Service Learning Commons^™

Public Talk And Civic Action: Education For Participation In A Strong Democracy, Benjamin R. Barber

Civic Engagement

Civic education programs have always played a distinctive role in the American education curriculum. For the most part, however, civic education has been associated with civic knowledge and the cultivation of a cognitive faculty thought to be identical with political judgement (private judgment on public issues).

Perhaps this has been appropriate to a society which understood democracy primarily as a system of accountability in which elected representatives do most of the actual governing and "citizens" limit themselves to the passive roles of voter and watchdog.

The Civic Mission Of The University, Benjamin R. Barber

Civic Engagement

The modern American university is embroiled in controversy, fueled by deep uncertainty over its pedagogical purposes and its civic role in a "free" society. At times the college establishment seems to know neither what a free society is not what the educational requisites of freedom might look like. Nonetheless, both administrators and their critics have kept busy, for like zealots (classically defined as people who redouble their efforts when they have forgotten their aims), they have covered their confusion by embellishing their hyperbole. They wring hands and rue the social crises of higher education... apathy, cynicism, careerism, prejudice, selfishness, sexism, …