The Internet Generation: Engaged Citizens or Political Dropouts

9: Civic Education outside the Classroom

9 Civic Education outside the Classroom I t is time to focus on the institution whose mission is to impart knowledge . Chapter 2 pointed out that recent developments have placed a mounting burden of political socialization on the public school. But its exploration of the school as agent of socialization stopped at the school door. In this final part of the book, we go inside, into those aspects of education that influence informed political participation. In chapter 10 we enter the civics class, exploring how it can carry out its civic education mission, giving substance to guidelines drawn earlier in the book for fostering habits of attentiveness to public affairs that match the world of information and communication of the emerging generations , with potential political dropouts as prime targets. In this chapter, we set the stage for that discussion by placing the civic education classroom in the wider educational and community context. In my earlier work on civic literacy (Milner 2002a), a full chapter dealt with education. The emphasis was on adult or lifelong education, on the premise that when it comes to civic literacy, what is learned as an adult is more important than what is acquired in one’s youth. Correspondingly , when the chapter did address the education of young people, it stressed the development of a literacy habit during the period of compulsory schooling. Data assembled in the chapter pointed to the correlation between countries’ scores (especially for students at the lower percentiles) on tests of citizens’ knowledge, such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (timss) tests of sixteen-yearold students in mathematics and science, and the level of functional literacy among adults. It was clear that school systems of the countries high in civic literacy were better at encouraging a larger proportion of students to read newspapers and books, use libraries and maps, write letters , etc., habits they retained into adulthood. Moreover, the acquisition 176 // educating tomorrow’s citizens of such habits seemed to be distinct from the content of civics courses, the long-term effects of which were unclear. Given the uncertainty about whether information acquired in these courses was retained into adulthood , civic education, though encouraged, was not given top priority among the recommended policy measures. There is still obvious truth in these observations. We do not know enough about the long-term effects of civic education, but we can be certain of the benefits of inculcating habits of literacy throughout the curriculum. Nevertheless, the urgency of the situation with regard to political dropouts obliges us in this last part of the current book to return to the school and the place of civic education in it. The fact that better-educated citizens are more likely to be informed and participate politically is confirmed in a wide range of research literature . This suggests that one effective approach to boosting informed political participation would be to raise the level and length of schooling . The problem is that while the average number of years of education has increased, political knowledge apparently has declined. Clearly, the causal relationship at the individual level is a complex one. Does more schooling make better citizens, or is it just selection bias—that is, the more resource-rich and motivated students stay in school? Some studies are encouraging. Milligan, Moretti, and Oreopoulos (2003) show that extra years of schooling mandated by compulsory schooling laws increase the likelihood of becoming politically involved and thus have a strong effect on voter turnout. Another study that investigated the relationship suggests that something more than selection bias is at work, finding the potential for educational attainment, in the form of the degree of availability of two-year colleges in given geographical regions, to correlate positively with differences in civic-related attitudes and reported behavior in those regions (Dee 2004). But what is taking place in these colleges that promotes informed political participation? Controlling for characteristics associated with self-selection, Nie and Hillygus (2001) show that college students majoring in the social sciences and humanities are more likely to vote and discuss politics, as well as to participate in community service and politics upon leaving college, a finding extended to longer-term political engagement by Hillygus (2005). She concludes that a curriculum that develops language and civic skills contributes to democratic participation more than any other aspect of education. civic education outside...