- The Evolving Citizen: American Youth and the Changing Norms of Democratic Engagement by Jay P. Childers
With The Evolving Citizen, Jay Childers offers an important contribution to the popular and scholarly discussion about citizenship, civic participation, and civic decline. Reviewing those conversations generally in the book’s introduction and then more specifically in its chapters, Childers shows how the data he illuminates and the analysis he articulates offer new answers to questions about whether young people are losing interest in politics and civic affairs and whether their forms of involvement are changing. His analysis does confirm some popular fears about waning interest in civic affairs among apathetic and cynical young people, but he also teases out their complex attitudes toward politics. Most importantly, he lets young people speak for themselves.
The core of the book analyzes more than 50 years of newspapers produced by students at seven U.S. high schools. Although finding suitably [End Page 741] archived newspapers proved challenging, Childers located seven that, together, satisfied his concern for consistency in some characteristics and diversity in others. All are from public high schools in metropolitan areas: Kansas City, Missouri; Phoenix, Arizona; Boston, Massachusetts; Washington, D.C.; Houston, Texas; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Portland, Oregon. They span the country geographically, some are urban and others suburban, and they differ in their racial and economic composition. (The demographic profiles of some of the high schools individually changed dramatically over the 50 years under consideration as well.) Childers accessed all issues of these newspapers from 1965 to 2010, amounting to thousands of pages of data.
Childers’s most fundamental contribution, then, is methodological. To a conversation that has largely relied on social scientific survey data, Childers brings rhetorical analysis. He joins a growing community of rhetorical critics whose textual analysis allows for interpretive nuance impossible in survey research. Childers’s second methodological contribution is his chronological scope. His project is longitudinal, whereas survey research tends to provide a momentary snapshot, sometimes in comparative perspective.
Childers’s analysis of these newspapers is thematic. He devotes four analysis chapters to parsing out four themes that emerge in the discourse, tracing how student discussion of those issues has evolved over the time period considered. In chapter 3, “Dislocated Cosmopolitans,” Childers traces a convincing shift toward concern for national and international affairs. Whereas young journalists in the 1960s and 1970s wrote about local issues including driver’s license laws, youth leadership in local politics, and a local curfew, by the 1990s Childers finds such stories rare. In their place are stories about presidents, presidential campaigns, and political celebrities. The most recent generations of students have adopted an especially global worldview. “From AIDS to obesity,” according to Childers, “all problems were global problems in the eyes of these students by the early 1990s” (79). In conversation with political theorists since Aristotle who have articulated the virtues of small-scale familiar democracy, Childers laments the decreased sense of political efficacy among students who see themselves primarily as members of a national or global community.
In chapter 4, “Removed Volunteers,” Childers shows how students have come to see volunteering and donating money as their primary outlets for civic influence. In his words, those students “have begun to see problems [End Page 742] and issues that might once have been handled through more traditional means (i.e., voting, letter writing, petition signing) as best dealt with by donating money and volunteering, thereby distancing themselves from the traditional political sphere” (113). They do not, however, talk about boycotting and buycotting as primary modes of participation, the hallmarks of “networked consumerism.” By limiting themselves to volunteering and donating, these students “have given up much of the collective political power to central life” (115), according to Childers. He notes that volunteering and donating money do not require collective organizing, and they “can be accomplished in complete isolation” (115).
Chapter 5, “Protective Critics,” makes the most provocative argument of the book. Childers tackles the stubborn political cynicism so familiar...