Chapter 3: Civic Education and Democracy's Flaws

Authors

Robert L. Tsai, Boston University School of LawFollow

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

7-2024

Editor(s)

Elizabeth Beaumont and Eric Beerbohm

ISBN

9781479829064

Publisher

NYU Press

Language

en-US

Abstract

Today, liberalism and democracy are beset by competitors that seek to return power to religious traditionalists or partisans masquerading as civic republicans.¹ In such an environment, can civic education do some good, and even help bridge our society’s deepening divides?

Seana Shiffrin has characteristically brought deep learning and penetrating insight to the project of civic education in a modern democracy. Against a “dominant” model of citizenship in which “citizens vote and hand off power to their representatives”— which she believes encourages the people to maintain an unhealthy distance from government— she proposes a richer account of political community in which people see their role as “fellow duty- holders.” To facilitate this vision of legal order, Shiffrin proposes greater societal investment in developing “skills of interpretation, analogous reasoning, critical evaluation, and extension of principles to new situations.”

I begin with the conviction that democracy in the United States remains worth defending, despite a constitutional tradition that originally treated broad citizen participation in public affairs with suspicion. I also agree heartily that civic education is indispensable to the survival of democracy— not just as a technocratic enterprise, but rather as a way of life. Any disagreements I have with Shiffrin concern the level at which theory can ensure the quality of civic learning necessary to keep the American experiment alive. There’s a limit to how much philosophy can guarantee the utility of education— the rest is a matter of pedagogy and the openness of the people to self- correction.

I shall begin by briefly summarizing Shiffrin’s key arguments while emphasizing that much of the success of her proposal depends on the substance of what is taught and how political know- how is conveyed. Her analysis largely stays at a high level of abstraction, content with sketching models, attitudes, and habits to be reproduced or avoided. But I contend that what’s missing is also essential to any civic education project: honest confrontation with democracy’s deficits. Thus, while Shiffrin’s theory of democratic citizenship is admirably thicker than what many proponents of legal liberalism allow, her account of education at present may be too incomplete to equip the citizen to tackle the problems facing an aging political order. Instead, I shall suggest that what would make a meaningful impact at this historical moment is a form of education that teaches citizens the ability to diagnose democracy’s shortcomings and the capacity to reason from injustice.

Recommended Citation

Robert L. Tsai, Chapter 3: Civic Education and Democracy's Flaws , in Civic Education in Polarized Times: NOMOS LXVI 83 (Elizabeth Beaumont and Eric Beerbohm ed., 2024).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/3906