definition of human right in civic education

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Civic Education

In its broadest definition, “civic education” means all the processes that affect people’s beliefs, commitments, capabilities, and actions as members or prospective members of communities. Civic education need not be intentional or deliberate; institutions and communities transmit values and norms without meaning to. It may not be beneficial: sometimes people are civically educated in ways that disempower them or impart harmful values and goals. It is certainly not limited to schooling and the education of children and youth. Families, governments, religions, and mass media are just some of the institutions involved in civic education, understood as a lifelong process. [ 1 ] A rightly famous example is Tocqueville’s often quoted observation that local political engagement is a form of civic education: “Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it.”

Nevertheless, most scholarship that uses the phrase “civic education” investigates deliberate programs of instruction within schools or colleges, in contrast to paideia (see below) and other forms of citizen preparation that involve a whole culture and last a lifetime. There are several good reasons for the emphasis on schools. First, empirical evidence shows that civic habits and values are relatively easily to influence and change while people are still young, so schooling can be effective when other efforts to educate citizens would fail (Sherrod, Flanagan, and Youniss, 2002). Another reason is that schools in many countries have an explicit mission to educate students for citizenship. As Amy Gutmann points out, school-based education is our most deliberate form of human instruction (1987, 15). Defining the purposes and methods of civic education in schools is a worthy topic of public debate. Nevertheless, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that civic education takes place at all stages of life and in many venues other than schools.

Whether defined narrowly or broadly, civic education raises empirical questions: What causes people to develop durable habits, values, knowledge, and skills relevant to their membership in communities? Are people affected differently if they vary by age, social or cultural background, and starting assumptions? For example, does a high school civics course have lasting effects on various kinds of students, and what would make it more effective?

From the 1960s until the 1980s, empirical questions concerning civic education were relatively neglected, mainly because of a prevailing assumption that intentional programs would not have significant and durable effects, given the more powerful influences of social class and ideology (Cook, 1985). Since then, many research studies and program evaluations have found substantial effects, and most social scientists who study the topic now believe that educational practices, such as discussion of controversial issues, hands-on action, and reflection, can influence students (Sherrod, Torney-Purta & Flanagan, 2010).

The philosophical questions have been less explored, but they are essential. For example:

Who has the full rights and obligations of a citizen? This question is especially contested with regard to children, immigrant aliens, and individuals who have been convicted of felonies.

In what communities ought we see ourselves as citizens? The nation-state is not the only candidate; some people see themselves as citizens of local geographical communities, organizations, movements, loosely-defined groups, or even the world as a whole.

What responsibilities does a citizen of each kind of community have? Do all members of each community have the same responsibilities, or ought there be significant differences, for example, between elders and children, or between leaders and other members?

What is the relationship between a good regime and good citizenship? Aristotle held that there were several acceptable types of regimes, and each needed different kinds of citizens. That makes the question of good citizenship relative to the regime-type. But other theorists have argued for particular combinations of regime and citizen competence. For example, classical liberals endorsed regimes that would make relatively modest demands on citizens, both because they were skeptical that people could rise to higher demands and because they wanted to safeguard individual liberty against the state. Civic republicans have seen a certain kind of citizenship--highly active and deliberative--as constitutive of a good life, and therefore recommend a republican regime because it permits good citizenship.

Who may decide what constitutes good citizenship? If we consider, for example, students enrolled in public schools in the United States, should the decision about what values, habits, and capabilities they should learn belong to their parents, their teachers, the children themselves, the local community, the local or state government, or the nation-state? We may reach different conclusions when thinking about 5-year-olds and adult college students. As Sheldon Wolin warned: “…[T]he inherent danger…is that the identity given to the collectivity by those who exercise power will reflect the needs of power rather than the political possibilities of a complex collectivity” (1989, 13). For some regimes—fascist or communist, for example—this is not perceived as a danger at all but, instead, the very purpose of their forms of civic education. In democracies, the question is more complex because public institutions may have to teach people to be good democratic citizens, but they can decide to do so in ways that reinforce the power of the state and reduce freedom.

What means of civic education are ethically appropriate? It might, for example, be effective to punish students who fail to memorize patriotic statements, or to pay students for community service, but the ethics of those approaches would be controversial. An educator might engage students in open discussions of current events because of a commitment to treating them as autonomous agents, regardless of the consequences. As with other topics, the proper relationship between means and ends is contested.

These questions are rarely treated together as part of comprehensive theories of civic education; instead, they arise in passing in works about politics or education. Some of these questions have never been much explored by professional philosophers, but they arise frequently in public debates about citizenship.

1.1 Ancient Greece

1.2 classical liberalism, 1.3 rousseau: toward progressive education, 1.4 mill: education through political participation, 1.5 early civic education in the united states, 2.1 the state, parents, and children in liberal democracies, 2.2 social capital, 2.3 deliberative democracy, 2.4 public work, 3.1 good persons and good citizens, 3.2 spectrum of virtues, 4.1 service learning, 4.2 action civics, 4.3 civic education through discussion, 4.4 john dewey: school as community, 4.5 liberation pedagogy, 5. cosmopolitan education, works cited, works to consult, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the good citizen: historical conceptions.

“As far back as evidence can be found—and virtually without exception—young adults seem to have been less attached to civic life than their parents and grandparents.” [ 2 ] That is not evidence of decline--although it is often read as such--but rather indicates that becoming a citizen is a developmental process. It must be taught and learned. Most if not all societies recognize a need to educate youth to be “civic-minded”; that is, to think and care about the welfare of the community (the commonweal or civitas ) and not simply about their own individual well-being. Sometimes, civic education is also intended to make all citizens, or at least prospective leaders, effective as citizens or to reduce disparities in political power by giving everyone the knowledge, confidence, and skills they need to participate. This section briefly introduces several conceptions of civic education that have been influential in the history of the West. [ 3 ]

The ancient Greek city state or polis was thought to be an educational community, expressed by the Greek term paideia . The purpose of political—that is civic or city—life was the self-development of the citizens. This meant more than just education, which is how paideia is usually translated. Education for the Greeks involved a deeply formative and life-long process whose goal was for each person (read: man) to be an asset to his friends, to his family, and, most important, to the polis.

Becoming such an asset necessitated internalizing and living up to the highest ethical ideals of the community. So paideia included education in the arts, philosophy and rhetoric, history, science, and mathematics; training in sports and warfare; enculturation or learning of the city’s religious, social, political, and professional customs and training to participate in them; and the development of one’s moral character through the virtues. Above all, the person should have a keen sense of duty to the city. Every aspect of Greek culture in the Classical Age—from the arts to politics and athletics—was devoted to the development of personal powers in public service.

Paideia was inseparable from another Greek concept: arete or excellence, especially excellence of reputation but also goodness and excellence in all aspects of life. Together paideia and arête form one process of self-development, which is nothing other than civic-development. Thus one could only develop himself in politics, through participation in the activities of the polis; and as individuals developed the characteristics of virtue, so would the polis itself become more virtuous and excellent.

All persons, whatever their occupations or tasks, were teachers, and the purpose of education—which was political life itself—was to develop a greater (a nobler, stronger, more virtuous) public community. So politics was more than regulating or ordering the affairs of the community; it was also a “school” for ordering the lives—internal and external—of the citizens. Therefore, the practice of Athenian democratic politics was not only a means of engendering good policies for the city, but it was also a “curriculum” for the intellectual, moral, and civic education of her citizens. “…[A]sk in general what great benefit the state derives from the training by which it educates its citizens, and the reply will be perfectly straightforward. The good education they have received will make them good men…” (Plato, Laws , 641b7–10). Indeed, later in the Laws the Athenian remarks that education should be designed to produce the desire to become “perfect citizens” who know, preceding Aristotle, “how to rule and be ruled” (643e4–6).

Ancient and medieval thinkers generally assumed that good government and good citizenship were intimately related, because a regime would degenerate unless its people actively and virtuously supported it. Aristotle regarded his Politics and his Ethics as part of the same subject. In his view, a city-state could not be just and strong unless its people were virtuous, and men could not exercise the political virtues (which were intrinsically admirable, dignified, and satisfying) unless they lived in a just polity. Civic virtue was especially important in a democratic or mixed regime, but even in a monarchy or oligarchy, people were expected to sustain the political community.

Today, the view that the best life is one of active participation in a community that relies on and encourages active engagement is often called “civic republicanism,” and it has been developed by authors like Wolin (1989), Barber (1992) and Hannah Arendt.

Classical liberal thinkers, however, saw serious drawbacks to making good government dependent on widespread civic virtue. First, any demanding and universal system of moral education would be incompatible with individual freedom. If, for example the state forced people to enroll their children in public schools in order to create good citizens, it would hamper parents and young people’s individual freedom.

The second problem was more practical. States did not have a very good record of producing moral virtue in rulers or subjects. Mandatory church membership, state-subsidized education, and even public spectacles of torture and execution did not reliably prevent corruption, sedition and other private behavior injurious to the community.

Thomas Hobbes is sometimes described as a forerunner of liberalism (despite his advocacy of absolute monarchy) because he held a dim view of human nature and thought that the way to prevent political disaster was to design the government right, not to try to improve civic virtue. He also held that a good government was one that permitted people to live their own lives safely. Another strong critic of the idea that a good society depended on civic virtue was Bernard Mandeville, who wrote a famous 1705 poem entitled, “The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits.” Mandeville argued that a good society could arise from sheer individual self-interest if it was organized appropriately.

Other classical liberal thinkers typically favored some degree of civic education and civic virtue, even as they proposed limitations on the state and a strong private sphere to reduce the dependence of the regime on civic virtue. In other words, they steered a middle course between pure classical liberalism and civic republicanism. For example, in his “Instructions for the conduct of a young Gentleman, as to religion and government,” John Locke wrote that a gentleman’s “proper calling is the service of his country, and so is most properly concerned in moral and political knowledge; and thus the studies which more immediately belong to his calling are those which treat of virtues and vices, of civil society and the arts of government, and will take in also law and history.” That was an argument for civic education. But it appeared in a minor, unpublished fragment (Locke 1703: 350). Civic education was not a significant theme in Locke’s important treatise Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), which was more about teaching individuals to be free and responsible in their private lives. Likewise, the emphasis of his political writing was on limiting the power of the state and protecting private rights.

James Madison hoped for some degree of civic virtue in the people and especially in their representatives. He endorsed “the great republican principle, that the people will have the virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks--no form of government can render us secure” (Madison, 1788, 11:163) On the other hand, Madison proposed a whole series of reforms that would make government proof against the various vices that seemed to be “sown in the nature of man” (Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, Federalist 10). These tools included constitutional limitations on the overall power and scope of government; independent judges with power of review; elections with relatively broad franchise; and above all, checks and balances.

Madison explained that republics should be designed for people of moderate virtue, such as might be found in real societies. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controuls on government would be necessary.” Unfortunately, neither citizens nor rulers could be counted on to act like angels; but good government was possible anyway, as long as the constitution provided appropriate controls.

The main “external controul” in a republic was the vote, which made powerful men accountable to those they ruled. However, voting was not enough, especially since the voters themselves might lack virtue and wisdom. “A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary controul on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.” In general, Madison’s “auxiliary precautions” involved dividing power among separate institutions and giving them the ability to check one another.

This policy of supplying by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power; where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other; that the private interest of every individual may be a centinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the state. (Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, Federalist 51)

Although ancient Athens instituted democracy, her most famous philosophers—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—were not great champions of it. At best they were ambiguous about democracy; at worst, they were hostile toward it. The earliest unadulterated champion of democracy, a “dreamer of democracy,” was undoubtedly Rousseau. Yet Rousseau had his doubts that men could be good men and simultaneously good citizens. A good man for Rousseau is a natural man, with the attributes of freedom, independence, equality, happiness, sympathy, and love-of-self ( amour de soi ) found prior to society in the state of nature. Thus society could do little but corrupt such a man.

Still, Rousseau recognized that life in society is unavoidable, and so civic education or learning to function well in society is also unavoidable. The ideal for Rousseau is for men to act morally and yet retain as much of their naturalness as possible. Only in this way can a man retain his freedom; and only if a man follows those rules that he prescribes for himself—that is, only if a man is self-ruling—can he remain free: “…[E]ach individual…obeys no one but himself and remains as free as before [society]” (1988, 60).

Yet prescribing those rules is not a subjective or selfish act. It is a moral obligation because the question each citizen asks himself or should ask himself was not “What’s best for me?” Rather, each asks, “What’s best for all?” When all citizens ask this question and answer on the basis of what ought to be done, then, says Rousseau, they are expressing and following the general will. Enacting the general will is the only legitimately moral foundation for a law and the only expression of moral freedom. Getting men to ask this question and to answer it actively is the purpose of civic education.

Showing how to educate men to retain naturalness and yet to function in society and participate untouched by corruption in this direct democracy was the purpose of his educational treatise, Emile . If it could be done, Rousseau would show us the way. To do it would seem to require educating a man to be in society but not of society; that is, to be “attached to human society as little as possible” (Ibid, 105).

How could a man for Rousseau be a good man—meaning, for him a naturally good man (1979, 93), showing his amour de soi and also his natural compassion for others—and also have the proper frame of mind of a good citizen to be able to transcend self-interest and prescribe the general will? How could this be done in society when society’s influence is nothing but corrupting?

Rousseau himself seems ambivalent on exactly whether men can overcome social corruption. Society is based on private property; private property brings inequality, as some own more than others; such inequality brings forth social comparisons with others ( amour propre ), which in turn can produce envy, pride, and greed. Only when and if men can exercise their moral and political freedom and will the general will can they be saved from the corrupting influences of society. Willing for the general will, which is the good for all, is the act of a moral or good person. Its exercise in the assembly is the act of a good citizen.

Still, Rousseau comments that if “[f]orced to combat nature or the social institutions, one must choose between making a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same time” (Ibid, 39). There seems little, if any, ambiguity here. One cannot make both a man and a citizen at the same time. Yet on the very next page of Emile Rousseau raises the question of whether a man who remains true to himself, to his nature, and is always decisive in his choices “is a man or a citizen, or how he goes about being both at the same time” (Ibid, 40).

Perhaps the contradiction might be resolved if we emphasize that a man cannot be made a man and a citizen at the same time, but he can be a man and a citizen at the same time. Rousseau hints at this distinction when he says of his educational scheme that it avoids the “two contrary ends…the contrary routes…these different impulses…[and] these necessarily opposed objects” (Ibid, 40, 41) when you raise a man “uniquely for himself.” What, then, will he be for others? He will be a man and a citizen, for the “double object we set for ourselves,” those contradictory objects, “could be joined in a single one by removing the contradictions of man…” (Idem). Doubtless, this will be a rare man, but raising a man to live a natural life can be done.

One might find the fully mature, and natural, Emile an abhorrent person. Although “good” in the sense of doing his duty and acting civilly, he seems nevertheless without imagination or deep curiosity about people or life itself—no interest in art or many books or intimate social relationships. Is his independence fear of dependence and thus built on an inability ever to be interdependent? Is he truly independent, or does he exhibit simply the appearance of independence, while the tutor “remains master of his person” (Ibid, 332)?

Whatever one thinks of Rousseau’s attempt to educate Emile—whether, for example, the tutor’s utter control of Emile’s life and environment is not in itself a betrayal of education—Rousseau is a precursor of those progressive educators who seek to permit children to learn at their own rate and from their own experiences, as we shall see below.

Mill argued that participation in representative government, or democracy, is undertaken both for its educative effects on participants and for the beneficial political outcomes. Even if elected or appointed officials can perform better than citizens, Mill thought it advisable for citizens to participate “as a means to their own mental education—a mode of strengthening their active faculties, exercising their judgment, and giving them a familiar knowledge of the subjects with which they are thus left to deal. This is a principal, though not the sole, recommendation of jury trial; of free and popular local and municipal institutions; of the conduct of industrial and philanthropic enterprises by voluntary associations” (1972, 179). Thus, political participation is a form of civic education good for men and for citizens.

On Liberty , the essay in which the above quotation appears, is not, writes Mill, the occasion for developing this idea as it relates to “parts of national education.” But in Mill’s view the development of the person can and should be undertaken in concert with an education for citizens. The “mental education” he describes is “in truth, the peculiar training of a citizen, the practical part of the political education of a free people, taking them out of the narrow circle of personal and family selfishness, and accustoming them to the comprehension of joint interests, the management of joint concerns—habituating them to act from public or semi-public motives, and guide their conduct by aims which unite instead of isolating them from one another” (Idem).

The occasion for discussing civic education as a method of both personal and political development is Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government . Mill wants to see persons “progress.” To achieve progress requires “the preservation of all kinds and amounts of good which already exist, and Progress as consisting in the increase of them.” Of what does Mill’s good consist? First are “the qualities in the citizens individually which conduce most to keep up the amount of good conduct…Everybody will agree that those qualities are industry, integrity, justice, and prudence” (1972, 201). Add to these “the particular attributes in human beings which seem to have a more especial reference to Progress…They are chiefly the qualities of mental activity, enterprise, and courage” (Ibid, 202).

So, progress is encouraged when society develops the qualities of citizens and persons. Mill tells us that good government depends on the qualities of the human beings that compose it. Men of virtuous character acting in and through justly administered institutions will stabilize and perpetuate the good society. Good persons will be good citizens, provided they have the requisite political institutions in which they can participate. Such participation—as on juries and parish offices—takes participants out of themselves and away from their selfish interests. If that does not occur, if persons regard only their “interests which are selfish,” then, concludes Mill, good government is impossible. “…[I]f the agents, or those who choose the agents, or those to whom the agents are responsible, or the lookers-on whose opinion ought to influence and check all these, are mere masses of ignorance, stupidity, and baleful prejudice, every operation of government will go wrong” (Ibid, 207).

For Mill good government is a two-way street: Good government depends on “the virtue and intelligence of the human beings composing the community”; while at the same time government can further “promote the virtue and intelligence of the people themselves” (Idem). A measure of the quality of any political institution is how far it tends “to foster in the members of the community the various desirable qualities…moral, intellectual, and active” (Ibid, 208). Good persons act politically as good citizens and are thereby maintained or extended in their goodness. “A government is to be judged by its actions upon men…by what it makes of the citizens, and what it does with them; its tendency to improve or deteriorate the people themselves.” Government helps people advance, acts for the improvement of the people, “is at once a great influence acting on the human mind….” Government is, then, “an agency of national education…” (Ibid, 210, 211).

Following Tocqueville, Mill saw political participation as the basis for this national education. “It is not sufficiently considered how little there is in most men’s ordinary life to give any largeness either to their conceptions or to their sentiments.” Their work is routine and dull; they proceed through life without much interest or energy. On the other hand, “if circumstances allow the amount of public duty assigned him to be considerable, it makes him an educated man” (Ibid, 233). In this way participation in democratic institutions “must make [persons] very different beings, in range of ideas and development of faculties, from those who have done nothing in their lives but drive a quill, or sell goods over a counter” (Idem).

There was no national public schooling in Mill’s Great Britain, and there were clearly lots of Britons without the requisite characteristics either of good citizens or of good men. Mill was certainly aware of this. He was much influenced by Tocqueville’s writings on the tyranny of the majority. Mill feared, as did Tocqueville, that the undereducated or uneducated would dominate and tyrannize politics so as to undermine authority and individuality. Being ignorant and inexperienced, the uneducated and undereducated would be susceptible to all manner of demagoguery and manipulation. So too much power in the hands of the inept and ignorant could damage good citizenship and dam the course of self-development. To remedy this Mill proposed two solutions: limit participation and provide the competent and educated with plural votes.

In Mill’s “ideally best polity” the highest levels of policymaking would be reserved for nationally elected representatives and for experts in the civil service. These representatives and experts would not only carry out their political duties, but they would also educate the public through debate and deliberation in representative assemblies, in public forums, and through the press. To assure that the best were elected and for the sake of rational government, Mill provided plural votes to those with college educations and to those of certain occupations and training. All citizens (but the criminal and illiterate) could vote, but not all citizens would vote equally. Some citizens, because they were educated or highly trained persons, were “better” than others: “…[T]hough every one ought to have a voice—that every one should have an equal voice is a totally different proposition…No one but a fool…feels offended by the acknowledgment that there are others whose opinion, and even whose wish, is entitled to a greater amount of consideration than his” (Ibid, 307–8).

But education was the great leveling factor. Though not his view when he wrote Considerations on Representative Government , Mill wrote in his autobiography that universal education could make plural voting unnecessary (1924, pp. 153, 183–84). Mill did acknowledge in Representative Government that a national system of education or “a trustworthy system of general examination” would simplify the means of ascertaining “mental superiority” of some persons over others. In their absence, a person’s years of schooling and nature of occupation would suffice to determine who would receive plural votes (1972, 308–09). Given Mill’s prescriptions for political participation and given the lessons learned from the deliberations and debates of representatives and experts, however, it is doubtful that civic education would have constituted much of his national education.

As noted above the founders of the United States tried to reduce the burdens on citizens, because they observed that republics had generally collapsed for lack of civic virtue. [ 4 ] However, they also created a structure that would demand more of citizens, and grant citizens more rights, than the empire from which they had declared independence. So virtually all of the founders advocated greater attention to civic education. When Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 23 that the federal government ought to be granted “an unconfined authority in respect to all those objects which are entrusted to its management” (1987, p. 187), he underscored the need of the newly organized central government for, in Sheldon Wolin’s words, “a new type of citizen…one who would accept the attenuated relationship with power implied if voting and elections were to serve as the main link between citizens and those in power.” [ 5 ] Schools would be entrusted to develop this new type of citizen.

It is commonplace, therefore, to find among those who examine the interstices of democracy and education views much like Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s: “That the schools make worthy citizens is the most important responsibility placed on them.” In the United States public schools had the mission of educating the young for citizenship.

Initially education in America was not publicly funded. It wasn’t even a system, however inchoate. Instead it was every community for itself. Nor was it universal education. Education was restricted to free white males and, moreover, free white males who could afford the school fees. One of the “founders” of the public-school system in the United States, even though his era predated the establishment of public schools, was Noah Webster, who saw education as the tool for developing a national identity. As a result, he created his own speller and dictionary as a way of advancing a common American language.

Opposed to this idea of developing a national identity was Thomas Jefferson, who saw education as the means for safeguarding individual rights, especially against the intrusions of the state. Central to Jefferson’s democratic education were the “liberal arts.” These arts liberate men and women (though Jefferson was thinking only of men) from the grip of both tyrants and demagogues and enable those liberated to rule themselves. Through his ward system of education, Jefferson proposed establishing free schools to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, and from these schools those of intellectual ability, regardless of background or economic status, would receive a college education paid for by the state.

When widespread free or publicly funded education did come to America in the 19 th century, it came in the form of Horace Mann’s “common school.” Such schools would educate all children together, “in common,” regardless of their background, religion, or social standing. Underneath such fine sentiments lurked an additional goal: to ensure that all children could flourish in America’s democratic system. The civic education curriculum was explicit, if not simplistic. To create good citizens and good persons required little beyond teaching the basic mechanics of government and imbuing students with loyalty to America and her democratic ideals. That involved large amounts of rote memorization of information about political and military history and about the workings of governmental bodies at the local, state, and federal levels. It also involved conformity to specific rules describing conduct inside and outside of school.

Through this kind of civic education, all children would be melded, if not melted, into an American citizen. A heavy emphasis on Protestantism at the expense of Catholicism was one example of such work. What some supporters might have called “assimilation” of foreigners into an American way of life, critics saw as “homogenization,” “normalization,” and “conformity,” if not “uniformity.” With over nine million immigrants coming to America between 1880 and the First World War, it is not surprising that there was resistance by many immigrant communities to what seemed insensitivity to foreign language and culture. Hence what developed was a system of religious—namely Catholic—education separate from the “public school” system.

While Webster and, after him, Mann wanted public education to generate the national identity that they thought democracy required, later educational reformers moved away from the idea of the common school and toward a differentiation of students. The Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, for example, pushed in 1906 for industrial and vocational education in the public schools. Educating all youth equally for participation in democracy by giving them a liberal, or academic, education, they argued, was a waste of time and resources. “School reformers insisted that the academic curriculum was not appropriate for all children, because most children—especially the children of immigrants and of African Americans—lacked the intellectual capacity to study subjects like algebra and chemistry” (Ravitch, 2001, 21).

Acting against this view of education was John Dewey. Because Dewey saw democracy as a way of life, he argued that all children deserved and required a democratic education. [ 6 ] As citizens came to share in the interests of others, which they would do in their schools, divisions of race, class, and ethnicity would be worn down and transcended. Dewey thought that the actual interests and experiences of students should be the basis of their education. I recur to a consideration of Dewey and civic education below.

2. The Good Democrat

Civic education can occur in all kinds of regimes, but it is especially important in democracies. In The Politics, Aristotle asks whether there is any case “in which the excellence of the good citizen and the excellence of the good man coincide” (1277a13–15). The answer for him is a politea or a mixed constitution in which persons must know both how to rule and how to obey. In such regimes, the excellence and virtues of the good man and the good citizen coincide. Democratic societies have an interest in preparing citizens to rule and to be ruled.

Modern democracies, however, are different from the ancient polis in several important and pertinent respects. They are mass societies in which most people can have little individual impact on government and policy. They are complex, technologically-driven, highly specialized societies in which professionals (including lawyers, civil servants, and politicians) have much more expertise than laypeople. And they are liberal constitutional regimes in which individual freedom is protected--to various degrees--and government is deliberately insulated from public pressure. For example, courts and central banks are protected from popular votes. Once the United States had become an industrialized mass society, the influential columnist Walter Lippmann argued that ordinary citizens had been eclipsed and could, at most, render occasional judgments about a government of experts (see The Phantom Public, 1925). John Dewey and the Chicago civic leader Jane Addams (in different ways) asserted that the lay public must and could regain its voice, but they struggled to explain how.

Several contemporary philosophers argue that citizens have a relatively demanding role and that they can and should be educated for it. Gutmann (1987), for example, argues that democratic society-at-large has a significant stake in the education of its children, for they will grow up to be democratic citizens. At the very least, then, society has the responsibility for educating all children for citizenship. Because democratic societies have this responsibility, we cannot leave the education of future citizens to the will or whim of parents. This central insight leads Gutmann to rule out certain exclusive suzerainties of power over educational theory and policy. Those suzerainties are of three sorts. First is “the family state” in which all children are educated into the sole good life identified and fortified by the state. Such education cultivates “a level of like-mindedness and camaraderie among citizens” that most persons find only in families (Ibid, 23). Only the state can be entrusted with the authority to mandate and carry out an education of such magnitude that all will learn to desire this one particular good life over all others.

Next is “the state of families” that rests on the impulse of families to perpetuate their values through their children. This state “places educational authority exclusively in the hands of parents, thereby permitting parents to predispose their children, through education, to choose a way of life consistent with their familial heritage” (Ibid, 28).

Finally, Gutmann argues against “the state of individuals,” which is based on a notion of liberal neutrality in which both parents and the state look to educational experts to make certain that no way of life is neglected nor discriminated against. The desire here is to avoid controversy, and to avoid teaching virtues, in a climate of social pluralism. Yet, as Gutmann points out, any educational policy is itself a choice that will shape our children’s character. Choosing to educate for freedom rather than for virtue is still insinuating an influential choice.

In light of these three theories that fail to provide an adequate foundation for educational authority, Gutmann proposes “a democratic state of education.” This state recognizes that educational authority must be shared among parents, citizens, and educational professionals, because each has a legitimate interest in each child and the child’s future. Whatever our aim of education, whatever kind of education these authorities argue for, it will not be, it cannot be, neutral. Needed is an educational aim that is inclusive. Gutmann settles on our inclusive commitment as democratic citizens to conscious social reproduction, the self-conscious shaping of the structures of society. To actuate this commitment we as a society “must educate all educable children to be capable of participating in collectively shaping their society” (Ibid, 14).

To shape the structures of society, to engage in conscious social reproduction, students will need to develop the capacities for examining and evaluating competing conceptions of the good life and the good society, and society must avoid the inculcation “in children [of the] uncritical acceptance of any particular way or ways of [personal and political] life” (Ibid, 44). This is the crux of Gutmann’s democratic education. For this reason, she argues forcefully that children must learn to exercise critical deliberation among good lives and, presumably, good societies. To assure that they can do so, limits must be set for when and where parents and the state can interfere. Guidelines must be introduced that limit the political authority of the state and the parental authority of families. One limit is nonrepression, which assures that neither the state nor any group within it can “restrict rational deliberation of competing conceptions of the good life and the good society” (Idem). In this way, adults cannot use their freedom to deliberate to prohibit the future deliberative freedom of children. Furthermore, claims Gutmann, nonrepression requires schools to support “the intellectual and emotional preconditions for democratic deliberation among future generations of citizens” (Ibid, 76.)

The second limit is nondiscrimination, which prevents the state or groups within the state from excluding anyone or any group from an education in deliberation. Thus, as Gutmann says, “all educable children must be educated” (Ibid, 45).

Gutmann’s point is not that the state has a greater interest than parents in the education of our children. Instead, her point is that all citizens of the state have a common interest in educating future citizens. Therefore, while parents should have a say in the education of their children, the state should have a say as well. Yet neither should have the final, or a monopolistic, say. Indeed, these two interested parties should also cede some of their educational authority to educational experts. There is, therefore, a collective interest in schooling, which is why Gutmann finds parental “choice” and voucher programs unacceptable.

But is conscious social reproduction the only aim of education? What about shaping one’s private concerns? Isn’t educating the young to be good persons also important? Or are the skills that encourage citizen participation also the skills necessary for making personal life choices and personal decision-making? For Gutmann, educating for one is also educating for the other: “…[M]any if not all of the capacities necessary for choice among good lives are also necessary for choice among good societies” (p. 40). She goes even further: “a good life and a good society for self-reflective people require (respectively) individual and collective freedom of choice” (Idem). Here Gutmann is stipulating that to have conscious social reproduction citizens must have the opportunity—the freedom and the capacities—to exercise personal or self-reflective choice.

Because the state is interested in the education of future citizens, all children must develop those capacities necessary for choice among good societies; this is simply what Gutmann means by being able to participate in conscious social reproduction. Yet such capacities also enable persons to scrutinize the ways of life that they have inherited. Thus, Gutmann concludes, it is illegitimate for any parent to impose a particular way of life on anyone else, even on his/her own child, for this would deprive the child of the capacities necessary for citizenship as well as for choosing a good life.

Gutmann’s position is that government can and must force one to participate in an education for citizenship. Children must be exposed to ways of life different from their parents’ and must embrace certain values such as mutual respect. On this last point Gutmann is insistent. She argues that choice is not meaningful, for anyone, unless persons choosing have “the intellectual skills necessary to evaluate ways of life different from that of their parents.” Without the teaching of such skills as a central component of education children will not be taught “mutual respect among persons” (Ibid, 30–31). “Teaching mutual respect is instrumental to assuring all children the freedom to choose in the future…[S]ocial diversity enriches our lives by expanding our understanding of differing ways of life. To reap the benefits of social diversity, children must be exposed to ways of life different from their parents and—in the course of their exposure—must embrace certain values, such as mutual respect among persons…” (Ibid, 32–33).

Yet what Gutmann suggests seems to go beyond seeing diversity as enrichment. She suggests that children not simply tolerate ways of life divergent from their own, but that they actually respect them. She is careful to say “mutual respect among persons,” which can only mean that neo-Nazis, while advocating an execrable way of life, must be respected as persons, though their way of life should be condemned. Perhaps this is a subtlety that Gutmann intended, but William Galston, for one, has come away thinking that Gutmann advocates forcing children to confront their own ways of life as they simultaneously show respect for neo-Nazis.

In our representative system, argues Galston, citizens need to develop “the capacity to evaluate the talents, character, and performance of public officials” (1989, p. 93). This, he says, is what our democratic system demands from citizens. Thus he disagrees with Gutmann, so much so that he says, “It is at best a partial truth to characterize the United States as a democracy in Gutmann’s sense” (Ibid, p. 94). We do not require deliberation among our citizens, says Galston, because “representative institutions replace direct self-government for many purposes” (Idem). Civic education, therefore, should not be about teaching the skills and virtues of deliberation, but, instead, about teaching “the virtues and competences needed to select representatives wisely, to relate to them appropriately, and to evaluate their performance in office soberly” (Idem).

Because civic education is limited in scope to what Galston outlines above, students will not be expected, and will not be taught, to evaluate their own ways of life. Persons must be able to lead the kinds of lives they find valuable, without fear that they will be coerced into believing or acting or thinking contrary to their values, including being led to question those ways of life that they have inherited. As Galston points out, “[c]ivic tolerance of deep differences is perfectly compatible with unswerving belief in the correctness of one’s own way of life” (Ibid, p. 99).

Some parents, for example, are not interested in having their children choose ways of life. Those parents believe that the way of life that they currently follow is not simply best for them but is best simpliciter . To introduce choice is simply to confuse the children and the issue. If you know the true way to live, is it best to let your children wade among diverse ways of life until they can possibly get it right? Or should you socialize the children into the right way of life as soon and as quickly as possible?

Yet what about the obligations that parents, as citizens, and children as future citizens, owe the state? How can children be prepared to participate in collectively shaping society if they have not received an education in how to deliberate about choices? To this some parents might respond that they are not interested in having their children focus on participation, or perhaps on anything secular. What these parents appreciate about liberal democracy is that there is a clear, and firm, separation between public and private, and they seek to focus exclusively on the private. Citizenship offers protections of the law, and it does not require participation. Liberal democracy certainly will not force one to participate.

Yet both Galston and Gutmann want to educate children for “democratic character.” Both see the need in this respect for critical thinking. For Galston children must develop “the capacity to evaluate the talents, character, and performance of public officials”; Gutmann seeks to educate the capacities necessary for choice among good lives and for choice among good societies. However much critical thinking plays in democratic character, active participation requires something more than mere skills, even thinking skills.

The concept of “social capital” was introduced by the sociologist James S. Coleman to refer to the value that is inherent in social networks (see, e.g., Coleman, 1988). The political scientist Robert Putnam subsequently argued that democracies function well in proportion to the strength of their social capital (1994) and that social capital is declining in the United States (2000). In his book Bowling Alone , Putnam explains, “Whereas physical capital refers to physical objects and human capital refers to properties of individuals [such as their own skills], social capital refers to connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense social capital is closely related to what some have called ‘civic virtue.’ The difference is that ‘social capital’ calls attention to the fact that civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a dense network of reciprocal social relations” (Putnam 2000, p. 19).

A related idea is “collective efficacy,” as developed by the sociologist Robert Sampson and colleagues. It is the use--or ability to use--social networks to address common problems, such as crime. Sampson finds that the level of collective efficacy strongly predicts the quality of life in communities (Sampson, 2012).

If governments and communities function much better when people have social networks and use them for public purposes, then civic education becomes important and it is substantially about teaching people to create, appreciate, preserve, and use social networks. A pedagogical approach like Service Learning (see below) might be most promising for that purpose.

Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her work on how people overcome collective action problems, such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons. These problems are endemic and serious, sometimes leading to environmental catastrophe and war. Ostrom, however, discovered many principles that allow people to overcome such problems. She wrote,

At any time that individuals may gain from the costly action of others, without themselves contributing time and effort, they face collective action dilemmas for which there are coping methods. When de Tocqueville discussed the ‘art and science of association,’ he was referring to the crafts learned by those who had solved ways of engaging in collective action to achieve a joint benefit. Some aspects of the science of association are both counterintuitive and counterintentional, and thus must be taught to each generation as part of the culture of a democratic citizenry. (Ostrom 1998)

Ostrom believed that these principles could be taught explicitly and formally, but the traditional and most effective means for teaching them were experiential. She argued that the tendency to centralize and professionalize management throughout the 20th century had deprived ordinary people of opportunities to learn from experience, and thus our capacity to address collective action problems had weakened.

Along with her husband Vincent Ostrom, Elinor Ostrom developed the idea of polycentric governance, according to which we are citizens of multiple, overlapping, and nested communities, from the smallest neighborhoods to the globe. Collective action problems are best addressed polycentrically, not reserved for national governments or parceled out neatly among levels of government. As president of the American Political Science Association and in other prominent roles, Ostrom advocated civic education that would teach people to address collective action problems in multiple settings and scales.

Deliberative democracy is the idea that a legitimate political decision is one that results from discussions among citizens under reasonably favorable conditions. Proponents debate precisely what qualifies as deliberation, but there is a general agreement that the discussion should be inclusive, free, equitable, and in some sense civil. In practical terms, deliberative democracy implies various efforts to increase the amount and the impact of public discussions. The philosophical underpinnings derive from the work of influential theorists including Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls, Michael Sandel, and others of varying views. See Gutmann and Thompson (1996) for an example of a sophisticated treatment that draws on many earlier works.

For civic education, the implication of deliberative democracy is that people should learn to participate in discussions, which may be both face-to-face and “mediated” by the news media and social media. Concretely, that means that people should develop the aptitude, desire, knowledge, and skills that lead them to read and discuss the news and current events with diverse fellow citizens and influence the government with the views that they develop and refine by deliberation. Practices such as discussing and debating current events in school seem especially promising.

Harry C. Boyte (1996, 2004) argues for the centrality of work to citizenship. We are not only citizens when we vote, read and discuss the news, and volunteer after school or work--which are all unpaid, voluntary activities. We are also citizens on the job; and even when we perform unpaid service, we should see our contributions as work-like in the sense that they are serious business. Citizens do not merely monitor and influence the government (per the theory of deliberative democracy) nor serve other people in community settings (emphasized in the idea of social capital); they also literally build, make, and maintain public goods. They do so whether they work in the public, private, or nonprofit sectors, for pay or not. Of course, they can work either well or badly, and a good citizen is one who makes valuable contributions to the public good, or builds “the commonwealth.”

The theory of public work suggests that civic education should be highly experiential and closely related to vocational education. Young people should gain skills and agency by actually making things together. A good outcome is an individual who will be able to contribute to the commonwealth through her or his work. Albert Dzur (2008), who holds a kindred but not identical view, emphasizes the importance of revising professional education so that professionals learn to collaborate better with laypeople.

3. The Good Person

The qualities of the good citizen are not simply the skills necessary to participate in the political system. They are also the virtues that will lead one to participate, to want to participate, to have a disposition to participate. This is what Rousseau was referring to when he described how citizens in his ideal polity would “fly to the assemblies” (1988, 140). Citizens, that is, ought to display a certain kind of disposition or character. As it turns out, and not surprisingly, given our perspective, in a democracy the virtues or traits that constitute good citizenship are also closely associated with being a good or moral person. We can summarize that close association as what we mean by the phrase “good character.”

It is the absence of these virtues or traits—that is, the absence of character—that leads some to conclude that democracy, especially in the United States, is in crisis. The withering of our democratic system, argues Richard Battistoni, for one, can be traced to “a crisis in civic education” and the failure of our educators to prepare citizens for democratic participation (1985, pp. 4–5). Missing, he argues, is a central character trait, a disposition to participate. Crucial to the continuation of our democracy “is the proper inculcation in the young of the character, skills, values, social practices, and ideals that foster democratic politics” (Ibid, p. 15); in other words, educating for democratic character.

Two groups predominate in advocating the use of character education as a way of improving democracy. One group comprises political theorists such as Galston, Battistoni, Benjamin Barber, and Adrian Oldfield who often reflect modern-day versions of civic republicanism. This group wishes to instill or nurture [ 7 ] a willingness among our future citizens to sacrifice their self-interests for the sake of the common good. Participation on this view is important both to stabilize society and to enhance each individual’s human flourishing through the promotion of our collective welfare.

The second group does not see democratic participation as the center, but instead sees democratic participation as one aspect of overall character education. Central to the mission of our public schools, on this view, is the establishing of character traits important both to individual conduct (being a good person) and to a thriving democracy (being a good citizen). The unannounced leader of the second group is educational practitioner Thomas Lickona, and it includes such others as William Bennett and Patricia White.

Neither group describes in actual terms what might be called “democratic character.” Though their work intimates such character, they talk more about character traits important to human growth and well-being, which also happen to be related to democratic participation. What traits do these pundits discuss, and what do they mean by “character”?

It is difficult, comments British philosopher R. S. Peters, “to decide what in general we mean when we speak of a person’s character as distinct from his nature, his temperament, and his personality” (1966, p. 40). Many advocates of character education are vague on just this distinction, and it might be helpful to propose that character consists of traits that are learned, while personality and temperament consist of traits that are innate. [ 8 ]

What advocates are clear on, however, is that character is the essence of what we are. The term comes from the world of engraving, from the Greek term kharakter , an instrument used for making distinctive marks. Thus character is what marks a person or persons as distinctive.

Character is not just one attribute or trait. It signifies the sum total of particular traits, the “sum of mental and moral qualities” ( O.E.D. , p. 163). The addition of “moral qualities” to the definition may be insignificant, for character carries with it a connotation of “good” traits. Thus character traits are associated, if not synonymous, with virtues. So a good person and, in the context of liberal democracy, a good citizen will have these virtues.

To Thomas Lickona a virtue is “a reliable inner disposition to respond to situations in a morally good way” (p. 51); “good character,” he continues, “consists of knowing the good, desiring the good, and doing the good” (Idem). Who determines what the good is? In general, inculcated traits or virtues or dispositions are used “in following rules of conduct.” These are the rules that reinforce social conventions and social order (Peters, p. 40). So in this view social convention determines what “good” means.

This might be problematic. What occurs when the set of virtues of the good person clashes with the set of virtues of the good citizen? What is thought to be good in one context, even when approved by society, is not necessarily what is thought to be good in another. Should the only child of a deceased farmer stay at home to care for his ailing mother, or should he, like a good citizen, join the resistance to fight an occupying army?

What do we do when the requirements of civic education call into question the values or beliefs of what one takes to be the values of being a good person? In Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education just such a case occurred. Should the Mozerts and other fundamentalist Christian parents have the right to opt their children out of those classes that required their children to read selections that went against or undermined their faith? On the one hand, if they are permitted to opt out, then without those children present the class is denied the diversity of opinion on the reading selections that would be educative and a hallmark of democracy. On the other hand, if the children cannot opt out, then they are denied the right to follow their faith as they think necessary. [ 9 ]

We can see, therefore, why educating for character has never been straightforward. William Bennett pushes for the virtues of patriotism, loyalty, and national pride; Amy Gutmann wants to see toleration of difference and mutual respect. Can a pacifist in a time of war be a patriot? Is the rebel a hero or simply a troublemaker? [ 10 ] Can idealized character types speak to all of our students and to the variegated contexts in which they will find themselves?

Should our teachers teach a prescribed morality, often closely linked to certain religious ideas and ideals? Should they teach a content only of secular values related to democratic character? Or should they teach a form of values clarification in which children’s moral positions are identified but not criticized?

These two approaches—a prescribed moral content or values clarification—appear to form the two ends of a character education spectrum. At one end is the method of indoctrination of prescribed values and virtues, regardless of sacred or secular orientation. But here some citizens will express concern about just whose values are to be taught or, to some, imposed. [ 11 ] At the same time, some will see the inculcation of specified values and virtues as little more than teaching a “morality of compliance” (Nord, 2001, 144).

At the other end of the spectrum is values clarification, [ 12 ] but this seems to be a kind of moral relativism where everything goes because nothing can be ruled out. In values clarification there is no right or wrong value to hold. Indeed, teachers are supposed to be value neutral so as to avoid imposing values on their students and to avoid damaging students’ self-esteem. William Damon calls this approach “anything-goes constructivism” (1996), for such a position may leave the door open for students to approve racism, violence, and “might makes right.”

Is there a middle of the spectrum that would not impose values or simply clarify values? There is no middle path that can cut a swath through imposition on one side and clarification on the other. Perhaps the closest we can get is to offer something like Gutmann’s or Galston’s teaching of critical thinking. Here students can think about and think through what different moral situations require of persons. With fascists looking for hiding Jews, I lie; about my wife’s new dress, I tell the truth (well, usually). Even critical thinking, however, requires students to be critical about something. That is, we must presuppose the existence, if not prior inculcation, of some values about which to be critical.

What we have, then, is not a spectrum but a sequence, a developmental sequence. Character education, from this perspective, begins with the inculcation in students of specific values. But at a later date character education switches to teaching and using the skills of critical thinking on the very values that have been inculcated.

This approach is in keeping with what William Damon, an expert on innovative education and on intellectual and moral development, has observed: “The capacity for constructive criticism is an essential requirement for civic engagement in a democratic society; but in the course of intellectual development, this capacity must build upon a prior sympathetic understanding of that which is being criticized” (2001, 135).

The process, therefore, would consist of two phases, two developmental phases. Phase One is the indoctrination phase. Yet which values do we inculcate? Perhaps the easiest way to begin is to focus first on those behaviors that all students must possess. In fact, without first insisting that students “behave,” it seems problematic whether students could ever learn to think critically. Every school, in order to conduct the business of education, reinforces certain values and behaviors. Teachers demand that students sit in their seats; raise their hands before speaking; hand assignments in on time; display sportsmanship on the athletic field; be punctual when coming to class; do not cheat on their tests or homework; refrain from attacking one another on the playground, in the hallways, or in the classroom; be respectful of and polite to their elders (e.g., teachers, staff, administrators, parents, visitors, police); and the like. The teachers’ commands, demands, manner of interacting with the students, and own conformity to the regulations of the classroom and school establish an ethos of behavior—a way of conducting oneself within that institution. From the ethos come the requisite virtues—honesty, cooperation, civility, respect, and so on. [ 13 ]

Another set of values to inculcate at this early stage is that associated with democracy. Here the lessons are more didactic than behavioral. One point of civic education in a democracy is to raise free and equal citizens who appreciate that they have both rights and responsibilities. Students need to learn that they have freedoms, such as those found in Bill of Rights (press, assembly, worship, and the like) in the U. S. Constitution. But they also need to learn that they have responsibilities to their fellow citizens and to their country. This requires teaching students to obey the law; not to interfere with the rights of others; and to honor their country, its principles, and its values. Schools must teach those traits or virtues that conduce to democratic character: cooperation, honesty, toleration, and respect.

So we inculcate in our students the values and virtues that our society honors as those that constitute good citizenship and good character. But if we inculcate a love of justice, say, is it the justice found in our laws or an ideal justice that underlies all laws? Obviously, this question will not arise in the minds of most, if any, first graders. As students mature and develop cognitively, however, such questions will arise. So a high-school student studying American History might well ask whether the Jim Crow laws found in the South were just laws simply because they were the law. Or were they only just laws until they were discovered through argument to be unjust? Or were they always unjust because they did not live up to some ideal conception of justice?

Then we could introduce Phase Two of character education: education in judgment. Judgment is based on weighing and considering reasons and evidence for and against propositions. Judgment is a virtue that relies upon practical wisdom; it is established as a habit through practice. Judgment, or thoughtfulness, was the master virtue for Aristotle from whose exercise comes an appreciation for those other virtues: honesty, cooperation, toleration, and respect.

Because young children have difficulty taking up multiple perspectives, as developmental psychologists tell us, thinking and deliberating that require the consideration of multiple perspectives would seem unsuitable for elementary-school children. Additionally, young children are far more reliant on the teacher’s involvement in presenting problem situations in which the children’s knowledge and skills can be applied and developed. R. S. Peters offers an important consideration in this regard:

The cardinal function of the teacher, in the early stages, is to get the pupil on the inside of the form of thought or awareness with which he is concerned. At a later stage, when the pupil has built into his mind both the concepts and the mode of exploration involved, the difference between teacher and taught is obviously only one of degree. For both are participating in the shared experience of exploring a common world (1966, 53).

The distinction between those moving into “the inside” of reflective thinking and those already there may seem so vast as to be a difference of kind, not degree. But the difference is always one of degree. Elementary-school students have yet to develop the skills and knowledge, or have yet to gain the experience, to participate in phase- two procedures that require perspectivism.

In this two-phased civic education teachers inculcate specific virtues such as patriotism. But at a later stage this orientation toward solidifying a conventional perspective gives way to one of critical thinking. The virtue of patriotism shifts from an indoctrinated feeling of exaltation for the nation, whatever its actions and motives, to a need to examine the nation’s principles and practices to see whether those practices are in harmony with those principles. The first requires loyalty; the second, judgment. We teach the first through pledges, salutes, and oaths; we teach the second through critical inquiry.

Have we introduced a significant problem when we teach students to judge values, standards, and beliefs critically? Could this approach lead to students’ contempt for authority and tradition? Students need to see and hear that disagreement does not necessarily entail disrespect. Thoughtful, decent people can disagree. To teach students that those who disagree with us in a complicated situation like abortion or affirmative action are wrong or irresponsible or weak is to treat them unfairly. It also conveys the message that we think that we are infallible and have nothing to learn from what others have to say. Such positions undercut democracy.

Would all parents approve of such a two-phased civic education? Would they abide their children’s possible questioning of their families’ values and religious views? Yet the response to such parental concerns must be the same as that to any authority figure: Why do you think that you are always right? Aren’t there times when parents can see that it is better to lie, maybe even to their children, than to tell the truth? This, however, presupposes that parents, or authority figures, are themselves willing to exercise critical judgment on their own positions, values, and behaviors. This point underscores the need to involve other social institutions and persons in character education.

4. Modern Forms of Civic Education

In the United States, most students are required to take courses on government or civics, and the main content is essentially political science for high school students. In other words, they use textbooks and other written materials to learn about the formal structure and behavior of political institutions, from local government to the United Nations (Godsay et al., 2012). The philosophical justifications for this kind of curriculum are rarely developed fully, but probably an underlying idea is that citizens ought to play certain concrete roles--voting, monitoring the news, serving on juries, petitioning the government--and to do so effectively requires a baseline understanding of the political system. Another implicit goal may be to increase young people’s appreciation of the existing constitutional system so that they will be motivated to preserve it.

Michael Rebell (2018) argues that both the United States Constitution and most states’ constitutional provisions regarding public education provide support for a right to adequate civic education . Specific policies should result from a deliberative process to define the educational opportunities that all students must receive and to select appropriate outcomes for civic education – all overseen by a court concerned with assessing whether civic education is constitutionally "adequate."

State standards are regulatory documents that affect the curriculum in public schools. All 50 states and the District of Columbia have adopted standards for civics as part of social studies (Godsay et al, 2012). The College, Career, and Civic Life ("C3") Framework for Social Studies State Standards (National Council for the Social Studies, 2013) provides a general framework for states to use as they design or revise these standards. It organizes civics – along with history, geography and economics – into one "Inquiry Arc" that extends from "Developing Questions and Planning Inquiries," to "Applying Disciplinary Concepts and Tools," to "Evaluating Sources and Evidence," to "Communicating Conclusions and Taking Informed Action." The Arc is presented as applicable from kindergarten through high school, but with increasingly demanding content. The logic of moving from question-generation to (ultimately) action suggests an implicit theory of civic engagement.

In the subsequent sections, we examine some proposals for alternative forms of civic education that are also philosophically interesting.

Putting students into the community-at-large is today called “service-learning.” It is a common form of civic education that integrates classroom instruction with work within the community. Ideally, the students take their experience and observations from service into their academic work, and use their academic research and discussions to inform their service.

Jerome Bruner, the renowned educator and psychologist, proposed that some classroom learning ought to be devoted to students creating political-action plans addressing significant social and political issues such as poverty or race. He also urged educators to get their students out into the local communities to explore the occupations, ways of life, and habits of residence. Bruner is here following Dewey, who criticized traditional education for its failure to get teachers and students out into the community to become intimately familiar with the physical, historical, occupational, and economic conditions that could then be used as educational resources (Dewey 1938, 40). Dewey warned of the “standing danger that the material of formal instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject matter of life experience.” This could be countered by immersing students in “the spirit of service,” especially by learning about the various occupations within their communities (1916, 10–11, 49). [ 14 ]

Empirical evidence suggests that experiential education may be most effective for civic learning. “The reason, again, is that students respond to experiences that touch their emotions and senses of self in a firsthand way” (Damon, 2001, 141). Also, as Conover and Searing point out, “while most students identify themselves as citizens, their grasp of what it means to act as citizens is rudimentary and dominated by a focus on rights, thus creating a privately oriented, passive understanding” (2000, 108). To bring them out of this private and passive understanding, nothing is better, as Tocqueville noted, than political participation. The kind of participation here is political action, not simply voting or giving money. William Damon concludes that the most effective moral education programs “are those that engage students directly in action, with subsequent opportunities for reflection” (2001, 144).

Another influence on service-learning is the theory of social capital, described above. If a democracy depends on people serving one another and developing habits and networks of reciprocal concern--and if that kind of interaction is declining in a country like the United States--then it is natural to encourage or require students to serve as part of their learning.

Some critics (e.g., Boyte and Kari, 1996) worry that the “service” in “service-learning” reflects a narrow conception of citizenship that overlooks power and agency and that encourages an undemocratic distinction between the server and the served.

We can think of civic action as participation that involves far more than serving, voting, working or writing a letter to the editor. It can take many other forms: attending and participating in political meetings; organizing and running meetings, rallies, protests, fund drives; gathering signatures for bills, ballots, initiatives, recalls; serving on local elected and appointed boards; starting or participating in political clubs; deliberating with fellow citizens about social and political issues central to their lives; and pursuing careers that have public value.

The National Action Civics Collaborative (NACC) unites organizations that engage students in civic action as a form of civic learning. Service is usually only one form of “action.” Some NACC members work in schools, but similar practices are perhaps more common and easier to achieve in independent, community-based organizations. Youth Organizing is a widespread practice that engages adolescents in civic or political activities. Levinson (2012) offers a philosophically sophisticated defense of a pedagogy that she calls “guided experiential civic education” and argues for its place in public schools.

Especially if one’s theory of democracy is deliberative (see section 2.3, above ), the core of civic education may be learning to talk and listen with other people about public problems. That is a cognitively and ethically demanding activity that can be learned from experience. The most promising pedagogy is to discuss current events with a moderator--usually the teacher--and some requirement to prepare in advance.

Debates are competitive discussions. Simulations (such as mock trials or the Model UN) involve discussing issues from the perspective of fictional or historical characters. And deliberations usually involve students speaking in their own real voice and trying to find common ground.

Considerable evidence shows that moderated discussions of current, controversial issues increase students’ knowledge of civic processes, their skills at engaging with other people, and their interest in politics. See, e.g., Kawashima-Ginsberg and Levine (2014).

Hess (2009) and Hess & McAvoy (2014) argue for discussing current controversies and explore some of the ethical dilemmas that arise for teachers who do so. For instance, should a teacher disclose her or his own views or attempt to conceal them to be a neutral moderator? What questions should be presented as genuinely controversial? (Most people would insist that slavery is no longer a controversy and should not be treated as such. But what about the reality of climate change?)

John Dewey argued that, from the 18 th century onward, states came to see education as the best means of perpetuating and recovering their political power. But “the maintenance of a particular national sovereignty required subordination of individuals to the superior interests of the state both in military defense and in struggles for international supremacy in commerce…To form the citizen, not the ‘man,’ became the aim of education” (1916, 90).

In a democracy, however, because of its combination of “numerous and more varied points of shared common interest” and its requirement of “continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations produced by varied intercourse,” which Dewey called “progress,” education could address personal development and “full and free interplay” among social groups (Ibid, 83, 79). In other words, it is in democratic states that we want to look for the preparation of good persons as well as good citizens; that is, for democratic education, which in this context, to repeat for emphasis, is what is meant by civic education.

Nowhere is there a better site for political or democratic action than the school itself, the students’ own community. This is Dewey’s insight (1916). Creating a democratic culture within the schools not only facilitates preparing students for democratic participation in the political system, but it also fosters a democratic environment that shapes the relationships with adults and among peers that the students already engage in. “Students learn much more from the way a school is run,” comments Theodore Sizer, “and the best way to teach values is when the school is a living example of the values to be taught” (1984, 120, 122).

Real problems, and not hypotheticals or academic exercises, are, Dewey argued, always of real concern to students. So in addition to activities of writing and classroom discussion, typical of today’s public schools, students should engage in “active inquiry and careful deliberation in the significant and vital problems” that confront their communities, however defined but especially their schools (1910, 55). Book lessons and classroom discussions rarely connect with decision-making on issues that affect that community. In fact, Dewey comments that traditional methods of instruction are often “foreign to the existing capacities of the young…beyond the reach of [their] experience…[T]he very situation forbids much active participation by pupils” (1938, 19).

As a core of learning Dewey wanted “an experiential continuum” (1938, 28, 33). The experiences that he wanted to promote were those that underscored healthy growth; those, in other words, that generated a greater desire to learn and to keep on learning and that built upon prior experiences. “[D]emocratic social experiences” were superior in providing “a better quality of human experience” than any other form of social or political organization (Ibid, 34).

One logical, and practical, possibility was to make the operations of the school part of the curriculum. Let the students use their in-school experiences to make, or help make, decisions that directly affect some of the day-to-day operations of the school—student discipline, maintenance of the grounds and buildings, problems with cliques, issues of sexism and racism, incidents of ostracism, and the like—as well as topics and issues inside the classrooms.

Dewey thought of schools as “embryo communities” (1915, 174), “institution[s] in which the child is, for the time…to be a member of a community life in which he feels that he participates, and to which he contributes” (1916, 88). We need not become sidetracked in questioning just what Dewey means by, or what we should mean by, “community” to grasp the sense that he is after. It is not surprising that Dewey wanted to give students experience in making decisions that affect their lives in schools. What is surprising is that so little democracy takes place in schools and that those who spend the most time in schools have the least opportunity to experience it.

The significance of democratic decision-making within the schools and about the wider community—the making of actual decisions through democratic means—cannot be overstated. As a propaedeutic to democratic participation, political action of this sort is invaluable. Melissa S. Williams comments: “…[L]earning cooperation as a practice is the only way to develop individuals’ sense of agency to reshape the world they share with others. It teaches moderation in promoting one’s own vision, and the capacity of individuals to see themselves as part of a project of collective self-rule” (2005, 238; emphasis in original).

Of course, not everything in school should be decided democratically. There are some areas in which decisions require expertise—a combination of experience and knowledge—that rules out students as decision-makers. Chief among such areas is pedagogy. Because the teachers and administrators know more about the processes of education and about their subjects, because they have firsthand and often intimate knowledge of the range and nature of abilities and problems of their students—a point emphasized by Dewey (1938, 56)—as well as the particular circumstances in which the learning takes place, they and not the students should make pedagogical decisions.

At the same time, because many students are still children, the decisions that they are to make should be age-appropriate. Not all democratic procedures or school issues are suitable for all ages. Differences in cognitive, social, and emotional development, especially at the elementary-school level, complicate democratic action. While all students may have the same capacity as potentiality, activating those capacities requires development, as noted in the discussion of a two-phased form of civic education.

Deweyan ideas about the school as a community live on in several kinds of practice. First, in some experimental schools, students, teachers, and parents actually govern democratically. In a Sudbury School (of which the first was founded in Sudbury, Massachusetts in 1968), the whole community governs the institution through weekly town meetings.

Much more common is to give students some degree of voice in the governance of a school through an elected student government, student-run media, and policies that encourage students to express their opinions.

Another very prevalent approach is to support and encourage students to manage their own voluntary associations within a school: clubs, teams, etc. Thomas & McFarland (2010) and others have found positive affects of extracurricular participation on voting, and a plausible explanation is that adolescents become active citizens by managing their own mini-communities.

In his critique of traditional pedagogy, Paulo Freire refers to teacher-centered education as the “banking concept of education” (1970, 72). This for Freire is unacceptable as civic education. Too often, observes Freire, students are asked to memorize and repeat ideas, stanzas, phrases, and formulas without understanding the meaning of or meaning behind them. This process “turns [students] into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher” (Idem). As a result, students are nothing but objects, nothing but receptacles to receive, file, and store deposits—that is, containers for what the teacher has deposited in their “banks.”

Like Dewey, Freire thinks that knowledge comes only from invention and reinvention and the perpetual inquiry in the world that is a mark of all free human beings. Students thereby educate the teachers as well. In sharp contrast, then, to the banking concept is “‘problem-posing’ education” (Ibid, 79), which is an experiential education that empowers students by educing the power that they already possess.

That power is to be used to liberate themselves from oppression. This pedagogy to end oppression, as Freire writes, “must be forged with , not for , the oppressed” (1970, 48; emphases in original), irrespective of whether they are children or adults. Freire worked primarily with illiterate adult peasants in South America, but his work has applications as well to schools and school-aged children. It is to be a pedagogy for all, and Freire includes oppressors and the oppressed.

To overcome oppression people must first critically recognize its causes. One cause is people’s own internalization of the oppressor consciousness [or “image,” as Freire says at one point (Ibid, 61)]. Until the oppressed seek to remove this internalized oppressor, they cannot be free. They will continue to live in the duality of both oppressed and oppressor. It is no wonder, then, as Freire tells us, that peasants once promoted to overseers become more tyrannical toward their former workmates than the owners themselves (Ibid, 46). The banking concept of education precludes the perspective that students need to recognize their oppression: “The more students [or adults] work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world” (Ibid, 73).

Having confronted the reality of the dual nature of her consciousness, having discovered her own internal oppressor and realized her actual situation, the person now must act on her realization. She must act, in other words, in and on the world so as to lessen oppression. Freire wanted his students, whether adult peasants or a country’s youth, to value their cultures as they simultaneously questioned some of those cultures’ practices and ethos. This Freire referred to as “reading the word”—as in ending illiteracy—and “reading the world”—the ability to analyze social and political situations that influenced and especially limited people’s life chances. For Freire, to question was not enough; people must act as well.

Liberation, therefore, is a “praxis,” but it cannot consist of action alone, which Freire calls “activism.” It must be, instead, action combined with “serious reflection” (Ibid, 79, 65). This reflection or “reflective participation” takes place in dialogue with others who are in the same position of realization and action.

This “critical and liberating dialogue,” also known as “culture circles,” is the heart of Freire’s pedagogy. The circles consist of somewhere between 12 and 25 students and some teachers, all involved in dialogic exchange. The role of the “teachers” in this civic education is to participate with the people/students in these dialogues. “The correct method for a revolutionary leadership…is, therefore, not ‘libertarian propaganda.’ Nor can the leadership merely ‘implant’ in the oppressed a belief in freedom…The correct method lies in dialogue” (Ibid, 67).

The oppressed thereby use their own experiences and language to explain and surmount their oppression. They do not rely upon others, even teachers, to explain their oppressed circumstances. “Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers” (Ibid, 80). The reciprocity of roles means that students teach teachers as teachers teach students. Dialogue encourages everyone to teach and everyone to create together.

Because Freire worked with illiterate adult peasants, he insisted that the circles use the ways of speaking and the shared understandings of the peasants themselves. In the circles the learners identify their own problems and concerns and seek answers to them in the group dialogue. Dialogue focuses on what Freire called “codifications,” which are representations of the learner’s day-to-day circumstances (Ibid, 114 and passim). Codifications may be photographs, drawings, poems, even a single word. As representations, codifications abstract the daily circumstances. For example, a photograph of workers in a sugar cane field permits workers to talk about the realities of their work and working conditions without identifying them as the actual workers in the photograph. This permits the dialogue to steer toward understanding the nature of the participants’ specific circumstances but from a more abstract position. Teachers and learners worked together to understand the problems identified by the peasants, a process that Freire calls “decoding,” and to propose actions to be taken to rectify or overturn those problems.

The circles therefore have four basic elements: 1) problem posing, 2) critical dialogue, 3) solution posing, and 4) plan of action. The goal, of course, is to overcome the problems, but it is also to raise the awareness, the critical consciousness (conscientization), of the learners so as to end oppression in their individual and collective lives. The increased critical awareness enables learners to appropriate language without being colonized by it. [ 15 ] Decoding allows participants “to perceive reality differently…by broadening the horizon of perception…[It] stimulates the appearance of a new perception” that allows for the transformation of the participants’ concrete reality (Ibid 115).

“Finally,” comments Freire, “true dialogue cannot exist unless the dialoguers engage in critical thinking…thinking which perceives reality as process, as transformation, rather than as a static activity” (Ibid, 92).

True dialogue is for Freire what civic education must be about. If civic education does not include it, then there is little hope that the future will be anything for the oppressed but a continuation of the present. “Authentic education is not carried on by ‘A’ for ‘B’ or by ‘A’ about ‘B,’ but by ‘A’ with ‘B’…” (Ibid, 93; emphases in original). Essential to such education are the experiences of the students, whatever their ages or situations. Naively conceived humanism, part and parcel of so much traditional education, tries “to create an ideal model of the ‘good man,’” but does so by leaving out “the concrete, existential, present situation of real people” (Idem). Therefore, traditional civic education, non-experiential civic education that overlooks the importance of Freire’s praxis, fails for Freire to raise either good persons or good citizens.

The Brazilian government has recognized Freire’s culture circles as a form of civic education and has underwritten their use for combating illiteracy among youth and adults (Souto-Manning, 2007).

Cosmopolitanism is an emerging and, because of globalization, an increasingly important topic for civic educators. In an earlier iteration, cosmopolitan education was multicultural education. According to both, good persons need to be aware of the perspectives of others and the effects their decisions have on others. While multicultural good citizens needed to think about the perspectives and plight of those living on the margins of their societies and about those whose good lives deviated from their own, good citizens in cosmopolitanism need to think, or begin to think, of themselves as “global citizens” with obligations that extend across national boundaries. Should and must civic education incorporate a global awareness and foster a cosmopolitan sensibility?

Martha Nussbaum, for one, thinks so. Nussbaum argues that our first obligation must be to all persons, regardless of race, creed, class, or border. She does not mean that we ought to forsake our commitments to our family, friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens. She means that we ought to do nothing in our other communities or in our lives that we know to be immoral from the perspective of Kant’s community of all humanity (1996, 7). We should “work to make all human beings part of our community of dialogue and concern” (Ibid, 9). Civic education should reflect that (Ibid, 11).

Philosopher Eamonn Callan, however, thinks otherwise. Callan wants to avoid a civic education, and the pursuit of justice that underlies it, “that gives pride of place to a cosmopolitan sensibility at the cost of particularistic affiliations” (1999, p. 197). In Callan’s view our civic education should be constructed ideally around the concept of “liberal patriotism.” Although liberal patriotism is an “identification with a particular, historically located project of political self-rule”—that is, American liberal democracy—it nevertheless also “entails a sense of responsibility to outsiders and insiders alike….” (Ibid, 198).

Of course, the danger here is that a liberal patriot may well feel a sense of obligation or responsibility only when her country is committing the injustice. Callan points out that it is “precisely the thought that ‘we Americans’ have done these terrible things that gave impetus [during the Vietnam war] to their horror and rage” (Idem). This thought is to be contrasted with our feelings and sense of responsibility when, as Callan suggests, Soviet tanks rolled through Prague. Because, according to Callan, our politico-moral identity was not implicated in the Soviet action, we somehow do not have to have a similar sense of horror and rage. Perhaps we do not have to, but should we? Nussbaum’s point is that we certainly should.

What, therefore, should civic education look like? Callan provides two examples: Should we “cultivate a civic identity in which patriotic affinities are muted or disappear altogether and a cosmopolitan ideal of ‘world citizenship’ is brought” to the forefront? Or should we cultivate a kind of patriotism “in which identification with a particular project of democratic self-rule is yet attuned to the claims of justice that both civic outsiders and insiders” will make (1999, 198). It appears that Nussbaum would favor the first, while Callan favors the second.

Perhaps these two are not the only options. In her metaphor of concentric identity circles Nussbaum argues that we ought to try to bring the outer circles of our relationships, the circle of all humanity, closer to the center, to our selves and to our loved ones (1996, 9). By doing so, we do not push out of our identities those particular relationships of significance to us. Instead, we need to take into consideration the effects that our moral and political decisions have on all of humanity. If our civic education helps us extend our sympathies, as Hume proposed, and if we could do so without paying the price of muting or eliminating our local and national affinities, then would Nussbaum and Callan agree on such a civic education?

Additionally, we need to consider that patriotism itself seems to have its own version of concentric circles. For example, Theodore Roosevelt warned against “that overexaltation of the little community at the expense of the great nation.” Here is a nod toward Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” as opposed to what he called “the patriotism of the village.” [ 16 ] If we move from the village to the nation, then can’t we move from the nation to the world? As Alexander Pope wrote in “An Essay on Man”: “God loves from Whole to Parts; but human soul/Must rise from Individual to the Whole/…Friend, parent, neighbor first it will embrace/His country next, and next all human race.”

Is it ever too early to begin educating children about the cultures, customs, values, ideas, and beliefs of people from around the world? Will this undercut our commitment and even devotion to our own family, neighborhood, region, and nation? No civic education must consist exclusively either of love of one’s community and a patriotic affiliation with one’s country or of preparation for world citizenship—a term that implies, at the least, a world state. There ought to be a composite that will work here.

If the purpose of civic education is to generate in the young those values that underscore successful participation in our liberal democracies, then the task facing educators, whether in elementary school, secondary school, or post-secondary school, might be far easier than we imagine. There seems to be a direct correlation between years in school and an increase in tolerance of difference (Nie et al., 1996). An increase of tolerance can lead to an increase of respect for those holding divergent views. Such increases could certainly help engender a cosmopolitan sensibility. But does the number of years in school correlate with a willingness to participate in the first place? For example, the number of Americans going to college has increased dramatically over the past 50 years, yet voting in elections and political participation in general are still woefully low.

Perhaps public schools should not teach any virtue that is unrelated to the attainment of academic skills, which to some is the paramount, if not the sole, purpose of schooling. But shouldn’t all students learn not just the skills but also the predispositions required to participate in the “conscious social reproduction” of our democracies, as Gutmann argues? If our democracies are important and robust, then do our citizens need such predispositions to see the value of participation? And if we say that our democracies are not robust enough, then shouldn’t our students be striving to reinvigorate, or invigorate, our democratic systems? Will they need infusions of patriotism to do that? If tolerance and respect are democratic virtues, then do we fail our students when we do not tolerate or respect their desires as good persons to eschew civic participation even though this violates what we think of as the duties of good citizens?

As stated earlier, civic education in a democracy must prepare citizens to participate in and thereby perpetuate the system; at the same time, it must prepare them to challenge what they see as inequities and injustices within that system. Yet a civic education that encourages students to challenge the nature and scope of our democracies runs the risk of turning off our students and turning them away from participation. But if that civic education has offered more than simply critique, if its basis is critical thinking, which involves developing a tolerance of, if not an appreciation for, difference and divergence, as well as a willingness and even eagerness for political action, then galvanized citizens can make our systems more robust. Greater demands on our citizens, like higher expectations of our students, often lead to stronger performances. As Mill reminds us, “if circumstances allow the amount of public duty assigned him to be considerable, it makes him an educated man” (Ibid, 233).

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• Center for Civic Education , home of the educational programs “We the People” and “Project Citizen.” Traditionally funded by the federal government and thus interesting as an expression of official policies toward civic education
• CIRCLE or the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement , based in Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, this center promotes research and projects on civic and political engagement of the young.
• Close Up Foundation , which runs a Washington DC experiential learning program for middle-school and high-school students.
• Constitutional Rights Foundation , which focuses on educating America’s youth about the importance of democratic participation.
• Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship , affiliated with Augsburg University and engaged in activist democracy through projects involving public work.
• Public Achievement , a civic engagement initiative that seeks to involve the young in learning lessons of democracy by doing public work.

character, moral | citizenship | cosmopolitanism | democracy | Dewey, John | ethics: virtue | Mill, John Stuart | Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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A network dedicated to building a culture of human rights

Human Rights Education

Human Rights Education Video from Amnesty Ireland on Vimeo .

WHAT IS HUMAN RIGHTS EDUCATION?

Human Rights Educators USA defines human rights education (HRE) as

… a lifelong process of teaching and learning that helps individuals develop the knowledge, skills, and values to fully exercise and protect the human rights of themselves and others; to fulfill their responsibilities in the context of internationally agreed upon human rights principles; and to achieve justice and peace in our world.  

For a discussion of various conceptions of human rights education, see:

• Nancy Flowers, “What is Human Rights Education?”
• Council of Europe,  Compasito, a Manual on Human Rights Education for Children , Chapter 2, “What is Human Rights Education?”

WHAT ARE THE GOALS OF HRE?

The mandate for human rights education is clear: For more than sixty years the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) has charged “every individual and every organ of society ” to “strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedom.” The 2012 UN Declaration for Human Rights Education and Training further emphasizes “the fundamental importance of human rights education and training in contributing to the promotion, protection and effective realization of all human rights” and reaffirms “that governments are “duty-bound …to ensure that education is aimed at strengthening respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

The goals of human rights education include learning about human rights, for human rights, and in human rights.

Learning about Human Rights Knowing about your rights is the first step in promoting greater respect for human rights. All segments of society need to understand the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human rights (UDHR, 1948) and how these international standards affect governments and individuals. They also need to understand the interdependence of rights, both civil and political rights and social, economic, and cultural rights.

Learning for Human Rights Education for human rights means understanding and embracing the principles of human equality and dignity and the commitment to respect and protect the rights of all people. It has little to do with what we know; the “test” for this kind of learning is how we act. The ultimate goal of education for human rights is empowerment, giving people the knowledge and skills to become responsible and engaged citizen committed to building a just civil society.

Learning in Human Rights Educators face a double challenge. First to teach in such a way as to respect human rights in the classroom and the school environment itself. For learning to have practical benefit, students need not only to learn about human rights, but also to learn in an environment that models them.

The second challenge is personally to model human rights values. Human rights education encourages everyone to use human rights as a frame of reference in their institutions and in their relationships with others . It especially challenges educators, as role models, critically to examine their own attitudes and behaviors and, ultimately, to transform them in order to advance peace, social harmony and respect for the rights of all.

One Practice, Many Goals

In this new field, the goals and the content needed to achieve these goals are under continual and generally creative debate. Among the goals that motivate most human rights educators are:

• developing critical analysis of their life situation;
• changing attitudes;
• changing behaviors;
• clarifying values;
• developing solidarity;
• analyzing situations in human rights terms;
• strategizing and implementing appropriate responses to injustice.

For more on the goals of human rights education:

• Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights,  ABC, Teaching Human Rights:  Practical Activities for Primary and Secondary School
• Council of Europe,  Compass  

WHY TEACH HUMAN RIGHTS?

Each declaration or treaty expressing human rights principles or humanitarian law standards, commits all state parties to educate their people about these internationally agreed-upon rights and standards. In the US this responsibility to educate exists at different levels within the federal system and within different agencies at state and local levels. Because today local, national, and international spheres have become increasingly interdependent, the quality of human rights provided in pre-collegiate education carries national and global consequences. Today’s students must understand fundamental principles of human rights to appropriately exercise their civic responsibilities and take their places in the world at large.

  Active Citizenship Human rights education is essential to active citizenship in a democratic and pluralistic civil society. Citizens need to be able to think critically, make moral choices, take principled positions on issues, and devise democratic courses of action. Participation in the democratic process means, among other things, an understanding and conscious commitment to the fundamental values of human rights and democracy, such as equality and fairness, and being able to recognize problems such as racism, sexism, and other injustices as violations of those values. Active citizenship also means participation in the democratic process, motivated by a sense of personal responsibility for promoting and protecting the rights of all. But to be engaged in this way, citizens must first be informed.

 Informed Activism Learning is also essential to human rights activism. Only people who understand human rights will work to secure and defend them for themselves and others. The better informed activists are, the more effective their activism. Furthermore, activists must themselves serve as catalysts for human rights learning in their own schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods.  

THE CONTENT OF HUMAN RIGHTS EDUCATION

Human rights education intersects with and reinforces many other forms of education, including peace education, global education, law-related education, development education, environmental education, and moral or values education. HRE is distinct from these related fields, however, by being grounded in principles based on international human rights documents.

1.  Fundamental Principles of Human Rights:

For schools the core content of HRE is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child . These documents provide principles and ideas with which to assess experience and build a school culture that values human rights. The rights they embody are universal , meaning that all human beings are entitled to them, on an equal basis.

Human rights include civil and political rights , such as the right to life, liberty and freedom of expression: rights also found in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. Human rights also include economic, social, and cultural rights such as the right to participate in culture, the right to food, and the right to work and receive an education.  Human rights are indivisible , meaning that no right can be considered “less important” or “non-essential.” And human rights are interdependent , part of a complementary framework. For example, your right to participate in government is directly affected by your right to express yourself, to form associations, to get an education, and even to obtain the necessities of life.

With the UDHR as its foundation, a framework of international human rights law has evolved since the mid-20th century. The chart below shows the principal human rights treaties. Stars indicate those treaties which the USA has ratified and has a legal responsibility to implement.

PRINCIPAL HUMAN RIGHTS CONVENTIONS

• International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR, 1966)
• International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR, 1966)
•   Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD, 1965)
• Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women
• Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishmen t  (CAT, 1984)
• The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC, 1989)
• Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (ICMW, 1990)
• Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD, 2006)
• International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance  (2006)
• Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (Refugee Convention, 1951)

2.    A Human Rights Perspective on Social Issues

  Human rights education offers a distinctly different approach to familiar topics from history, as well as contemporary issues. For example, often-taught historical topics like the Civil War, the Age of Exploration, or US immigration can look quite different through a human rights lens, Likewise, discussing current national or school issues like internet freedom, school violence, or federal health policies from a human rights perspective can add an important new dimension.

For more on the content of human rights education:

• Nancy Flowers,  The Human Rights Education Handbook , Part III, “The Content of Human Rights Education”
• Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE),  Guidelines on Human rights Education for Secondary Schools    

METHODOLOGIES FOR HUMAN RIGHTS EDUCATION

No matter what the setting – classroom, service learning program, university, or community center – common principles inform the methods for effectively teaching and learning human rights. These include using participatory methods for learning such as role plays, discussion, debates, mock trials, games, and simulations. Learners should be encouraged to engage in an open-minded examination of human rights concerns and critically reflect on their environment with opportunities to draw their own conclusions and envision their choices in presented situations. Universal human rights represent a positive value system , a standard to which everyone is entitled. Learners can make connections between these values and their own lived experiences. This approach recognizes that the individual can make a difference and provides opportunities to explore examples of individuals who have done so.

Learners should examine both the international/global dimension and the domestic implications of human rights themes and consider how they relate to questions of diversity, economic inequality, and the relationship between individual choices and collective well-being. These intersections provide an opportunity to incorporate a variety of perspectives (e.g., race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, cultural/national traditions). In addition, human rights should be explicitly linked to relevant provisions of international, regional, national and state laws, treaties and declarations, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions .

For more on human rights education methodologies see:

• Richard Pierre Claude,  Methodologies for Human Rights Education
• Council of Europe, Human Rights Album Methodology Handbook
• Nancy Flowers,  The Human Rights Education Handbook , Part IV, “ Methods for Human Rights Education”
• Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights,  Human Rights Training

THE AUDIENCE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS EDUCATION

Who needs human rights education? The simple answer is, of course, everyone. However, human rights education is especially critical for some groups:

• Young children and their parents: Educational research shows conclusively that attitudes about equality and human dignity are largely set before the age of ten. Human rights education cannot start too young.
• Teachers, principals, and educators of all kinds: No one should be licensed to enter the teaching profession without a fundamental grounding in human rights, especially the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

Veteran teachers present a particular challenge because human rights education involves not only new information, but also introduces attitudes and methodologies that may challenge their accustomed authority in the classroom. Nevertheless, most teachers around the world share a common trait: a genuine concern for children. This motivation and a systematic in-service training program linked to recertification or promotion can achieve a basic knowledge of human rights for all teachers.

• Doctors and nurses, lawyers and judges, social workers, journalists, police, and military officials: Some people urgently need to understand human rights because of the power they wield or the positions of responsibility they hold. Human rights courses should be fundamental to the curriculum of medical schools, law schools, universities, police and military academies, and other professional training institutions.
• Especially vulnerable populations: Human rights education must not be limited to formal schooling. Many people never attend school. Many live far from administrative centers. Yet they, as well as refugees, minorities, migrant workers, indigenous peoples, the disabled, and the poor, are often among the most powerless and vulnerable to abuse. Such people have no less right to know their rights and far greater need.
•   Activists and Non-Profit Organizations: Many human rights activists lack a grounding in the human rights framework and many human rights scholars know next to nothing about the strategies of advocacy. Few people working in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) recognize that they may be engaged in human rights work. Especially in the United States, where social and economic justice is rarely framed in human rights language, many activists who work on issues like fair wages, health care, and housing need to understand their work in a human rights context and recognize their solidarity with other workers for social and economic justice.
• Public office holders, whether elected or appointed : In a democracy no one can serve the interests of the people who does not understand and support human rights.
• Power Holders: This group includes members of the business and banking community, landowners, traditional and religious leaders, and anyone whose decisions and policies affect many peoples’ lives. As possessors of power, they are often highly resistant, regarding human rights as a threat to their position and often working directly or indirectly to impede human rights education. To reach those in power, human rights need to be presented as benefiting the community and themselves, offering long-term stability and furthering development.   

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Publication

Human rights education: key success factors

Why human rights education matters

Despite significant progress, human rights and fundamental freedoms are violated every day around the world. These violations range from barriers to educational access, discrimination based on gender, race, and religion, to racism, hate speech and violent conflicts. For example, 2023 marked the 13th time peacefulness has deteriorated in the last 15 years, and 79 countries witnessed increased levels of conflict.

Human rights violations are an affront to just, peaceful and inclusive societies and require urgent, collective and sustained efforts at all levels. Education lies at the centre of these efforts to achieve human rights. Effective human rights education inculcates knowledge, skills, values, beliefs and attitudes that encourage all individuals to uphold their own rights and those of others.

This study, commissioned by UNESCO in cooperation with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), examines the impact of human rights education (HRE) pedagogies and good practices worldwide, with a specific focus on the primary and secondary levels in formal education. Using a data-driven approach that includes a literature review and surveys and interviews with informants, the study identifies key success factors for impactful HRE and provides recommendations for future research and practice.

The study finds that HRE can have a positive impact on learners’ knowledge and understanding of human rights, as well as their attitudes and behaviours related to human rights. It is an essential resource for education stakeholders looking to promote HRE at all levels of society and through a lifelong learning lens.

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• Introduction

Origins in ancient Greece and Rome

• Natural law transformed into natural rights
• “Nonsense upon stilts”: the critics of natural rights
• The persistence of the notion
• The nature of human rights: commonly accepted postulates
• Liberté : civil and political rights
• Égalité : economic, social, and cultural rights
• Fraternité : solidarity or group rights
• Liberté versus égalité
• The relevance of custom and tradition: the universalist-relativist debate
• Inherent risks in the debate
• Developments before World War II
• The UN Commission on Human Rights and its instruments
• The UN Human Rights Council and its instruments
• Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
• The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Its Optional Protocols
• Other UN human rights conventions and declarations
• Human rights and the Helsinki process
• Human rights in Europe
• Human rights in the Americas
• Human rights in Africa
• Human rights in the Arab world
• Human rights in Asia
• International human rights in domestic courts
• Human rights in the early 21st century

human rights

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human rights , rights that belong to an individual or group of individuals simply for being human, or as a consequence of inherent human vulnerability, or because they are requisite to the possibility of a just society. Whatever their theoretical justification, human rights refer to a wide continuum of values or capabilities thought to enhance human agency or protect human interests and declared to be universal in character, in some sense equally claimed for all human beings, present and future.

It is a common observation that human beings everywhere require the realization of diverse values or capabilities to ensure their individual and collective well-being. It also is a common observation that this requirement—whether conceived or expressed as a moral or a legal demand—is often painfully frustrated by social as well as natural forces, resulting in exploitation, oppression, persecution, and other forms of deprivation. Deeply rooted in these twin observations are the beginnings of what today are called “human rights” and the national and international legal processes associated with them.

Historical development

The expression human rights is relatively new, having come into everyday parlance only since World War II , the founding of the United Nations in 1945, and the adoption by the UN General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. It replaced the phrase natural rights, which fell into disfavour in the 19th century in part because the concept of natural law (to which it was intimately linked) had become controversial with the rise of legal positivism . Legal positivism rejected the theory, long espoused by the Roman Catholic Church , that law must be moral to be law. The term human rights also replaced the later phrase the rights of Man, which was not universally understood to include the rights of women.

Most students of human rights trace the origins of the concept of human rights to ancient Greece and Rome , where it was closely tied to the doctrines of the Stoics , who held that human conduct should be judged according to, and brought into harmony with, the law of nature . A classic example of this view is given in Sophocles ’ play Antigone , in which the title character, upon being reproached by King Creon for defying his command not to bury her slain brother, asserted that she acted in accordance with the immutable laws of the gods.

In part because Stoicism played a key role in its formation and spread, Roman law similarly allowed for the existence of a natural law and with it—pursuant to the jus gentium (“law of nations”)—certain universal rights that extended beyond the rights of citizenship. According to the Roman jurist Ulpian , for example, natural law was that which nature, not the state, assures to all human beings, Roman citizens or not.

It was not until after the Middle Ages , however, that natural law became associated with natural rights. In Greco-Roman and medieval times, doctrines of natural law concerned mainly the duties, rather than the rights, of “Man.” Moreover, as evidenced in the writings of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas , these doctrines recognized the legitimacy of slavery and serfdom and, in so doing, excluded perhaps the most important ideas of human rights as they are understood today—freedom (or liberty) and equality .

The conception of human rights as natural rights (as opposed to a classical natural order of obligation) was made possible by certain basic societal changes, which took place gradually beginning with the decline of European feudalism from about the 13th century and continuing through the Renaissance to the Peace of Westphalia (1648). During this period, resistance to religious intolerance and political and economic bondage; the evident failure of rulers to meet their obligations under natural law; and the unprecedented commitment to individual expression and worldly experience that was characteristic of the Renaissance all combined to shift the conception of natural law from duties to rights. The teachings of Aquinas and Hugo Grotius on the European continent, the Magna Carta (1215) and its companion Charter of the Forests (1217), the Petition of Right (1628), and the English Bill of Rights (1689) in England were signs of this change. Each testified to the increasingly popular view that human beings are endowed with certain eternal and inalienable rights that never were renounced when humankind “contracted” to enter the social order from the natural order and never were diminished by the claim of the “ divine right of kings .”

Human Rights

Student should be able to: define human rights; Identify what may lead to limitations of human rights; Describe what happens during emergency periods. .

What you'll learn

• Definition of human rights.
• Limitations of Human Rights e.g. Wars; state of emergency, conviction in a law court etc.
• A list of what happens during emergency periods e.g. limitation of movement and lack of freedom of speech.

Your Teacher

Laura Dumuje

• 42 Lessons Taught
• 4.6 Teacher Rating

Civil Rights 101: Definition, Examples, Importance

Civil rights protect individuals from discrimination and oppression by governments, social institutions, and individuals. They’re essential to a free, equal, and democratic society. In this article, we’ll explore the definition of “civil rights” and provide six critical examples of these types of rights. We’ll also explain why civil rights matter so much.

Civil rights protect an individual’s right to equal social opportunities and equal protection under the law. The right to equal employment, a fair trial, public education, public facility access, marriage equality, and freedom of religion are examples of civil rights.

What’s the definition of a civil right?

A civil right is a right that ensures equal social opportunities and equal protection under the law. If someone faces discrimination based on their race, age, gender , religion, or other personal characteristics, their civil rights have been violated. Governments are responsible for protecting people from discrimination, which means enforcing laws and holding individuals and institutions accountable for civil rights violations.

Where did civil rights come from? They’re like human rights and natural rights, but what’s considered a civil right varies significantly by time and place. The phrase itself – “civil rights” – comes from the Latin jus civis, which means “right of the citizen.” While every person had some rights in ancient times, “civil rights” were meant for citizens.

Today, civil rights are more widely granted to all people, but there are some areas of debate. Consider the right to vote in the United States. Some places let non-citizens vote in local elections , but only citizens can vote in federal elections. Many areas in the US also strip voting rights from people convicted of felonies. According to The Sentencing Project, around 4.6 million Americans can’t vote because of a felony conviction. Activists and experts consider this disenfranchisement a civil rights violation.

Is there a difference between a civil right and a civil liberty?

If you look up civil rights, you’ll find mentions of “civil liberties” at the same time. Are they different? Civil liberties limit what the government can do to people. As an example, freedom of speech prevents the government from censoring, retaliating, or legally sanctioning people for their opinions and ideas. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights deals with freedom of speech by stating: “Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.” Other civil liberties include the right to privacy and freedom of the press.

Civil rights are rights that protect people and communities from discrimination. It protects a wide variety of personal characteristics like age, sexual orientation, gender identity, social class, religion, race, and so on. The line between civil rights and civil liberties often blurs because civil liberties can also be civil rights. Freedom of religion and freedom to marry are two examples. Because there’s significant overlap, civil liberties and civil rights are often discussed interchangeably. Both are essential to a functioning democracy.

What are examples of civil rights?

Civil rights protect people from discrimination by ensuring equal protection under the law and equal social opportunities. Here are six examples:

Right to equal employment

“Equal employment” forbids discrimination based on characteristics like a person’s race, religion, age, and gender. The Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 (The United States) is a clear example of how a government can protect this civil right. The EEOA amended the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to address employment discrimination against Black Americans and other minoritized groups. The Act of 1972 also gave the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission the ability to enforce the law against individuals, employers, and labor unions that violated the original act’s employment provisions.

Right to a fair trial

The right to a fair trial appears in many international and national human rights instruments, such as Article 10 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights, and the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution. While there is no single international definition of what a “fair trial” constitutes, it involves civil rights such as the right to a public hearing, the right to counsel, and the right to be heard in a reasonable time. After the September 11 terror attacks in 2001, the United States opened a detention camp on Guantanamo Bay for individuals with suspected ties to Islamic terrorist groups. The camp is the site of severe civil rights violations . In addition to torturing the detainees, the United States has never given any of them a fair trial. Many of them have never been charged with a crime.

Right to public education

Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights enshrines the right to education, which should be free at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education should also be compulsory, while higher education should be equally accessible based on merit. In South Africa, the 1953 Bantu Education Act violated this right. As part of the country’s apartheid system, it segregated education by race and trained Black students for the types of manual jobs the government declared “acceptable” for Black South Africans. The curriculum also reinforced the belief that Black South Africans were inferior to white South Africans. The Act also ensured that Black schools were severely underfunded compared to their white counterparts, which violates the civil right to equal opportunities.

Right to use public facilities

Everyone has the right to use public facilities such as public bathrooms, libraries, hospitals, public transport, sanitation facilities, and more. Because these services are meant to serve everyone in an area, discrimination against someone based on their gender, age, race, and so on represents a violation of their civil rights. In the US and the UK, many bathroom laws seek to exclude trans people from the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity . While they may technically have access to another public facility, being forced to use a bathroom that doesn’t align with their gender is still a form of discrimination. The arguments used to justify that discrimination – which include fear-mongering about trans people perpetuating violence – echo the sentiments that propped up the racial segregation of public bathrooms.

Marriage equality

Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone of “full age” has the right to marry and have a family without any limitation due to race, nationality, or religion. In places like the United States, marriage has long been considered a civil right. Interracial was once banned, but in 1967, the Supreme Court ruled that prohibiting interracial marriages was unconstitutional. Marriage equality has since expanded to same-sex marriage, which was legalized in the US in 2015. According to the Human Rights Campaign, same-sex marriage is now legal in 34 countries .

Freedom of religion

Freedom of religion is an individual’s (and community’s) right to practice their religion or belief in public or private. It also protects the right to not practice a religion or belief, so people who do not follow a certain religion cannot be persecuted. In 2010, France banned the wearing of face-covering headgear, which included burqas and niqabs. Opponents of the law argued that it threatened individual religious freedoms and discriminated against interpretations of Islam that encouraged or required women to wear face coverings. In 2018, the UN Human Rights Committee found the ban disproportionately harmed the right of two female plaintiffs to “manifest their religious beliefs.” In 2022, French lawmakers voted to ban women and girls from wearing hijab while playing sports.

Why do civil rights matter?

Civil rights weren’t always considered important, but they’re now an essential part of a free society. Various social movements fight for the rights of specific groups, but civil rights matter to everyone. Here are three of the most important reasons why:

#1. They protect individual liberties

Civil rights protect all individuals – but especially those belonging to minoritized groups – from discrimination. Throughout history, we see the effects of discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality, and more. Both the United States and South Africa had systems based on racial segregation, which led to horrific human rights violations whose consequences reverberate today. Civil rights, like the right to public education, the right to equal employment, and the right to public services, safeguard everyone’s right to a good life.

#2. They guard societies from tyranny

By forbidding discrimination based on personal characteristics, civil rights prevent societies from descending into tyranny. How? Civil rights establish basic freedoms for individuals and limitations on the powerful. They’re a vital check on government power, but civil rights also prevent discrimination in corporations and other private institutions. As an example, The Fair Housing Act in the United States makes discrimination illegal in most types of housing , including public and private housing. When civil rights aren’t being protected, social movements like the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa rise up.

#3. They protect democracy

Civil rights help ensure equal social opportunities and protection under the law, which are both essential to a functioning democracy. The right to vote is just one specific example, but all civil rights foster democratic principles like equality, inclusion, participation, and access. If a society doesn’t protect the civil rights of its population, democracy is threatened. Individuals can take action by advocating for better enforcement of civil rights and expansions of civil rights. There are also organizations around the world working to protect civil rights and democracy.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

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Civic Education: Human Rights & Its Sources

• Femi-Royal Aliu
• October 4, 2016
• One Comment

Human rights are basic rights and privileges of citizens in a country as enshrined in the constitution. They are rights and freedoms in which every human being is entitled to irrespective of colour, language, race, age, sex, or geographical location. These rights and privileges were declared in 1789.

Fundamental Human Rights

They are written in the constitution of the country, generally referred to as the principles of fundamental human rights. We shall look at these principles in four broad categories, these are as follows:

Social and Economic Rights

• Right to life
• Right to property and security
• Right to freedom
• Right to personal liberty
• Right to freedom of association
• Right to private life
• Right to freedom of speech and expression
• Right to education

Political rights

• Right to be voted for
• Right to choose political party
• Right to aspire to any public office
• Right to criticize the government constructively

Legal rights

• Right to fair hearing in the law court
• Right to justice
• Right to equality before the law

Civil rights

• Right to freedom of worship
• Right to choose religion
• Right to freedom of conscience
• Right to freedom of movement
• Right to work and be worked for

Sources of Rights

Ordinarily, rights are deemed to be inheriting or natural to the individual. They are therefore generally considered as inalienable. This approach to rights implies that individuals derive their rights from God and not from the Law.

There is another approach which stipulates that individuals derive their rights from the law. This approach implies that rights are conferred on the individual by the state or government. This approach is based on assumption that where the law does create the necessary conditions for the existence of the rights, individuals cannot make claims on the state in the name of rights.

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COMPASS Manual for Human Rights Education with Young people

No one is born a good citizen, no nation is born a democracy. Rather, both are processes that continue to evolve over a lifetime. Young people must be included from birth. Kofi Annan

• What is Democracy?

"Of the people, by the people, for the people" Abraham Lincoln

The word democracy comes from the Greek words "demos", meaning people, and "kratos" meaning power; so democracy can be thought of as "power of the people": a way of governing which depends on the will of the people.

There are so many different models of democratic government around the world that it is sometimes easier to understand the idea of democracy in terms of what it definitely is not. Democracy, then, is not autocracy or dictatorship, where one person rules; and it is not oligarchy, where a small segment of society rules. Properly understood, democracy should not even be "rule of the majority", if that means that minorities' interests are ignored completely. A democracy, at least in theory, is government on behalf of all the people, according to their "will".

Question: If democracy is government by the people, are there any real democracies in the world?

Why democracy?

The idea of democracy derives its moral strength – and popular appeal – from two key principles: 1. Individual autonomy : The idea that no-one should be subject to rules which have been imposed by others. People should be able to control their own lives (within reason). 2. Equality : The idea that everyone should have the same opportunity to influence the decisions that affect people in society.

These principles are intuitively appealing, and they help to explain why democracy is so popular. Of course we feel it is fair that we should have as much chance as anyone else to decide on common rules!

The problems arise when we consider how the principles can be put into practice, because we need a mechanism for deciding how to address conflicting views. Because it offers a simple mechanism, democracy tends to be "rule of the majority"; but rule of the majority can mean that some people's interests are never represented. A more genuine way of representing everyone's interests is to use decision making by consensus, where the aim is to find common points of interest.

Question: What are the advantages and disadvantages of making decisions by consensus, compared to using majority rule? How are decisions made in your youth group?

• The development of democracy

Ancient history

The ancient Greeks are credited with creating the very first democracy, although there were almost certainly earlier examples of primitive democracy in other parts of the world. The Greek model was established in the 5th century BC, in the city of Athens. Among a sea of autocracies and oligarchies – which were the normal forms of government at the time – Athenian democracy stood out. However, compared to how we understand democracy today, the Athenian model had two important differences:

1. Theirs was a form of direct democracy – in other words, instead of electing representatives to govern on the people's behalf, "the people" themselves met, discussed questions of government, and then implemented policy.

Democracy is not the law of the majority, but the protection of the minority. Albert Camus

2. Such a system was possible partly because "the people" was a very limited category. Those who could participate directly were a small part of the population, since women, slaves, aliens – and of course, children – were excluded. The numbers who participated were still far more than in a modern democracy: perhaps 50,000 males engaged directly in politics, out of a population of around 300,000 people.

Question: What are the advantages and disadvantages of direct democracy?

Democracy in the modern world

While democracies share common features, there is no single model of democracy. UN Resolution on promoting and consolidating democracy (A/RES/62/7)

Today there are as many different forms of democracy as there are democratic nations in the world. No two systems are exactly the same and no one system can be taken as a "model". There are presidential and parliamentary democracies, democracies that are federal or unitary, democracies that use a proportional voting system, and ones that use a majoritarian system, democracies which are also monarchies, and so on.

One thing that unites modern systems of democracy, and which also distinguishes them from the ancient model, is the use of representatives of the people. Instead of taking part directly in law making, modern democracies use elections to select representatives who are sent by the people to govern on their behalf. Such a system is known as representative democracy. It can lay some claim to being "democratic" because it is, at least to some degree, based on the two principles above: equality of all (one person – one vote), and the right of every individual to some degree of personal autonomy.

Question: What should an elected official do to make sure he or she is representing properly those who elected him or her?

"The right to vote is not a privilege. In the twenty-first century, the presumption in a democratic State must be in favour of inclusion ... Any departure from the principle of universal suffrage risks undermining the democratic validity of the legislature thus elected and the laws which it promulgates." Judgement of the European Court (Hirst v. UK)

• Improving democracy

People often talk about countries "becoming" democracies, once they start to have relatively free and open elections. But democracy includes far more than just elections, and it really makes more sense to think about the will of the people idea, rather than about institutional or voting structures, when we are trying to assess how democratic a country is. Democracy is better understood as something that we can always have more – or less – of, rather than something that either is, or is not.

Democratic systems can nearly always be made more inclusive, more reflective of more people's wishes, and more responsive to their influence. In other words, there is room to improve the "people" part of democracy, by including more people in decision making; there is also room to improve the "power" or "will" part of democracy, by giving the people more real power. Struggles for democracy throughout history have normally concentrated on one or the other of these elements.

Today, in most countries of the world, women do have the vote but the struggle has been won only relatively recently. New Zealand is said to be the first country in the world to have introduced universal suffrage, in 1893, although even here, women were only granted the right to stand for parliament in 1919. Many countries have granted women the right to vote first of all, and only several years later, have allowed them to stand for elected office. Saudi Arabia has only  granted women the power to vote in elections in 2011.   Today even in established democracies, there are other sections of society, which commonly include immigrants, migrant workers, prisoners and children, who are not given the right to vote, even though many of them might pay taxes and all are obliged to obey the laws of the land.

Prisoners and voting rights Prisoners are allowed to vote in 18 European countries. Prisoners' rights to vote are restricted in 20 countries, depending on such things as length of sentence or severity of the crime committed, or the type of election. In 9 European countries, prisoners are not allowed to vote at all. Prisoners' voting rights, Commons Library Standard Note SN/PC/01764, last updated in 2012, http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN01764 In the case of Hirst v. the United Kingdom in 2005, the European Court found that the universal ban on prisoners from voting in the UK was a violation of Article 3, Protocol 1 of the European Convention, which says that: "The High Contracting Parties undertake to hold free elections at reasonable intervals by secret ballot, under conditions which will ensure the free expression of the opinion of the people in the choice of the legislature."

Question: Can excluding certain sectors of society from the democratic process ever be justified?

Democracy and participation

I don't have any formula for ousting a dictator or building democracy. All I can suggest is to forget about yourself and just think of your people. It's always the people who make things happen. Corazon Aquino

The most obvious ways to participate in government are to vote, or to stand for office and become a representative of the people. Democracy, however, is about far more than just voting, and there are numerous other ways of engaging with politics and government. The effective functioning of democracy, in fact, depends on ordinary people using these other means as much as possible. If people only vote once every 4 or 5 years – or do not vote at all – and if they do nothing else in the interim, then government really cannot be said to be "by the people". It is hard to say that such a system is a democracy. You can read in more detail about ways of participating in the section on Citizenship and Participation. Here are a few ideas – perhaps the minimum that might be needed for members of parliament to be able to act democratically, on your behalf: Stay informed about what is happening, what is being decided "in the name of the people", and in particular, about the decisions and actions being taken by your own representative. Make your opinions known – either to your representatives in parliament, or to the media, or to groups working on particular issues. Without feedback from "the people", leaders can only lead according to their own will and priorities. Where decisions appear to be undemocratic, or against human rights, or even when you just feel strongly about them, make efforts to get your voice heard, so that the policies may be reconsidered. The most effective way of doing this is probably by joining with other people so that your voice is louder. Vote, when the possibility arises. If people do not vote, then members are effectively unaccountable.

Question: Have you ever participated in any of these ways (or others)?

• Democracy and Human Rights

The connection between human rights and democracy is deep, and goes both ways: each is in some way dependent on the other, and incomplete without the other.

Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives. Article 21, part 1, UDHR

First of all, the values of equality and autonomy are also human rights values, and the right to take part in government is itself a human right. Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) tells us that "The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government": so democracy is in fact the only form of government which is consistent with human rights.

However, a "democracy" is also incomplete without a thorough-going respect for human rights. Taking part in government, in a genuine way, is almost impossible to do without people having other basic rights respected. Consider the following, as examples: 1. Freedom of thought, conscience and religion (UDHR, Article 18). This is one of the first rights which are essential in a democracy: people need to be able to think freely, to hold whatever beliefs are important to them, without being punished for doing so. Governments throughout history have tried to limit this right because they are afraid that if people think about other forms of government, this will endanger the current system. So they have locked people away simply for thinking the "wrong" thoughts. (Such people are known as prisoners of conscience.) However, a society without a pluralism of views is not just intolerant; it also limits its own possibilities to develop in new and possibly improved directions.

2. Freedom of Expression (UDHR, Article 19). It is important not just to be able to think what you want, but also to be able to express that opinion out loud, whatever that opinion may be. If people are prevented from discussing their views with other people, or presenting them in the media, how can they "take part" in government? Their opinion has essentially been discounted from the possible alternatives under consideration.

Democracy doesn't recognize east or west; democracy is simply people's will. Shirin Ebadi

3. Freedom of peaceful assembly and association (UDHR Article 20). This right allows you to discuss ideas with others who want to do so, to form interest groups or lobbying groups, or to gather together for the purposes of protest against decisions you disagree with. Perhaps such an activity is sometimes inconvenient for governments; however it is essential if different views are to be made known and taken into account. And that is part of what democracy is all about.

These are just three human rights which are intrinsically bound up with the idea of democracy, but any infringement of other human rights will also affect the extent to which different people are able to take part in government. Poverty, poor health, or the lack of a home, can all make it more difficult for someone to have their voice heard, and diminish the impact of their choice, compared with others. Such infringements of rights almost certainly make it impossible for the person concerned to be elected to government office.

Question: How well are the three "democratic" rights (listed above) respected in your country?

• Problems with democracy

Democracy doesn't mean much if you are hungry or homeless, or have no health care or your children can't go to school; even if you have a vote, democracy is not effective. Susan George, President of ATTAC

Voter apathy

For a number of years, there has been concern about the status of democracy, perhaps particularly in the more established democracies. Much of this is based on the decreasing levels of citizen participation at elections, which appear to indicate a lack of interest and involvement on the part of citizens. A low voter turnout calls into question the legitimacy of so-called democratically elected governments, which are, in some countries, actually elected by a minority of the total electorate.

Elections and apathy Turnout at elections to the European Parliament has fallen every year since the first elections in 1979. In 2009, only 43% of the electorate used their vote, and in some countries, turnout fell as low as 34%. In national elections throughout Europe, turnout ranges from just over 50% in some countries, to over 90% in others. Some countries, for example, Greece and Belgium in Europe, make voting compulsory. In such countries turnout is obviously much higher than the average for countries where voting is optional.

Question: What proportion of the electorate voted in your country's most recent elections?

Although it is undoubtedly a problem that people are increasingly failing to vote in elections, there are some studies which indicate that participation in different forms may actually be on the increase, for example, pressure groups, civic initiatives, consultative organs, and so on. These forms of participation are just as important to the effective functioning of democracy as voter turnout at elections, if not more so.

Democracy and civic participation The so-called Arab Spring, where masses of people – many of them young – took to the streets in order to express their dissatisfaction with the government, has shown a new level of civic participation in countries which have not traditionally been regarded as democracies. In Europe as well, even in the more traditional democracies, "people power" appears to have found a new lease of life: students have protested in many countries against moves by governments to impose fees on education. Trade unions have brought people onto the streets to protest about the impact of economic cuts. In addition, autonomous groups of activists have invented new and creative forms of demonstrating against climate change, the power of large corporations, the withdrawal of key state services, and also against oppressive measures of policing.

Rule of the Majority

A minority may be right, and a majority is always wrong. Henrik Ibsen

There are two problems that are more intricately connected to the notion of representative democracy, and these concern minority interests. The first problem is that minority interests are often not represented through the electoral system: this may happen if their numbers are too few to reach the minimum level necessary for any representation. The second problem is that even if their numbers are represented in the legislative body, they will have a minority of representatives and these may not therefore be able to summon up the necessary votes to defeat the majority representatives. For these reasons, democracy is often referred to as "rule of the majority".

Majority rule, if not backed up by a guarantee of human rights for all, can lead to decisions which are harmful to minorities, and the fact that these decisions are the "will of the people" can provide no justification. The basic interests of minorities as well as majorities need to be safeguarded in any democratic system by adherence to human rights principles, reinforced by an effective legal mechanism, whatever the will of the majority may be.

Question: If the majority of the population is in favour of depriving certain people their human rights, do you think "the people should decide"?

The rise of nationalism

Democracy is best conceived as a process of democratization. Patomäkim,Teivainen

A related problem is the worrying trends across Europe towards support for extreme right parties. These parties have often played on nationalist feelings, and have targeted "non-indigenous" members of the population, particularly asylum seekers, refugees, and members of religious minorities, and sometimes in violent ways. As a defence, such parties often appeal to their support among the population, and the democratic principle that they represent the opinions of a large number of people. However, where a party advocates violence in any form, and where it fails to respect the human rights of every member of the population, it has little right to appeal to democratic principles.

Depending on the extent of the problem, and the particular cultural context, it may be necessary to limit the right to freedom of expression of certain groups, despite the importance of this right to the democratic process. Most countries, for example, have laws against inciting racial hatred. This is regarded by the European Court as an acceptable limitation of freedom of expression, justified by the need to protect the rights of other members of society, or the structure of society itself.

Question: Is nationalism any different from racism?

• Young People and Democracy

Young people often do not even have the vote, so how can they be a part of the democratic process? Many people would answer this question by saying that young people are not ready to be part of the process, and that only when they are 18 (or at whatever age their country gives them the vote) will they be able to participate.

In fact, many young people are politically very active long before they get the vote, and in some ways, the impact of such activity can be stronger than the single vote they receive later on – and may or may not decide to use – once every 4 or 5 years. Politicians are often anxious to appeal to the youth vote, so they may be more likely to listen to the concerns of young people.

Many young people are engaged in environmental groups, or in other protest groups campaigning against war, against corporate exploitation, or against child labour. Perhaps one of the most important ways that young people can begin to be engaged in community life and political activity is at a local level: here they will be more aware of the particular issues that are of concern to them and those with whom they come into contact, and they will be better able to have a direct impact. Democracy does not only deal with national or international issues: it needs to begin in our own neighbourhoods! Youth organisations are one of the ways through which young people experience and practise democracy and, therefore, have an important role in democracy, provided, of course, that they are independent and democratic in the way they function!

Question: If a 16-year-old is considered mature enough to marry and get a job, should he or she not be able to vote?

Work of the Council of Europe

We will strive for our common goal of promoting democracy and good governance of the highest quality, nationally, regionally and locally for all our citizens. Action Plan of the Warsaw Summit of the Council of Europe (2005)

Democracy is one of the core values of the Council of Europe, together with human rights and the rule of law. The Council of Europe has a number of programmes and publications looking at the improvement and future of democracy. In 2005, the Forum for the Future of Democracy was established by the Third Summit of Heads of State and Government of the Council of Europe. The aim of the Forum is to "strengthen democracy, political freedoms and citizens' participation through the exchange of ideas, information and examples of best practices". A meeting of the Forum takes place every year, and brings together about 400 participants from the 47 Council of Europe member States and observer States.

Support for development and implementation of standards for democracy is carried by the European Commission for Democracy through Law – also known as the Venice Commission – which is the Council of Europe's advisory body on constitutional matters.  The commission has been particularly active in assisting in the drafting of new constitutions or laws on constitutional courts, electoral codes, minority rights and the legal framework relating to democratic institutions.

In addition to this standard-setting work, the Council of Europe promotes democracy and its values by programmes on democratic participation, education for democratic citizenship and youth participation, because democracy is much more than voting in elections!

Download Compass  

• 15 September International Day of Democracy
• 19 September Suffrage Day

UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS (UDHR)

Back to: CIVIC EDUCATION SS1

Welcome to class! 

In today’s class, we will be talking about the universal declaration of human rights. Enjoy the class!

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) refers to global proclamation specifying the rights of individuals. It is the primary international expression of the fundamental/inalienable rights of members of the human race.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is an international document that states basic rights and fundamental freedoms to which all human beings are entitled.

The Universal Declaration of Human rights was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization on December 10, 1948. The Charter consists of thirty (30) articles on Human Rights. It also has core freedoms.

The importance of UDHR                  

• The recognition and declaration of human rights is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.
• It is the last resort and a rebellion against tyranny and oppression.
• It promotes friendly relation between nations of the world.
• It promotes social progress and a better standard of life in larger freedom.
• It brought about the promotion of universal respect and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms.
• It acts as a guideline for a human king in determining what is right and what is wrong.
• It reinforces all other human rights, allowing society to develop and progress. The ability to express our opinion and speak freely is essential to bring about change in society

In our next class, we will be talking about the Meaning of Seven Core Freedom of UDHR .  We hope you enjoyed the class.

Should you have any further question, feel free to ask in the comment section below and trust us to respond as soon as possible.

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Sugar-sweetened Beverage Intake Increasing Globally Among Children and Teens

Study estimates at least 10% of youth worldwide consume more than 7 servings of sugary drinks weekly 

A new global analysis of the dietary habits of children and adolescents from 185 countries revealed that youth, on average, consumed nearly 23% more sugar-sweetened beverages in 2018 compared to 1990. Overall, intakes were similar in boys and girls, but higher in teens, urban residents, and children of parents with lower levels of education. Researchers from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University published the findings Aug. 7 in The BMJ .

The study drew from the Global Dietary Database , a large comprehensive compilation of what people around the world eat or drink, to generate the first global estimates and trends of sugar-sweetened beverage intake in youth. These were defined as soda, juice drinks, energy drinks, sports drinks, and home-sweetened fruit drinks such as aguas frescas with added sugars and containing more than 50 kcal per 1 cup serving. Incorporating data from over 1,200 surveys from 1990 through 2018 in a large model, the research team found that youth (defined as those ages 3 to 19 years) were drinking more and had nearly twice the overall intake of adults.   

The research team’s definition of sugary drinks excluded 100% fruit juices, non-caloric artificially sweetened drinks, and sweetened milks.   

Sugar-sweetened beverage intake among young people varied dramatically by world region, averaging 3.6 servings per week globally and ranging from 1.3 servings per week in South Asia to 9.1 in Latin America and the Caribbean. The researchers found that children and teens in 56 countries, representing 238 million young people or 10% of the global youth population, averaged 7 or more servings per week.   

“Sugary beverages increase weight gain and risk of obesity, so even though kids don’t often develop diabetes or cardiovascular disease when they are young, there could be significant impacts later in life,” said first author Laura Lara-Castor , a recent graduate of the Friedman School and now a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington. “This study highlights the need for targeted education and policy interventions to change behavior early on and prevent the adverse outcomes associated with sugar-sweetened beverage intake in childhood.”  

Among the world’s most populous nations, those with the highest sugary drink intakes by youth in 2018 included Mexico (10.1 servings per week), followed by Uganda (6.9), Pakistan (6.4), South Africa (6.2), and the United States (6.2). Looking at trends from 1990 to 2018, the region with the largest increase in consumption among youth was Sub-Saharan Africa, in which average weekly servings grew 106% to 2.17 servings per week, an acceleration that requires attention, say the researchers.     

In recent years, many governments worldwide have been implementing measures such as soda taxes and restrictions on the sale of sugary drinks in schools to promote healthy dietary habits. These efforts are new and also face strong opposing forces such as aggressive industry marketing and the globalization of the food sector.    

“Our findings should raise alarm bells in nearly every nation worldwide,” said senior author Dariush Mozaffarian , Jean Mayer Professor of Nutrition and director of the Food is Medicine Institute at the Friedman School. “The intakes and trends we’re seeing pose a significant threat to public health, one we can and must address for the future of a healthier population.”   

Citation and Disclaimer

Citation: Research reported in this article was supported by the Gates Foundation, the American Heart Association, and the National Council for Science and Technology in Mexico. Complete information on authors, methodology, limitations, and conflicts of interest is available in the published paper.  

Disclaimer: The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funders.  

Globally, Consumption of Sugary Drinks Increased at Least 16% Since 1990

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