Episode 17: On Civics Education

[MUSIC PLAYING] You're listening to Community Crafted Education, where we explore alternatives to conventional K-12 education and their potential impacts on society and culture. I'm Eric Wairn, director of the National Hybrid Schools Project. On this episode, I'm joined by James Sholes from the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University. We'll talk about common schools and civic education. Well, we're here this week with James Sholes from the Florida State University Institute for Governance and Civics. James, thanks for being here today. Eric, always great to be with you. Yeah, so the Institute for Governance and Civics, I wanted to have you want to talk about this idea of civic education. So I guess we'll just go ahead and start. So when this is like a common phrase, right? So when policymakers talk about civic education, what do they mean? And what are they usually trying to fix? I'd say they're usually trying to fix some sort of perceived crisis in Americans' understanding of an appreciation for. That's a key point. Appreciation for our democratic institutions or our government institutions. And this might look a little bit different on the left and right. I think the left tends to look at civics as a way of enacting progress. They want to create programs, help students understand how to advocate, how to be activists, how to promote certain social changes. And so the left oftentimes thinks of civic education in that sort of strand. Now, I would say the right tends to think of it more in terms of appreciation of institutions and a recognition of the brilliance of the American founding. And so depending on which state you're in and which politicians are talking, they're typically thinking of one of those two lanes. OK, do you have any specific examples of projects that have come out in the last however many years to kind of promote this, either in either kind of direction? Yeah, so on the left, we think of what's called action civics. Action civics tends to be the idea, again, that students need to learn how to use the levers of government to get some sort of action or some sort of change. And so in a typical action civics type of lesson, it might be, OK, identify a problem, let's say homelessness, OK, oftentimes they identify really thorny problems. But anyway, we want 16-year-olds to solve homelessness. But they might say, OK, there's a problem of homelessness in our community. What might we do about that? And how might we use the different levers of government to address that? And so you might need to know about petitioning the government to create some sort of homeless shelters or you might need to know about civil rights in terms of marching and protesting and organizing and all these sorts of things. So it's understanding how government works, but doing it so that you can get to certain ends. That's what you might think of in terms of action civics. And on the right-hand side, I think you could look at these sort of civic institutions that are popping up throughout the country, and one that I'm a part of. More focused on appreciation and understanding of the founding principles. So what does it mean when the declaration says, we hold these truths to be self-evident? So you could think on the right-hand side, it's teaching founding documents. And again, this isn't to say that these two sides don't overlap. On the right, there's a bit of action involved. And on the left, there's certainly understanding and appreciation of things. These aren't mutually exclusive. You're sort of speaking in broad strokes here. Yeah, so historically, what isn't the idea that we would have most kids going to-- maybe not necessarily large, but often large, but at least common public schools. And that would teach all of these things within certain guard rails and would promote civic unity. Or is that all sort of a-- did that work? I mean, we all know about the pageant scene into Killamockingbird where the whole town goes to see the school pageant. Right? Everybody knows high school football. Was this something that actually worked and we gave up on or did it not work? What's the story with that? Well, first, let's back up and talk about what common schools are. Because I think sometimes in education, we take it for granted that people know what we're talking about. And so this is a movement that comes out in the 1800s to really create essentially a regulated public school system. Before this, we've got a patchwork of schools that are private, some are publicly operated. Their funding is some coming from public sector, some is tuition. So the common school movement is this first real creation of a public education system. And one of the real impetus is behind it was to building a nation. It was a forming and national identity. And having everyone become more common, I guess you could say. Well, everyone have things in common, right? That Richard Poor would go to school together. I wanted to say black and white, but that's not true, right? We didn't think that in the 1800s. But people would go to school together and that they would learn about democratic American institutions that would learn the Protestant ethic that formed the country. And so you see, by and large, Protestants went whole hog supporting the common school movement. And that's-- again, I like to speak in broad strokes. Of course, there were Protestants that didn't go all in. For example, Lutheran didn't go all in. And that's partly why we have a strong Lutheran school system. But that also stems from a little bit of persecution, right? That Lutherans often tended to be German. They wanted to have German speaking schools. And the common school movement didn't want schools being taught in German, right? You see the same thing in the Catholic space. Catholics were being persecuted. They were being forced into common schools, public schools, where they were having Protestant Bible readings. And even not the Bible reading. And like the readers of the day, they would say things-- you know, I'm going to paraphrase those dirty unwashed Catholics. You know, they would have dispersions cast in the Catholic direction in the readers of the day, not even in the Bible. And so you had a tremendous pushback among Catholics. And that's why we have a separate Catholic school sector, right? But at the same time, I mean, common schools were popular. Why did they take off so quickly? Well, because a lot of people supported them, right? And you end up getting a system where, over time, nearly 90% of kids are going to public schools that developed out of this common school movement. Right? So was it a-- you know, I guess, did it cause national unity or did national unity cause common schools? You're asking me, was it a chicken or an egg question? There certainly was some level of national unity around common schools. And national unity was an aim of common schools. And in some cases, it did work, right? You have some communities where the local school is the lifeblood of the community. And like you said, they rallied together for community events. They have sporting events. And it's really a wonderful institution. But where you see that is typically in communities where there's a lot of similarity among the people that live there, right? When most of the people in the community are of a similar religious bent, right? Similar economic status, right? You don't see this in really diverse communities as much as you see it in small rural America, where people have a lot of similar interests. And so again, did the common school cause this or is it a product of it? I think it's a different question. And I think you-- I've gotten long winded here, but I think you asked me-- there might have been a follow-up in that question. Did I answer what you were-- Was it real? Right? Was it real? Or what caused the unraveling, then? Did something else in society cause it all to unravel or did the schools just not work? A variety of things have happened. So first off, again, when common schools were created, the district was one of the largest political units-- or sorry, the smallest political units. So a district might have consisted of a school or a elementary school and upper school or something like that. So what you get through the early 1900s through progressivism is increasing consolidation. So districts become larger and larger and larger. You go from the one-room schoolhouse to the large school where people are busing their kids, right? To across town to go somewhere else with more kids. So education gets separated from the family. It gets separated more and more from the local community. You have decisions in terms of curriculum, in terms of who's being hired as teachers, all becoming further removed from the family. And that was one of the key things about common schools in the first place. Education used to be a family affair, right? The family decided who was going to educate the kid and what they were going to be educated in. And public education through common schools separates that and makes schooling something done outside the family. And then increasingly, over time, as we consolidate from over 200,000 districts to like, I think it's 13,000 or something like that today. Education is further and further removed. The rights of parents and the responsibilities of parents further removed from them. And then you have to think about what's going on in society. People are increasingly mobile. They're less connected to people in their community. Communities are becoming more and more diverse. And so the common school doesn't fit. So maybe it was the community that formed the school. Maybe I'm answering my chicken and egg problem here. And we're seeing that less so. And people are reclaiming the right to educate their own kids in their value system to direct the upbringing of their children. And so today we're seeing an ascendancy of the parental rights and the rights of the family and the education of children. Not to say that the state doesn't have an interest in educating kids, but I think that's that shift between more focus on the individual, focus on the family is a re-adjustment that's happening in an American education. Yeah, I want to come back to the state question in a minute. But it does seem kind of like communities are maybe reassuring themselves a little bit, but not in geographic terms. They're more in different kinds of cultural sorts of communities. Right. Yeah, go ahead. If you-- and I had a piece on this that nobody's read in the Journal of Character Education, where I read-- Already what I did. Where I argue that schools that are formed based on some sort of interest are going to form a more stronger community where you can promote values in character. Then in schools where you draw circles around them and collect everyone based on geography. When you draw a boundary around a school and assign everyone there, if everyone in that boundary is a white Protestant or a black urban inner city, assemblies of God-member or whatever, you draw a small demographic around people and you assign everyone there. Well, you're probably going to get a lot of agreement. If everyone in that community agrees on something. But when you start drawing circles around schools and requiring people to go there, and you've got a diversity of ideas and commitments, then you start getting real tension. And this is what you see. You look at Kato's, the Kato Institute's-- what's the name of the battle map? The battle map. Right. You start seeing people fight over things because you're requiring everyone to go to this place. And now they've got to decide what books are we going to allow in our library? What dress code are we going to require for our students? And so the school forces conflict because it's a zero-sum game. And we have to fight over these things. And so drawing circles around schools and assigning people there doesn't work when we become increasingly more diverse in our communities. Yeah. So are we sort of giving up on something, though, because geography doesn't go away, even if we're resorting in different kinds of ways in the schools. So you mentioned that there's historically been school choice. But the classic worry is sort of that if families sort themselves in different schools will lose whatever kind of civic culture we did have. So is that a real concern? Are we just kind of turbo-charging this move away from any kind of shared civic culture in America? You can certainly understand the concern. And the funny thing is, if you look throughout history, the different people that support that claim changes over time. It's very funny. I mean, today it tends to be the left that makes this claim. We've got to support public schools because they are unify us. So today it's the liberal progressive wing of people. And maybe it was still progressives in the past, but you used to see people like the KKK supporting this sort of notion, right? And swing for it. Right, swing for it. And trying to say, you must-- first, we have to have compulsory education. Everyone must send their kids to schools. And the only way you can meet that requirement is if you send them to a public school. And so you see the KKK and other groups in places like Oregon passing laws. I mean, we know how government works. The KKK doesn't pass laws. I should be clear in my speech, but advocating for the passage of laws that make those sorts of rules. And you get court cases in the 1920s, like Pierce First and Society of Sisters, where they were essentially saying that you must go to public schools, which would outlaw these schools run by nuns, or there was a military school involved in it as well. And we have the Supreme Court saying the child is not the mere creature of the state. So this sort of idea that everyone must go to a public school for national unity has been pushed throughout our country's history by various different groups. And so the question you're asking, are we giving up on something? I don't think so, because what we see in the research literature is that actually choice is very good for these things, whether it comes to political tolerance, political participation, civic knowledge, volunteerism, all of these things, the results are that private school choice is good in these areas. So there was a great meta-analysis by some of our friends, Danny Shaquille. I want to say Patrick Wolff was on it, published a couple years ago. He looked at like 57 studies, I believe it was, and found that private schools tended to have a small advantage in these areas over public schools. So at worst, we're no worse off through school choice programs and through allowing people to select into different schools. And at best, they're actually producing a little bit better outcomes than the public school system. And that goes back to what you and I were just discussing. When you force people to go to a school, you force conflict and tension, and you actually make people retreat into their own spheres and battle one another. Whereas when you allow people to choose, this is a theory behind it, is that people become confident in their sphere and comfortable in their sphere and become more willing to allow people to operate in their sphere. So I'm allowed to go to a Catholic school. You're allowed to go to a Lutheran school. And we might even allow some people to choose a Muslim school or a Jewish school. And we allow for more pluralism and religious liberty when we're each allowed to be comfortable in our own environments. Yeah, so just this is great. So just to put an even finer point on this, I know the paper you're talking about. But some of these outcomes-- so say more about some of the outcomes that they found in this. How does this show up in people's lives who go to a school tolerance? Not the ones they're forced to. Yeah. Political tolerance, allowing people you disagree with to do something. So oftentimes the way this is done in a study will be something like you think about the group you dislike most. It might be white nationalist in the KKK, or it might be abortionists. Or whoever the group is that you dislike, would you be willing to let them adopt a highway? Would you be willing to let them hold a parade in your town? Whatever you think of a whole bunch of different things that you might be willing or not willing to let them do. And so thinking about the group you disagree with, what sort of levels of tolerance do you have to allowing them to engage in civil society or in other actions, political actions? Or to what extent are you willing to deny them rights or activities because you disagree with them? And what you see is more often than not in private schools, they tend to be more politically tolerant of those they disagree with. So I think again, going back to Muslim schools, that's a key issue right now in the school choice world. Should we allow for Muslim schools to participate in voucher programs? Or should we have some sort of regulation that doesn't allow them? But you could see how someone who's able to use a Catholic school and likes the values formation that they're getting might be more tolerant to allow someone who's Muslim to choose a Muslim school or Jewish to choose a Jewish school. And again, that's not to say we can't have reasonable safeguards in all of the schools where they can't teach fundamental ideologies that are contrary to the United States. But with that in mind, people can tend to be more tolerant towards other people. Yeah, so this podcast is focused on hybrid schools and micro schools, right? And they tend to be even smaller, right? So we've been talking about examples like Catholic schools, Lutheran schools, which you might think of as sort of bigger versions, right? They're kind of like size-wise. They're more similar to conventional public schools than a micro school of 10 kids would be, right? So these schools tend to be even more than those kind of high identity they have, really thick moral commitments of one kind or another. Do you think that changes the math at all? Does that pose any kind of problem? If you're not going to a particular, I don't want to name anything, but you know what I'm saying, right? An even more hyper-specific identity is what these schools are trying to produce. Does that cause any difference of opinion there? - No. (laughing) - So as you're talking, I was thinking, if you went to a public school superintendent and asked them about school choice, more often than not, the public school superintendent would say something like, we're perfectly fine with school choice as long as they have to do the exact same thing that we do. - Right. - Right, like you could choose to go to that school as long as they have to have unionized teachers with certification, they have to have salary schedules, they've got to teach this curriculum, they've got to do everything we do, then you can choose them, right? So you might say that those individuals are not very tolerant of allowing people to choose something different, but imagine a homeschooler or a microschooler in your scenario. And let's say it's someone who's very progressive that believes in some sort of unschooling, and someone comes along and says, well, should someone be allowed to form a microschool that is focused on job training? And I imagine that unschooling person would be like, yeah, that's fine. (laughing) Get it? - Yeah, I would imagine you have more political tolerance in these places because they recognize the value of that independence and that liberty that they have to pursue. So when you give them that freedom, they're more likely to extend that freedom to other people. And so I think you would see this probably even magnified more so in hybrid and microschools than you would other places. - Or even more live and let live. - Exactly. - Right. - Right, as long as you don't, this is like the non-aggression principle, right? - Yes. - As long as you don't impose upon me, I'm not going to impose upon you. So if I'm able to have your five kids meet at my home and we read great works of Western literature, but you want to do something completely different, I'm willing to allow you to do that as long as you don't infring upon my right to pursue the education I think is best for my kids and the kids in my sphere. - Yeah. Yeah, so you sort of anticipated one of my other questions, which was, what good does something like, I mean, it's common course, maybe a bad example, but kind of tests on the other side, right? Like on the back end. Is that, does that help this at all? If someone said, well, look, you can do whatever you want as long as you can pass some test. Does that help this at all? I can think of plenty of unschoolers right now who are saying, what are you talking about? We're playing an entirely different game. Yeah, but what does that, does that rain in kind of the, any people's fears at all, you think? - I think you have to keep spheres separate and understand the different spheres and interests in education. The state has a legitimate interest in role in education and part of that legitimate interest in role is to preserve institutions, to promote the government, right? Like to help people understand and grow in flourishing our society. And there's also an interest in jobs and people being productive citizens and all these sorts of things. Those are legitimate interests of the state. And we have public schools, right? So it is perfectly, perfectly reasonable to expect the public sector to set rules for governing that sphere, right? So they can set standards for schools, they can set requirements for teachers, all of these things to regulate that sector are perfectly reasonable. We also have interest in the parents have rights and responsibilities and duties, right? And have an interest in raising their children. And so we have this private sphere and we're, I don't wanna say blurring the lines between them with public dollars 'cause I don't think that's necessarily true. We can go into that more. But you have these two separate spheres that you have to recognize the state should not be dictating to the micro schools, to the hybrid schools, to the home schools, what they should be doing in their sphere. It should be as much as possible giving them liberty to pursue the education that they think is best for their children without imposing upon them. And it can, but it can try to encourage them and influence them. I think a good example of this would be like in Florida, the Fordosivics and Debate Initiative. Create opportunities for students to participate, even if they're in a homeschool, a private school, a micro school, whatever it is, in these programs. Create scholarship opportunities, right? So you're encouraging participation but not requiring participation from these individuals. So use your bully pulpit or whatever you wanna call it, create incentives for people to adopt things or maybe create programs that are really good that people want to participate in. All of that's certainly useful and worthwhile, but you have to understand the different spheres between the public and the private sector. - Yeah, I mean, and you're talking about, enabling ways for people from very different schools to interact with each other, right? So you're not in your bubble all the time, right? - Right, exactly. You don't have to have everyone go to the same public school to interact with one another, right? So creating debate societies or different sort of things like that where students have opportunities to interact with one another, engage with one another, sports as well, allow homeschoolers, micro schoolers and whatnot to engage in sports, right? That is a wonderful time to meet and interact with other people or even to participate on the same sports teams with people. If you don't have enough at your micro school to form a team, allowing them to join the team at another school and participate in state high school athletics associations, right? So find ways that these other institutions can allow for interaction without forcing the requirements for the public sector on the private sector. - Yeah, so say I'm a state legislator and I take my responsibility to the taxpayers very seriously, right? You said we're not blurring the lines, but are we kind of blurring the lines with some of these funding programs? So what are my responsibilities to the taxpayers? If I see a school that does go kind of way out there in ways that my constituents may not like, and where should I show some restraint in my views about this? - Well, first, I mean, waste and fraud, you have to be on the lookout for it, right? So you have to make sure that dollars are going to where they're supposed to be going, that they're not being siphoned away to the, what was the example in that one famous video now, the leering center or something along those lines? - A leering center. - A leering center, right? You don't want it to go there. Right, so you've got sort of fiduciary responsibilities to make sure that the dollars are going to where they should be going. But you have minimal, I would say, requirements to make sure that students are learning specific things, right? As long as students are learning how to do very basic things, they're, I mean, I got to watch how I say this. They should be learning to read, they should be learning to write, right? They should be providing an education to the kids. And if they're not, if a homeschooler or a micro-schooler are engaged in egregious activities, where the Department of Family Services should be engaged, right, like that's, we have rules in place already to protect the rights of children, right? If children are being harmed in some way, we already have rules and laws in place to try to take care of that. But what you shouldn't decide is, oh, a micro-school, homeschool, you need to teach in third grade the American founding or in fourth grade, you need to teach the lifecycle of plans or something, you should not be dictating to students exactly what they should teach or schools what they should teach. But that then creates challenges for assessment. Some people say, well, I'm fine with these private school choice programs as long as they take the assessment. Well, the assessment is geared at something. It is typically built on something like a set of standards. And so if you're assessing third graders and your private school or micro-schooler, whatever it is, it hasn't taught that stuff because they're planning to do it in fourth grade, you're inherently biasing the test against those individuals. And so unless you have tests of very basic reading ability, math ability that completely separate, it is sort of content from it, which is very hard to do, you're biasing the test towards the individuals in state-sponsored schools that are aligned to the assessments. So even there, you have to create maximum flexibility. Even if you want to say some sort of assessment must be administered, which I think is a reasonable position to take, you've got to give flexibility and choice of the assessment. It could be the classic learning test. It could be the blanking on names of different tests. You might know-- You get portfolios? All right. I'm not a big portfolio guy. but you could imagine a system that involves it. The base is a huge part of the system. basic point being, you should defer to the individuals as much as possible while protecting rights of children to receive an education. And I would say maybe we leave it at that for now. Yeah. Okay. Well, two more questions then. One is this whole business of, we've got a much more decentralized society now. The differences in what people want vary, I think, a lot more than they did 200 years ago. Is that net good or net bad? It's neither net good or net bad that we are a more diverse society. But it is a net good that our institutions and our educational system is recognizing it. Right? That is a net good. And the truth of the matter is there was quite a bit of diversity. International has passed. Yeah. That was a cheating question. Well, part of what we did is we steamrolled over people. Right? We forced them into system. We used compulsion to compel them to public schools. We denied them funding based on their choice. So I'm a big fan of the Skyning Virgil Bloom who wrote a book, Freedom of Choice in Education in 1958. And he would say that essentially the education benefit is a welfare benefit that everyone is entitled to. Everyone richer poor is entitled to this welfare benefit of a free subsidized education. And the only way you lose that entitlement to the free subsidized education is if you choose. Right? If you, if you decide you want to choose something that the public isn't offering, you lose your public education benefit. And that's discrimination based on choice. Right? So if you want a Catholic education or you want something different from what the public schools are offering, you shouldn't lose that benefit. The public schools can't be and shouldn't be everything to all people. It's not possible. So what we're doing now is we're recognizing that people do have varied interests and it's not a bad thing. I got a good friend, John Palmer. John Palmer's dad was a dairy farmer. At John Palmer's dad used to say, John, it takes all kinds to make the world go around. And that's the truth. It takes all kinds of people to make the world go around to make the American economy flourish. And what we're doing by allowing people to choose different types of schools that meet different types of needs is we're allowing that to flourish. We're allowing our diversity, which is we're always told diversity is our strength. Well, we're allowing that diversity to flourish, right? People can choose the types of schools, the types of environments. They're going to be best for them at promote the type of education that I think is best for kids. And that's a good thing. That is certainly not a bad thing. Yeah. Well, James, this has been great. And I have one more question for you, which is what's the most interesting thing that you're working on that people involved in hybrid schools or micro schools would want to hear about? I think they should be looking forward to the release of a book that Jason Bedrick and I are co-editing called the Phoenix Principles. They might have seen the Phoenix Declaration that was put out on the Heritage Foundation's website. What we've done is we've taken those seven principles that are on the Phoenix Declaration. And we've gotten really top-notch people to contribute chapters. You've all been given seven Mark Powerline, Robert Pandecio. I don't want to leave some people out. But there are seven really great scholars essentially expounding upon the brief paragraph that was in the Phoenix Declaration to say, this is what it means. And in these principles, part of what we're doing is we're trying to give people a vision of what education should be that balances the individual and parental rights. Like the first principle in the Phoenix Declaration is essentially that the parents have the primary duty to raise their children. And so if we're creating a system or a school or whatever, even if it's a public school, recognizing that the parents have the primary right to educate their children, that that right is above the state's right and that the state then when an institute schooling is in service to that right of parents, right? So then we have these other principles that schools should be focused on academic excellence that they should promote the sort of Western, they should transmit our culture to the next generation, right? So I would say, be on the lookout for the Phoenix Principles book, although you might have to wait a few months for it to come out, but I'm pretty excited about it. Okay. We'll talk about it when it comes out. James, this is great. Thank you so much. Thank you, Eric. Thank you for listening to Community Crafted Education, a podcast hosted by the National Hybrid Schools Project and Kennesaw State University's Michael J. Cole's College of Business. If you have any questions about the topics we discussed on today's show or want to learn more about what we do, please look up the National Hybrid Schools Project or reach out to us directly at coalscollege.com/hybrid.