of Idols,” writing as a bitter former follower, for being responsible for the culture of technique that prevailed among liberals. Yet Bourne’s passionate statement nonetheless held insight. Bourne argued that the defect of the philosophy of “instrumentalism” (Dewey’s preferred word for pragmatism) “even when it means adjustment to changing, living experience, is that there is no provision for thought or experience getting beyond itself…You never transcend anything.” In Bourne’s critique, the “realism” of Dewey had “everything good and wise except the obstreperous vision that would drive and draw men into it.”

For Dewey, ordinary men and women – not simply credentialed experts – had a role to play in the creation of what he called “social [or scientific] intelligence.” But Dewey also often imagined the future in terms of engineering and mechanical metaphors. “The more one loves peace…the more one is bound to ask himself how the machinery, the specific, concrete arrangements, exactly comparable to physical engineering devices, for maintaining peace are to be brought about.” The problem with such logic, as John Jordan has observed, is that mechanical “modes of reason, no matter how democratically or generously applied, are inescapably hierarchical.” This is, in part, because this way of talk privileges one discourse – technical and scientific – above other ways of talking and thinking, such as narrative voice, or the wisdom gained from daily experience and “common sense.” It is also “because of the hubris that held there could be only one correct logic.” As Jordan summarizes, “Although Dewey did not fall into the simplistic positivism of some Taylorites, his philosophic subtleties did not significantly rock the boat in which The New Republic progressives sailed confidently into the future.”

Engineering and scientific modes of thought as conventionally understood are, most particularly, different than politics. Politics involves a constant interplay and negotiation among distinctive interests, values, and ways of looking at the world. There is no “one” precise and efficient answer. Dewey sought to resist the elite nature of American decision making. But since conceptual maps make a difference, narrow definitions of politics took a toll. Dewey did not have a sufficiently political understanding of “community” or “society” to resist long-term trends which were marginalizing the role of citizens in public affairs.

Dewey’s definitional mistake can be found in his address on Social as Social Centre. Despite its luminous vision – and its consequences, helping to spawn a movement for schools to become centers of community life across the nation – it articulated a faulty distinction between “politics” and “society.” “I mean by ‘society’ the less definite and freer play of the forces of the community which goes on in the daily intercourse and contact of men in an endless variety of ways that have nothing to do with politics or government,” Dewey argued. Dewey proposed that citizenship needed to be defined more broadly, “to mean all the relationships of all sorts that are involved in membership in a community,” and that the range of school activities related to citizenship education was wide. But his definition took the political edge off of citizenship.

I believe it is crucial to define politics itself in rich and expansive ways. It is also vital to include in that treatment closely associated ideas such as interest and power —both understood multi-dimensionally —if citizens are to gain standing as co-creators of the public world.

Putting politics back in

Politics is best understood as the interplay of distinctive, unique interests and perspectives to accomplish public purposes. In this deepest sense of politics, it is everywhere.

Sometimes there is an intractable clash of interests and power relations – a dynamic Dewey neglected with too singular a focus on “social intelligence” as a power resource that could replace “coercion.” Yet sometimes, especially with vision, skill, and determination, politics can negotiate clashing interests for the sake of general benefit. This is “a different kind of politics,” a view of politics as productive, not simply distributive. Politics is the way people with widely divergent values and from very different backgrounds can work together to solve problems and create common things of value. Politics is precisely “the contact of men [and women] in endless variety.”

This broader sense of politics can only be sustained if it is widely dispersed – not the property of the professional political class or the state. Politics, after all, is from the Greek root, politikos, meaning “of the citizen.” Until very modern times the word had no associations with the state at all; it conveyed the idea of the polis, public relationships among citizens. As the intellectual historian Giovanni Sartori has detailed, this meant horizontal civic relationships, not the vertical, state-centered relationships with which it has come to be associated.

Today in practical terms, there is urgent need to spread back out the ownership of politics if we are to have any hope of revivifying politics. It is in the short term but overwhelming interest of political leaders to over-promise or declare themselves “in charge,” patterns which increasingly alienate the citizenry. Further, politics defined by elections necessarily emphasizes partisanship. It thus eclipses the interplay of diverse interests – and the development of skills essential to negotiate such interplay – that is at the heart of the politics we need.

Sheldon Wolin conveyed popular politicalness in American life when he defined it as “our capacity for developing into beings who know and value what it means to participate in and be responsible for the care and improvement of our common and collective life.” The British theorist Bernard Crick, in his great 1962 dissenting work against the vein, In Defense of Politics, stressed politics as “a great and civilizing activity.” He emphasized politics as negotiation of diverse views and interests. Drawing on Aristotle’s The Politics, Crick argued that politics is about plurality, not similarity. Aristotle had proposed that an emphasis on the “unity” of the political community destroyed its defining quality. He contrasted politics with military alliance, based on “similarity” of aim. In this vein, Crick defended politics against a list of forces which he saw as obliterating recognition of plurality. Its “enemies” included nationalism, technology, and mass democracy, as well as partisans of conservative, liberal, and socialist ideologies.

Voices like Wolin and Crick, or in contemporary life David Mathews at the Kettering Foundation, have been dissenting ones, in the main, among white intellectuals. Minority intellectuals, such as the African Americans Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, or Ralph Ellison, by and large have had a much more political sense of civic action.

In the fifties and beyond, the professionalization of mediating institutions such as political parties, unions, schools, and universities eroded the everyday experiences of politics through which people learned skills of dealing with others unlike themselves, and developed some sense of their productive contribution to the larger democracy. It replaced a horizontal relationship among citizens as a wide experience of politics with an increasingly vertical political relationship of the citizen in relation to the state, as Addams had foreseen in 1902. Across many institutions, people increasingly became defined as “clients” served by professionals who understood themselves to be “experts.” Meanwhile, the rise of the consumer culture created different visions of the “good life” as about consumption, not production. These are themes I have elsewhere treated in some detail. Here, I want to emphasize their conceptual counterpart, the way current civic theory has lost the Deweyian insight that citizens make democracy.

The de-politicization of most social life is illustrated by comparing the views of “communitarians” with those of “liberals,” the leading schools of political theory. Despite differences, both remove citizens from politics, except on the (relatively rare) occasions when citizens vote, protest, or otherwise interact with their government and elected officials.

Today current communitarian theory is a resource in America’s anti-politics politics, a politics of innocence in which almost everyone eschews responsibility for addressing the troubles of our time. Communitarian theorists have made helpful criticisms of a view of the citizen as simply an individual bearer of rights. Yet their positive concept of citizenship has created a moral repertoire easily mobilized in a Manichean world view. Communitarian theory is advanced by intellectuals such as Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone and president of the American Political Science Association, Amitai Etzioni, founder of the Communitarian Caucus, and Don Eberly, a Bush advisor, and a number of others. Communitarians stress what Etzioni calls “the social dimension of human existence.” They express alarm about the fraying of what they see as the underlying moral fabric of the nation that is essential to a well-functioning democracy. They argue that America suffers from excessive individualism, an overemphasis on rights and an under-emphasis on responsibilities, and an increasingly litigious culture where citizens seek resolution of conflicts through the courts.

In communitarianism, the citizen is defined as a member of the community who expresses his or her citizenship through acts of volunteering and service. Communitarians strike a chord by decrying a decline in America’s community involvement and voluntary spirit in a world that seems increasing depersonalized and fragmented. Yet calls for compassionate, community-minded volunteers do not convey boldness, intelligence, gritty determination in the face of adversity, courage in fighting injustice, or capacities for sustained work with others outside our “community” with whom we may have sharp disagreements.

An etymology of service, a concept at the heart of communitarianism, illustrates the problem. Service is from the Latin root, servus, meaning slave. The history of the word is associated with terms such as “servile,” “serf,” and “servant.” Service does not necessarily imply servitude. In one of its meanings, performing the duties connected with a position, service and derivatives such as public service, community service, and service learning have been useful bridges for public institutions to re-connect with the world. In this meaning, service sometimes provides a starting point for political involvement. Yet in all meanings service is associated with other-directedness. The service giver, in focusing on the needs and interests and desires of those being served, adopts a stance of altruism or selflessness. Whether motivated by desire for concealment or by self-abnegation, this submerges the interests and identity of the server.

The view of citizenship as voluntarism and service was hotly debated during the Clinton administration inside the New Citizenship, a nonpartisan effort I coordinated with the White House Domestic Policy Council from 1993-95, as well as in discussions of the National Commission on Civic Renewal. There continue to be voices arguing for “political” citizenship. Liberal theorists such as Michael Schudson, Theda Skocpol, Ziad Munson and Marshall Gans challenge communitarians and the Bush administration specifically on just these grounds. As Schudson put it in a critique of Bush’s substitution of “service” for “justice”:

“There is no place in this vision of citizenship for individuals to sue for their rights or to invoke the law on behalf of their liberties or to initiate actions for damages against tobacco companies or tire manufacturers. There is no acknowledgement that democracy has been enlarged in our lifetimes when individuals have been driven not by a desire to serve but by an effort to overcome indignities they themselves have suffered.”

Public scholars such as Schudson draw on social movements whose theme was the struggle for distributive justice. Yet while the struggle for justice remains crucial, a singular focus on justice narrows the range of politics and people’s political interests dramatically, while liberalism’s state-centered quality emphasizes a vertical, not a horizontal, understanding of political relations.

For all the radical differences between a focus on “service” or “justice,” or between communitarian and liberal views of citizenship broadly, there are also similarities in the ways both camps think about democracy and civic agency. At bottom, both define politics, as citizens practice it, as a distributive activity associated with government – a fight over who gets what. Because public action necessarily involves more than such fights – in the global context, for instance, it involves creating the conditions for security and survival itself —this view marginalizes the amateur, and identifies democracy, in turn, with elections. It cedes to elected officials the mandate to take up the generative and productive tasks of politics.

The limits of American (and European) conceptions of civil society which confine productive political activity to the political class are emphasized by a number of theorists in South Africa. There, as Krista Johnson has observed, the freedom movement generated politics with broad popular ownership. Democratic theory out of this tradition challenges views which “ascribe to the state the role of knowledge producer, able to develop policy and set the agenda for social transformation” in the name of politics. Popular democrats see de-politicized versions of civil society as using a language of “citizen participation” and “people–driven development” to limit and constrain citizens. “The role of civil society organizations [is restricted] to that of mobilization and the implementation of directives from above…based on a clear distinction between government or party experts who ‘know’ and the mass of the people who are supposed to apply this knowledge, leaving out of the equation the capacity of the average citizen to act and form his or her own opinion.” In contrast, “scholars [like Neocosmos, Mamdani, herself, and others] working within the popular-democratic paradigm suggest that what is required is a redefinition of the relationship between ruler and ruled whereby the practices of government are no longer considered to be the privilege of the few, and the majority of citizens are not excluded from the public realm.” Omano Edigheji, a social theorist at the University of the Witwatersrand writing in this vein, adds marketplace thinking to Crick’s list of politics’ enemies. Marketplace thinking, he argues, results in “the individualisation and monetisation of life.” Edigheji emphasizes “a different kind of politics” to counter the “false god of the market.”

American democrats, in theory and practice, have much to learn from such arguments and from the political traditions which feed them. Theory and practice from our experiences have things to contribute, as well. For instance, “public work politics,” a concept developed by the Center for Democracy and Citizenship and its colleagues over the last 14 years of action research projects, gets at what is different about constructive and useful politics. Public work can be understood as sustained effort to create a civic outcome by a mix of citizens. It adds an emphasis on the productive, generative dimensions of political action, as well as the cumulative civic learning process of organizations and individuals. It highlights the ways in which politics is not simply about distributive struggles but also solves public problems and creates public things, involving negotiation among diverse interests to create outcomes of broad public benefit.

For its civic potential to be realized, public work needs to include a civic learning process which makes explicit the political dimensions of civic action with its diverse interests and power dynamics. Political action in this vein is full of conflict, turbulence, and challenges; it is messy and often difficult. It can reconfigure power relationships in more democratic terms, in ways that are unsettling. But it can also unleash tremendous political energy and creativity through the sense of getting somewhere of public benefit. This, I believe, is what Jane Addams was getting at when she talked about the educator freeing the powers of everyone.

“Public work politics” is also a way to name elements of successful citizen efforts around the world. Highly moralized politics based on a Manichean approach to the world’s problems is dysfunctional in addressing most collective problems of the 21st century, whatever the calculus of “good and evil.” The complex, interconnected nature of the world’s problems was dramatized by a report, Global Trends 2015, released months before 9/11. The report warned of terrorist attacks, but it connected them to poverty, illicit weapons, AIDS, famine, sectarian warfare, three billion people short of water, and slave labor. It concluded, “governments will have less and less control” over such problems. The bright spots were citizen initiatives addressing them.

The spotlight on citizen initiatives and the interconnected nature of problems has been paralleled by others. For instance, as David Bornstein observed in The New York Times in 1999, citizen movements and initiatives have been growing at remarkable rates, with large impacts – the defeat of apartheid, the fall of communism, the overthrow of right wing dictators in Chile and the Phillipines, the establishment of an international criminal court, the raising of village income, educational and health levels for millions of peasants by groups like the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. Moreover, such efforts show signs of a cumulative process of social learning. William Drayton, president of Ashoka, an organization which seeks to catalyze citizen effort, argues that a movement culture is emerging: “A critical mass of institutions, people, and ideas [which]feed on one another and strengthen one another.”
These civic initiatives and movements have had strong moral dimensions, but they have also demonstrated political savvy and the capacity to enlist people from widely different points of the political spectrum – an organizing capacity much more developed and sustained than current anti-globalization protests, for instance. Even the most morally clear-cut of citizen efforts, such as the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, have evidenced such qualities. In the early 21st century, as civic initiatives have moved from the relatively clear cut issues of opposition to dictatorial political regimes to the far more complex tasks of development and the construction of flourishing democracies, practical, multi-dimensional approaches to problem solving – the capacity to bring together people with different conceptions of right and wrong and definitions of what the problem is – are all the more important.

Public work that builds the power and political acumen of citizens creates an alternative to inflamed and Manichean politics. This is illustrated, for instance, by the efforts of the most successful and broad citizen groups such as the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), based largely in minority and working class congregations. The IAF groups develop a sense of citizen responsibility, what they call “care for the whole,” or the public weal, in the process of struggling for justice. Their core practice of “one on one interviewing” assiduously re-builds public relationships among people from diverse cultural and political backgrounds. It explicitly creates an understanding of politics as citizen-centered, a horizontal relationship among the people, not a vertical relation with the state or political leaders. A dramatic lapse in contemporary political theory (and conventional practice) is a slighting of such citizen-centered politics; in the United States more than four or five million people from a wide range of religious and political views are now in religiously-based citizen organizations that teach such politics.

We have begun to see the large potential of a “different kind of politics” in civic engagement work at the University of Minnesota over the last several years, where the Center for Democracy and Citizenship has worked with the provost, faculty leaders, and other stakeholders to launch a sustained effort to “renew the land grant, public mission” of the University. First with a Task Force on Civic Engagement and now with a formal Council on Public Engagement, the University has begun to develop relationships, practical strategies, and a wide intellectual discussion on what civic engagement might mean for scholarship, disciplines, teaching, relations with communities, internal culture, institutional incentives and rewards, and the university’s contribution to democracy. Building political alliances and a broad vision of public engagement’s meaning for democracy itself have been key to this work, though I want to stress that it is also just beginning (see the University web site, www.umn.edu/civic ).

Though there are many aspects of this different politics at the University, as elsewhere, I want to conclude by focusing on one: what it looks like in a neighborhood-based process of creating democratic educational centers of community life, in political as well as social terms.

Democratizing education

John Dewey believed fervently in what Sara Evans and I have called free public spaces to democratic civilization. “If public questions were frequently being discussed by a local community forum with widespread democratic participation by adults and youth,” he said in his essay, “A Free Teacher in a Free Society,” then a good share of citizenship education could be brought about by participation in those councils.”

In his proposal for the “school as a social centre,” he added to the idea of school as a place for dialogue three other elements. He saw the school as a place for “moralizing mankind,” teaching norms and patterns of respectful behavior in a society where traditional bonds were rapidly losing their force. He believed schools, when connected to the life of communities and occupations outside the school walls, would make learning come alive while simultaneously helping to illumine the meaning and significance of activities in which people are engaged. “Most people are doing particular things of whose exact reasons and relationships they are only dimly aware,” Dewey said. The whole is so vast, so complicated and so technical that it is next to out of the question to get any direct acquaintanceship with it. Hence we must rely upon… interpretations that come to us through conscious channels.” This, he argued, was the source of the university-extension movement, to give “social bearings” to activities. Finally, schools needed to be centers for continuing education in occupations that need updated learning.

As the idea took shape in a broad movement, launched formally in Rochester in 1907 and spreading rapidly, it spawned a Social Center Association of America, and allied itself with other forces, such as the “community civics” movement in which young citizens were to investigate and help solve social problems, and adult education. Woodrow Wilson, among many other luminaries, became a champion, arguing that “What is going to be produced by this movement [is] a release of common forces…now somewhere banked up.” Further, the idea of school as social center, originally inspired by Jane Addams’ Hull House, became closely associated with other educational efforts, such as cooperative extension. L.J. Hanifan, superintendent of rural schools in West Virginia, detailed activities involving schools as social centers, beginning with picnics and other “sociables,” realized in the work of “surveys, meetings, discussions, debates, reading circles, exhibits, lectures, libraries, evening classes, community histories, and electoral participation in matters of community improvements, especially for good roads.”

However robust the movement once was, it faded over the decades. Schools, rural and urban, increasingly became detached from the life of community. Parents (especially from lower income or minority cultural backgrounds) expressed feelings of powerlessness and detachment. Hours became more rigid. Doors shut after the school day ended. Allied efforts like cooperative extension, or even settlements, became one-way service delivery operations.

Yet the creation of public spaces can be a seedbed for productive, pluralist, citizen-owned politics in an age of gated communities and privatized resources. When we did public forums in Minnesota as part of the Civic Engagement Task Force work in 2000-2, we heard often the desire for “public spaces” in which citizens with different views could talk about and work on controversial and difficult issues facing communities and the society. Such expressions of desire were accompanied by observations that public spaces are disappearing.

Creating, renewing, and sustaining public spaces tied to learning and practicing concepts of citizen politics and public work have central to the action research projects in civic engagement undertaken over the past 14 years by the Center for Democracy and Citizenship and our partners (for accounts, theory, lessons see the web site, at www.publicwork.org). Public space for discussion, work, and political learning emerged immediately as a felt need in a variety of settings, from St. Bernard’s Catholic elementary school to St. Catherine’s College, from Augustana Nursing Home to the Neighborhood House settlement on the West Side of St. Paul. Public space, as people voice the need, combines space for relationship building with development of public skills of action and empowerment. “We want to learn how to act in public,” was a comment I often heard from Hmong women, refugees from Laos who had settled in St. Paul and were participants in the Jane Addams School for Democracy, a learning and public work partnership formed in 1995. In Public Achievement, the youth civic engagement and education initiative begun by the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, young people work as teams on projects they choose, with the guidance of adult “democracy coaches.” They express a sense of political awakening from the everyday work of problem solving and public creation. Team members often name their meetings as a “space to be themselves.” In Public Achievement they are free to try out new roles, to work with others outside their friendship circles, and to practice political skills (like chairing meetings, negotiating, making presentations, interviewing) which they translate into broader public work.

Our experiences highlight both political dynamics in public spaces and the educational aspects – when a diverse mix of people engage each other, you can see everyone in the room getting smarter, as one organizer put it. For instance, immigrant families participating in the Jane Addams School (JAS) experience most institutions – from schools to social service agencies – as unresponsive and often condescending, unaware of their cultural backgrounds and knowledge, dismissive of their ideas. It does little good simply to bewail the pattern, however, or to treat Hmong or Latino families as simply victimized and powerless. The JAS works, in significant measure, because it involves a creative, fluid public space where people’s talents and contributions are valued and developed, where the question, “what is citizenship?” is a constant topic of discussion and debate, and where people who are “marginalized” develop the political savvy to be otherwise. Such public spaces occasion conversation about issues that range from the personal to the global. They also provide spaces for people to learn political skills and habits, which they use in helping making government more accountable, interactive, and transparent.

In the JAS learning circles, immigrants teach college students, as well as get help with study for the citizenship test of the INS. Teenagers learn internet and journalism skills, which they employ to make visible stories of young people’s public work projects. Throughout, political action and public leadership training are vital dimensions. The JAS has created a working relationship with the regional INS, which allows participants to bring their co-learner to the test, and has also involved INS staff in a variety of community projects. JAS played a key role in mobilizing political action among Hmong communities and college students across the country in support of the Hmong Veterans Recognition Bill in Congress in 2000. Hmong people have developed many strategies to access local schools, as well. “Some of the people in this community were leaders in Laos, in Thailand, and in Latin America,” argues Nan Skelton, a co-founder of the JAS. “But many have not been able to translate that into leadership in relation to the incredibly complex world of the St. Paul School system.” Skelton observes that most institutions, including schools, discourage people from displaying their cultures and languages. “They want people to be proficient in the dominant culture.” But the philosophy of the JAS is that “communities cannot build a future if they don’t bring their past with them. [Public] leadership training [is essential] to help community leaders interact with and influence that world.” The expectation of the JAS approach is that increased parent power will increase the capacity of the schools and other institutions to teach. “We expect teachers and administrators of neighborhood schools will also seek ways to increase shared ownership in children’s learning.” In the summer of 2002, a teacher training program organized by Nan Kari, another co-founder, in civic and political skills began to parallel immigrant parent training. It quickly spawned a number of projects in which teachers work with community members.

Sandy Fuller, a third co-founder, describes the democratizing dynamic that comes from the political mix of immigrants, students, faculty and others. “I have heard Hmong students say, “I was Hmong and I was running away from being Hmong and wanted to be American. I turned my back on everything that reflected backward people. At the JAS I saw the college professors with people like my parents and learning from them. That was the same stuff my parents told me and I didn’t listen to them. Now these smart people are learning from my parents.” Or, as Cindy Xiong, a high school sophomore active in JAS since the 5th grade (one of a group of Hmong girls who raised money and organized a trip to Washington to lobby for the Veterans bill), described her interest in a new project, organizing a trip back to Laos. “We want to take a trip to our parents’ homeland…to be in their shoes and see why they push us so much…we don’t understand them, and there is a lot of miscommunication. We want to take this trip to understand our parents better, and to come back with this knowledge to explain it to other youth.”

In turn, the Jane Addams School has become a resource – a 21st century version of a “demonstration plot,” in the old land grant idiom – for what democratizing culture change and also civic learning for students might look like. Faculty from many departments and many hundreds of university students have been involved in different ways, and JAS has been widely recognized as an outstanding example of reciprocal, sustained university-community partnership. Craig Swan, Vice Provost at the University, told a group of Harvard researchers, “This is a partnership with people from the university helping immigrant populations understand our democratic traditions, but also getting new perspectives about what citizenship and democracy mean to people who haven’t been born in the U.S. There is learning on both sides.”

The work on the West Side has brought home a contrast between two modes of educational practice, “service” and “organizing.” We need to change the now dominant view of civic learning as community service or service learning, if we are to develop the political sensibilities of our students. Organizing, from the Greek root ergon, meaning work, involves understanding education as about transformation, the “reworking” of ourselves and our contexts. An organizing approach is what we need to develop, if we are to think and act politically.

Two approaches to civic learning

Beyond Innocence

In an information age, people feel powerless to cope with the avalanche of information shaping their worlds and lives, from global financial systems to parent education. Moreover, the institutional fabric seems static, beyond human control, even as it undergoes turbulent change. Higher education, whose theories of knowledge and practice of pedagogy bear some share of responsibility for this phenomenology of powerlessness, has a particular leadership role to take in changing it.

There is a growing ferment about civic engagement in higher education that now includes a number of institution-wide efforts at the University of Pennsylvania, UC San Diego, Illinois, among others, as well as at Michigan and Minnesota. Today, much of our research culture is detached from the problems and currents of the larger society. Much educational experience of our students teaches a narrow view of problems as discrete and disconnected. Service or even service learning does not necessarily address this problem at all. More generally, we also often teach the kind of innocence and irresponsibility that grows from cultivating the stance of outside critics, not engaged actors. As Julie Ellison has described, we teach our students how to be critics of everything, but proponents of very little. As a result of these dynamics, public universities have experienced a radical fraying of the relationships with citizens.

Democratizing education —in the sense of its reconnection with the political life of communities, and in the sense of educational and learning activities as sites for democratizing the larger society —is key to changing this phenomenology of powerlessness and innocence.

To the extent that education becomes a medium for developing bolder, more confident, and more political citizens, it will take leadership in addressing the largest challenges and crises of our time. This means schools, universities, and other educational sites becoming public and political spaces, as well as John Dewey’s social ones.

As we change our institutions, we also help to create a deeper understanding of politics – an understanding of politics which simultaneously retrieves its historic legacy and adapts it for the radically changing world of the new century. We need a politics that is the productive, pluralist, public activity through which we create and sustain our common world.

Back to top