We need to talk about civic literacy

I've been doing a project on civics education. I'm a one-time candidate, former political staffer and policymaker, with a BA in History.

It seems sometimes silly to think what we need amid so much vile garbage and utter inanity in the world is civic literacy, but it's the core of so many of our problems. Not knowing how to disagree constructively. Not knowing how to separate a fallible opinion from our identity. Not knowing how power works, how political psychology works, how lobbying and decision-making works.

We treat civics like people instinctively know any of this or can just "pick it up" by being alive.

But we are expected, as a whole, to organize and pick leaders out of all of this and they are expected to respond to the issues that affect all of us, today, yesterday, and twenty years from now.

You wouldn't give everyone a car and not train them how to drive, yet we give everyone a vote expecting them to pick good leaders. Ones who can oversee the administration of government, respond to issues effectively, not be hypocrites, not be cowards, not be corrupt. You'd think it's a low bar...

We need to talk about civic literacy in a way that transcends politics and synthesizes history.

Civic literacy, and citizen education, needs to be about far more than civic facts. Civics has to be framed, I've come to believe, as group problem-solving.

We are all living with the legacies of the Cold War, which to be short, has meant all of our politics is filtered through a lens of Left versus Right and liberals and conservatives. This isn't bad in and of itself to have that lens, but the last century has ingrained in us reflexive and discourse-closing responses to hostile stereotypes.

This is especially true in the broader mainstream, the hyper-online public square where opinions roil in a political spectrum morass, rarely self-aware. People use labels and terms bereft of an academic richness behind the history and concepts, and people use those labels to vilify and condemn, rather than understand and learn.

Worse, the places and institutions where this can be countered is subjected to countless budget cuts, always expected to do more with less: education.

This project has me talking to fascinating people and I am trying to record it and share it around. One of these interviews was with a public relations expert, James Hoggan, who wrote the book "I'm Right and You're An Idiot: The Toxic State of Public Discourse and How to Clean It Up".

I want to make a podcast out of this project and hope people will listen. Here's a clip from this interview where we talk about the need to re-contextualize civics ed.

I really want people to talk about civics education more as an essential pillar in a functioning democracy. Like so much of education, it's been subjected to budget cuts and lack of prioritization.

I like this quote from Buckminster Fuller:

"Our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviours that will avoid extinction."

Ask:

If you know any glimmer or ray of hope out there where you are, please share it here. Thank you.

Submitted October 07, 2020 at 08:42AM by civicsfactor https://ift.tt/2SBxqGQ