What Kind of Citizen?

All is not bleak when it comes to educating for democratic understanding and participation. Many teachers across the country conduct excellent educational activities concerned with helping students become active and effective citizens (see sidebar).

But even when educators are expressly committed to teaching “good citizenship,” there is cause for caution. My colleague Dr. Joseph Kahne, Mills College, California, and I spent the better part of a decade studying programs that aimed to develop good citizenship skills among youth and young adults. In study after study, we come to similar conclusions: the kinds of goals and practices commonly represented in curricula that hope to foster democratic citizenship usually have more to do with voluntarism, charity, and obedience than with democracy. In other words, “good citizenship” to many educators means listening to authority figures, dressing neatly, being nice to neighbors, and helping out at a soup kitchen — not grappling with the kinds of social policy decisions that every citizen in a democratic society needs to understand.

In our studies of dozens of programs, we identified three visions of "good" citizens that help capture the lay of the land when it comes to citizenship education: the Personally Responsible Citizen; the Participatory Citizen; and the Social Justice Oriented Citizen. These three visions can serve as a helpful guide to the variety of assumptions that fall under the idea of citizenship education. As Table 1 illustrates, they also lead to very different program decisions.

Personally Responsible Citizens contribute to food or clothing drives when asked and volunteer to help those less fortunate whether in a soup kitchen or a senior center. They might contribute time, money, or both to charitable causes. Both those in the character education movement and those who advocate community service would emphasize this vision of good citizenship. They seek to build character and personal responsibility by emphasizing honesty, integrity, self-discipline, and hard work. Or they nurture compassion by engaging students in volunteer community service.

Participatory Citizens participate in the civic affairs and the social life of the community at local, state, and national levels. Educational programs designed to support the development of participatory citizens focus on teaching students about how government and other institutions (eg. community based organizations, churches) work and about the importance of planning and participating in organized efforts to care for those in need, for example, or in efforts to guide school policies. While the personally responsible citizen would contribute cans of food for the homeless, the participatory citizen might organize the food drive.

Social-Justice Oriented Citizens know how to critically assess multiple perspectives. They can examine social, political, and economic structures and explore strategies for change that address root causes of problems. These are the critical thinkers, and this vision of citizenship is the least commonly pursued in schools. We called this kind of citizen the Social-Justice Oriented Citizen because these programs emphasize the need for citizens to be able to think about issues of fairness, equality of opportunity, and democratic engagement. They share with the participatory citizen an emphasis on collective work related to the life and issues of the community.

However, they make independent thinking a priority and encourage students to look for ways to improve society, and become thoughtfully informed about a variety of complex social issues. These programs are less likely to emphasize the need for charity and volunteerism as ends in themselves and more likely to teach about ways to effect systemic change. If Participatory Citizens are organizing the food drive and Personally Responsible Citizens are donating food, the Social Justice Oriented Citizens are asking why people are hungry and acting on what they discover.

Currently, the vast majority of school programs that take the time to teach citizenship emphasize either good character – including the importance of volunteering and helping those in need – or technical knowledge of legislatures and how government works. Far less common are schools that teach students to think about root causes of injustice or challenge existing social, economic, and political norms as a way to strengthen democracy.

Voluntarism and kindness can be used to avoid much thinking about politics and policy altogether. If that’s the case, then in terms of democratic citizenship, these programs are highly limited. Character traits such as honesty, integrity, and responsibility for one’s actions are certainly valuable for becoming good neighbors and citizens. But, on their own, these traits are not about democracy. A growing number of educators and policymakers promote voluntarism and charity as an alternative to social policy and organized government action.

Former U.S. President George Bush Sr. famously promoted community service activities for youth by imagining a “thousand points of light” representing charitable efforts to respond to those in need. But if young people understand these actions as a kind of noblesse oblige — a private act of kindness performed by the privileged and fail to examine the deeper structural causes of social ills, then the thousand points of light risk becoming a thousand points of the status quo. Citizenship in a democratic community requires more than kindness and decency;