September 17, 2024 • 43 mins
In this episode of Educating to be Human, Lisa speaks with Joel Westheimer, a professor of education at the University of Ottawa, author of "What Kind of Citizen? Educating Our Children for the Common Good", and a leading voice on democracy and civic education. As democratic societies face increasing global challenges as well as radically diminishing commitments to the notion of democracy internally, this episode explores how schools can play a pivotal role in fostering democratic values, civic engagement, and critical thinking among students.
The role of education in democratic societies is unique, requiring more than just the standard curriculum of math, science, and literature, Joel argues. Schools must also teach students to ask hard questions, engage in the democratic process, and become informed citizens who can shape the future of their communities. How can schools balance these approaches to foster a more engaged and thoughtful citizenry, and how is this particularly vital in the face of current democratic challenges? With an incredibly pivotal presidential election around the corner, this discussion underscores the urgent need to rethink the role of civic education, preparing young people not only to succeed academically but to become effective, engaged citizens in a democratic society.
Joel Westheimer is Professor and former University Research Chair in Democracy and Education at the University of Ottawa. He is also education columnist for CBC Radio. In addition to researching civic engagement and the role of schools in democratic societies, Westheimer studies broader school reform, teacher education, and education policy and practice. His most recent book (2024) is What kind of citizen? Educating our children for the common good, 2nd edition.
"What Kind of Citizen? Educating Our Children for the Common Good" https://www.tcpress.com/what-kind-of-citizen-9780807769720
Follow Joel on X/Twitter @joelwestheimer
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Generation Citizen - https://www.generationcitizen.org/
I Civics - https://vision.icivics.org/
We the People curriculum - https://civiced.org/we-the-people
Mikva Challenge: https://mikvachallenge.org/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Educating to be Human, a podcast where we'll explore what it means to be human in today's world at the intersection of education, technology, and culture. I'm your host, Lisa Petrides, founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management and Education. Each week, I'll speak with people who are supporting transformative change in education today.
(00:01):
In this episode of Educating to be Human, I have the pleasure of speaking with Joel Westheimer. He's a professor of education at the University of Ottawa in Canada. And a renowned expert on the role of education in a democratic society. Joel's work focuses on the importance of teaching democracy in our schools, fostering critical thinking, civic engagement, and a sense of community among students.
Well, why I'm so glad you're here is because you've been doing this work, the whole role of schooling and democratic societies, for several decades, and this question about democratic societies. is more relevant and important than ever. So I'd love to hear your thoughts. What is the role of school in democratic societies today?
And I think that there are things that should be different. And the reason is that we require different things of citizens in a democracy than we do of citizens in, let's say, a dictatorship. I'm just going to give that example, right? In a dictatorship, citizens are charged with following the rules. someone brings the way we're going to live down from on high and they declare that that's the way that people are going to function.
And so that requires a set of skills and dispositions and attitudes and a type of knowledge that other societies don't necessarily require of its citizens. So the role of schooling in a democratic society, I think, is to help prepare students, not only to be able to make a living and to engage in productive work in society and to raise good families, but also to participate as effective citizens in a democratic society and in fact that is one of the historic missions of schools in the United States and Canada and in other places, it goes back to that famous Thomas Jefferson quote, which i'll paraphrase but he said that If the people in a democratic society are not well educated enough to govern their own affairs, then the solution is not to take that power of governance away from them, but rather to educate them, right?
So we don't take the power of governance away and give it to a king or to a dictator. We in a democratic society say, People need to be well educated enough in how and when and why to participate in democratic governance to be able to do so effectively. And so that's a major goal of schooling in, in a democratic society.
Yeah, well, so first of all, we do have radically diminishing commitments to the notion of democracy across society, and it's particularly high among young people. So, for example, the number of young people that, agree with the idea that it would be okay to live in a society with a strong leader who didn't have to inter, didn't have to deal with interference from legislature or courts, you know, from Congress or courts, which is basically the definition of an autocracy. The number of young people that say that that would be okay has risen dramatically over the last 10 years. And so there's cause for concern for those of us who think, Democracy is important, but it's also understandable that young people are disenchanted with democracy because lately, democracy has not delivered a lot of things that young people care about, things like addressing climate change or lack of affordable housing.
We've had Congress that's gridlocked, and we've had polarization that has made passing legislation virtually impossible around many things that young people care about. And so this disenchantment with democracy has filtered down through all levels of the system and we now see record low levels of support for democratic institutions. And so when you asked before what the role of schooling in democratic society is, I think we both have to simultaneously improve those institutions to be more responsive to the kinds of things that we all care about and that young people care about in particular, and then also shore up the notion of the importance of democratic institutions and the importance of self governance as compared to other systems of governance around the world.
Joel (00:08):
Yeah, I think that's right. And there's certain things that schools need to do in particular that can address some of those goals. So when we think about the needs of citizens in a democratic society that might differ from the needs of citizens in other societies, I can name a few goals that I think schools should take on directly.
I'll just address maybe three of those, but there are many more that I'm sure listeners can think about. The first is that students in democratic society need to really learn to ask difficult questions about the world around them, right? Because we're charged with improving that world, with coming together to make decisions about how to move forward. And so to do that, you have to ask questions about the world. You have to see that problems exist in the world and that those problems need our help in solving. So asking questions is a big, a big thing. And sometimes those questions can be uncomfortable, for adults in the room, but it's important to emphasize the importance of asking difficult questions. The second is that students really need to be able to think critically about that world around them. So once you ask questions, the different possible solutions to those questions and the different perspectives on those questions are important to be able to deal with, which is the third thing as well is to be able to deal with multiple perspectives.
Lisa (00:10):
Well, and it strikes me that today, more so than ever, we're moving away from schools as places where we're supposed to be teaching and learning critical thinking to places, for example, that do job training. I mean, certainly this is true in high schools and also in colleges that success is measured by the jobs your graduates get.
So much so now that we barely have the language to talk about other goals of schooling. Students enter school. Thinking that it's about job training. Parents bring their kids to school feeling like it's about job training. And so we lose a lot of the broader and richer goals of schooling when we do that. I just recently saw a booklet cross my desk called job training skills for kindergartners, which. Which shows the kind of the depth of the madness that, that we've reached around this idea of schools as job training. But of course, schools have many other goals that we all care about, that parents care about, that the kids themselves care about and that we care about as a society. Things like social and emotional development. Do our kids leave schools having the knowledge and skills and attitudes that they need to pursue their passions to be excited about the world? Can they enter healthy relationships? Can they know what kinds of things to pursue to make themselves happy? Do they know how to contribute to society in a way that will be rewarding for them and for the society at large? There's lots of goals of schooling around. There's social goals and emotional goals and political goals, lots of goals that go beyond job training. And we always need to remember those broader goals, especially for schools in a democratic society.
So much so now that we barely have the language to talk about other goals of schooling. Students enter school. Thinking that it's about job training. Parents bring their kids to school feeling like it's about job training. And so we lose a lot of the broader and richer goals of schooling when we do that. I just recently saw a booklet cross my desk called job training skills for kindergartners, which. Which shows the kind of the depth of the madness that, that we've reached around this idea of schools as job training. But of course, schools have many other goals that we all care about, that parents care about, that the kids themselves care about and that we care about as a society. Things like social and emotional development. Do our kids leave schools having the knowledge and skills and attitudes that they need to pursue their passions to be excited about the world? Can they enter healthy relationships? Can they know what kinds of things to pursue to make themselves happy? Do they know how to contribute to society in a way that will be rewarding for them and for the society at large? There's lots of goals of schooling around. There's social goals and emotional goals and political goals, lots of goals that go beyond job training. And we always need to remember those broader goals, especially for schools in a democratic society.
Joel (00:13):
Yeah. I mean, and that's, what's so, so ironic about it is that of course, we can't know what kinds of job requirements there's going to be 20 years from now or 10 years from now, kids are looking for jobs. And so it's the broad kinds of skills like critical thinking, like thinking period that at least for good jobs and the most rewarding jobs people need, but too often now businesses have done a sleight of hand. You know, it used to be that people had a general education , but that the specific skills that a job requires were job training. And job training was a purview of businesses. When you got a job in a large corporation or a small business, you were paid to get training at the beginning of your job. You weren't expected to jump in and be able to do everything. You were trained for it, and you were trained for it While receiving a salary, businesses have now pulled this sleigh of hand where they've downloaded or have tried to download all that training on to public schools and schooling in general, and that's not really the purview of schools, both because it's sort of a fool's errand because we don't know what specific skills are going to be needed for every particular job that a student is going to go into later, but also because it pushes out of the way so many important goals for schooling that we all hold dear.
And while we want kids to have the basic skills they need, nobody doesn't want that to be able to function in the workplace. We don't want that to dominate every aspect of schooling.
Well, I'll tell you a little bit about research that colleagues and I have done that formed the basis of this kind of work. Then we can certainly talk about examples that are out there. But work I did way back originally with Joe Kahn, who's a professor at University of California, Riverside. And he and I many years ago were very interested in the kinds of programs that were out there that claim to be teaching. good citizenship, good democratic citizenship.
And what we were interested in is, you know, if you went out to the street and asked 100 people whether they think schools should teach good citizenship, most people, you'd get a lot of head nodding agreement. You know, most people would say, yes, of course, schools should teach good citizenship. But if you ask a follow up question and you say, What exactly do you mean by good citizenship? What is a good citizen and what exactly should schools do to teach that? That's when that easy consensus will start to fray. You'll get a lot of disagreement about what it means to be a good citizen. And that is precisely the question that Joe Kahn and I were interested in when we started doing this research, which is programs and education based programs, school based programs in particular, say they're teaching good citizenship. What do they imagine the good citizen to be? What kind of citizens are they imagining leaving the schoolhouse doors when they graduate? And so what we did was we studied a series of programs. We started with 10, but then it became hundreds and other people have taken a framework that we developed and studied thousands of programs, not just in the U. S., but worldwide. And we found certain categories remarkably consistent across all these programs. What we found was that, loosely speaking, a lot of these programs could be placed into three visions of what a good citizen is. You know, professors love to put things in boxes, so it doesn't mean that every program fits perfectly in one of these one and only of these boxes, but it gives us a helpful way to talk about the different visions of these programs.
Lisa (00:17):
"Yes absolutely, is this part of the good citizen framework?"
So I'll tell you a little bit about each one. The Personally Responsible Citizen, those were programs that wanted kids to be, personally responsible. They wanted kids to show up to school on time, to dress nicely, to help others, to be nice people, to maybe volunteer in their community, not to do drugs, not to litter, to pay their taxes, to get a good job.
But some programs also looked at a different kind of vision of a good citizen. The second one I mentioned is the participatory citizen. And those were programs that emphasize the idea that in a democratic society, it's important for students to participate in the community and participate in thinking about ways that we organize ourselves.
These were programs that wanted kids to ask and think about the root causes of problems. They wanted them to know that there were problems in the world that need solving, but to think about what the root causes of those problems are, and how to change them, and how to address those problems. So these programs might ask kids to learn about social movements and social change, how social change happens in history, how the women's rights movement happened, how civil rights movement happened, what kind of organization did that require?
But most importantly, they wanted students to think about the problems that need addressing in the world and what the causes of those problems are and how we might, you be able to move towards solutions to those problems. So if I use that example I was using before, if the participatory citizens are organizing a food drive and the personally responsible citizens are donating cans of food, the social justice oriented citizens might be asking, How come in one of the richest countries in the world, we have people who are hungry? And what can we do about that?
You might notice that the personally responsible citizen might have something to do with good citizenship, being a good person, but it has nothing to do with democratic citizenship per se. In other words, there's not a leader of a country around the world in any type of country that doesn't want citizens to pay taxes, or to show up to work on time, or to give blood when blood is needed or to help an old person across the street, right?
I'm wondering how we are seeing that play out in our schools. Specifically, like, are we seeing the community respond and say, Yes, it is important to have more of that social justice perspective. It seems like perhaps we've swung in the other direction. In some cases, where the community's not responding and saying, Yes, that's what we want.
Joel (00:24):
Yeah, I would say that it's split but as a whole school reform writ large has been moving in the other direction over the past couple of decades and maybe is ready to swing back but something we haven't talked about yet and might be important to mention is the problems with our obsession in school reform right now with standardized testing and standardization across the curriculum. We've been emphasizing standardized testing in only two subject areas, math and literacy. And when we sort of hijack the whole curriculum for only preparation in those two subject areas, we lose a lot of what's rich about the broader school curriculum and a lot of what's important in other subject areas. No one, thinks that it's not important for kids to learn to read and to write and to add numbers, right? There's no group called parents and educators against kids knowing how to read like there's no there's no such, there's no such group. We all think that's important. But most educators and most parents frankly think that that's not enough. That's not the only thing that schools should be doing . But standardization is a problem because not because all standardized tests are bad or that we shouldn't do spot checks on the system and know what's being taught and what, where we need more work. The problem is that standardized tests measure such a narrow part of what's important about schooling. Even within the subject matters that they test, let's say in english and math, they're still measuring only a small portion of what's taught in those subject areas. I've never met an English teacher who said oh, yes, you know what's tested on those tests, that's everything that I teach. There's nothing else that, that I teach about other than what's on the SATs or what's on the ninth grade standardized exam. No, teaching is a much richer endeavor and enterprise than these standardized tests can capture. And that's partly because our testing technology is not that sophisticated yet.
Yeah, I would say that it's split but as a whole school reform writ large has been moving in the other direction over the past couple of decades and maybe is ready to swing back but something we haven't talked about yet and might be important to mention is the problems with our obsession in school reform right now with standardized testing and standardization across the curriculum. We've been emphasizing standardized testing in only two subject areas, math and literacy. And when we sort of hijack the whole curriculum for only preparation in those two subject areas, we lose a lot of what's rich about the broader school curriculum and a lot of what's important in other subject areas. No one, thinks that it's not important for kids to learn to read and to write and to add numbers, right? There's no group called parents and educators against kids knowing how to read like there's no there's no such, there's no such group. We all think that's important. But most educators and most parents frankly think that that's not enough. That's not the only thing that schools should be doing . But standardization is a problem because not because all standardized tests are bad or that we shouldn't do spot checks on the system and know what's being taught and what, where we need more work. The problem is that standardized tests measure such a narrow part of what's important about schooling. Even within the subject matters that they test, let's say in english and math, they're still measuring only a small portion of what's taught in those subject areas. I've never met an English teacher who said oh, yes, you know what's tested on those tests, that's everything that I teach. There's nothing else that, that I teach about other than what's on the SATs or what's on the ninth grade standardized exam. No, teaching is a much richer endeavor and enterprise than these standardized tests can capture. And that's partly because our testing technology is not that sophisticated yet.
We're very good at telling whether students can add two plus two and get four. We're pretty good at understanding whether students can decode the words of a sentence and understand its meaning, but we're less good at measuring other things that are very important to us. Things like critical thinking, things like creativity, things like engagement and passion. So we all care that kids can learn to read and that they can decode those words of the sentence, but many people also care about, for example, kids learning how to understand what's worth reading and how that reading links to their life outside of school. The same with math. We want kids to be able to add numbers or get the correct change in a supermarket.
So we have this pressure from the parents who are saying, how are my kids performing on these tests? And on the other hand, we're seeing record numbers of students who, for example, are opting out of these kinds of standardized tests and assessments, who would be in complete agreement with what you said, you know, where they're saying this isn't even assessing what it is I know and learn and what I may be able to take to my life, to the workforce, to my community after formal education.
Because there's certain things that we can measure, we put numbers to those. The problem is that there's certain things we can't measure and we don't have numbers for those. So what happens is instead of measuring the things we care about, we start to care about the things that we can measure and we're drawn to those numbers.
And that involves all of us, right? We all then become beholden to these numbers and we lose a lot of what's important in schooling. You mentioned, Lisa, the opt out movement and that's really been a vast movement that's made a huge difference and that has maybe pushed the pendulum in the other direction because frankly, parents were tired of their kids coming home in tears about the pressure of these tests and also realizing that these tests only measure certain things about school and so for anyone who doesn't know, these opt out movements allowed individual students, they, they sometimes were groups of students or classes, sometimes whole schools opted out, and sometimes even school districts opted out of these standardized tests when it was allowed to opt out sometimes, and even when it wasn't allowed.
Lisa (00:30):
You know, you've talked about the three different visions that people have around what a good citizen is with the good citizen framework. And I'm wondering, can you give us some examples of the types of schools? Like what are those schools that go all the way from being a good personal citizen to participatory to actually understanding the root cause in the social justice component of it?
And each of the four major subject areas, science, social studies, language arts, and math sort of oriented the teaching and learning around this issue and problem of hunger and homelessness. The school had a roof that was unused on the school. And one of the things they did was they built a community garden on the roof, but the students helped build it. So the math teachers did geometry with, you know, constructing these boxes and figuring out how much soil would be in volume and so forth. The science teachers had the students study soil composition and then the sunlight needed and plant growth and so forth. The social studies teacher of course, had students engaged with issues of hunger and the history of hunger and homelessness in the community and the language arts teacher had students read books about, um, about these issues and novels that raised issues of hunger and homelessness. And they all came together around this curriculum. It didn't mean that every class was oriented only around this issue, but it meant that in the background, this issue was always there and students were always sort of drawn back in to engaging with this issue.
They ended up growing food on this roof. And someone knew the famous Bay Area chef, Alice Waters, and she actually came to the school and cooked a meal with the vegetables that the students had grown. And that served as a fundraiser to raise money. The students then researched programs in the community and decided which ones to, to donate the money to.
Of course. And that sort of begs the question of how do you scale something like that? I'm guessing that not all schools are going to be in a position to take something like that on. Yet we want to encourage that kind of thinking and that kind of critical thinking and participation. Well, what do you think about this idea of how you could take this as a sort of general idea and make it your own in terms of scaling this in other kinds of education communities.
But there's also a lot of national programs that try and do work. It's sometimes called Action Civics. Sometimes called service learning certain aspects of service learning. And there are programs that do that nationally and that provide curricular resources for schools and even developmental resources for schools that want to pursue that. So one example is a program called mikva challenge and they have several different kinds of courses curriculum that they bring to schools. But one of their curriculum is called issues to action. And it's very similar to what I just described. This curriculum gives a kind of step by step process for youth activism that asks students to look at the community, identify issues of importance to the community and to the students, and then conduct research about those issues, look at different power relationships that those issues bring up, and develop strategies and take action to, to have an impact on those issues, and to even impact policy around those issues, and to tie that to their academic curriculum.
That's one example. There are many, many others. There's a program called Generation Citizen. There's iCivics. There's the, we, the people curriculum. So there are efforts to scale up, but the one thing we should keep in mind though, is that scaling up also has to come with some cautionary words, because I think that what makes some of the magic of these programs, the local magic is the fact that they're local. They take on issues in that particular community and they build on the experiences and passions and interests of not just the students, but the teachers in a particular school. And so we can't have a cookie cutter, scaled up curriculum. And most large scale programs don't try and do that, but the ones that do can fall flat from the richness that we see in some of these local initiatives, right?
And that makes so much sense. I can't think of a community across our country that wouldn't have unique and local issues and passions and interests that this could be applied to. I really love that. This idea of scaling, often we think about it in a negative way, similar to how we think about standardized tests, but we're not just trying to have a cookie cutter approach and make everything the same, but how do you take that kind of thinking and expertise and apply it in your own context? That would be very, very powerful.
Joel (00:37):
Absolutely. It doesn't mean we can't have common goals, right? Both for civics curriculum and for curriculum. And of course there's some common goals that we all share. The problem is when we try and standardize everything and make everything identical because schools are not McDonald's, right? In McDonald's, we want, uh, cheeseburger to be the same in every McDonald's that we go into. That's part of the reason we go into them if we go into a McDonald's. But schools are not McDonald's. We want schools brimming with the immediate local passion, ideas, and experiences that students and teachers bring to the learning experience.
So we have a lot of knowledge about what works. The bad news is that we have this huge push to what some people call a back to basics curriculum. And we still have the stranglehold of standardized testing that pushes the kinds of stuff we're talking about to the back burner or, or off the stove altogether.
And there are some people who raise concerns about this kind of work in schools, because they think that schools should not be in the business of developing these kinds of attitudes and dispositions toward democratic life. They think schools should only, um, be teaching how to add numbers and how to read.
Absolutely. And that's just such a good comment. I mean, a lot of this has to start in teacher education because a lot of teachers feel, Ill equipped to pursue the complex curriculum that you and I were talking about. These are not easy things to do in schools and people need training on how to do it.
Yes. I'm very excited about it. It's, , my book, " What kind of citizen? Educating our children for the common good." It's from Teacher's College Press. It is hot off the press, the second edition, and, uh, it just came out in 2024.
Lisa (00:42):
Great. Thank you. Well, this has been such a terrific conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this lens that you've given us to be thinking about good citizenship moving from how we're good people and good citizens to then how we're in community with each other, and then moving into this global challenge that we face today. I mean, between social media, the news, and everything we're able to see now from one side of the globe to the other, this has become so much more important. And I might argue a little differently than you did and say that whether you are in a democratic society or not, how we are good citizens and good people and how we interact with our community and participate to how we can address some of the global challenges that we are faced with is really more important than ever. So thank you so much.
If you enjoy our show, please rate and review us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can access our show notes for links and information on our guests, and don't forget to follow us on Instagram and Twitter at edu to be human. That is EDU to Be Human. This podcast was created by Lisa Petrides and produced by Helene Theros.
Welcome to Educating to be Human, a podcast where we'll explore what it means to be human in today's world at the intersection of education, technology, and culture. I'm your host, Lisa Petrides, founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management and Education. Each week, I'll speak with people who are supporting transformative change in education today.
(00:01):
In this episode of Educating to be Human, I have the pleasure of speaking with Joel Westheimer. He's a professor of education at the University of Ottawa in Canada. And a renowned expert on the role of education in a democratic society. Joel's work focuses on the importance of teaching democracy in our schools, fostering critical thinking, civic engagement, and a sense of community among students.
Well, why I'm so glad you're here is because you've been doing this work, the whole role of schooling and democratic societies, for several decades, and this question about democratic societies. is more relevant and important than ever. So I'd love to hear your thoughts. What is the role of school in democratic societies today?
And I think that there are things that should be different. And the reason is that we require different things of citizens in a democracy than we do of citizens in, let's say, a dictatorship. I'm just going to give that example, right? In a dictatorship, citizens are charged with following the rules. someone brings the way we're going to live down from on high and they declare that that's the way that people are going to function.
And so that requires a set of skills and dispositions and attitudes and a type of knowledge that other societies don't necessarily require of its citizens. So the role of schooling in a democratic society, I think, is to help prepare students, not only to be able to make a living and to engage in productive work in society and to raise good families, but also to participate as effective citizens in a democratic society and in fact that is one of the historic missions of schools in the United States and Canada and in other places, it goes back to that famous Thomas Jefferson quote, which i'll paraphrase but he said that If the people in a democratic society are not well educated enough to govern their own affairs, then the solution is not to take that power of governance away from them, but rather to educate them, right?
So we don't take the power of governance away and give it to a king or to a dictator. We in a democratic society say, People need to be well educated enough in how and when and why to participate in democratic governance to be able to do so effectively. And so that's a major goal of schooling in, in a democratic society.
Yeah, well, so first of all, we do have radically diminishing commitments to the notion of democracy across society, and it's particularly high among young people. So, for example, the number of young people that, agree with the idea that it would be okay to live in a society with a strong leader who didn't have to inter, didn't have to deal with interference from legislature or courts, you know, from Congress or courts, which is basically the definition of an autocracy. The number of young people that say that that would be okay has risen dramatically over the last 10 years. And so there's cause for concern for those of us who think, Democracy is important, but it's also understandable that young people are disenchanted with democracy because lately, democracy has not delivered a lot of things that young people care about, things like addressing climate change or lack of affordable housing.
We've had Congress that's gridlocked, and we've had polarization that has made passing legislation virtually impossible around many things that young people care about. And so this disenchantment with democracy has filtered down through all levels of the system and we now see record low levels of support for democratic institutions. And so when you asked before what the role of schooling in democratic society is, I think we both have to simultaneously improve those institutions to be more responsive to the kinds of things that we all care about and that young people care about in particular, and then also shore up the notion of the importance of democratic institutions and the importance of self governance as compared to other systems of governance around the world.
Joel (00:08):
Yeah, I think that's right. And there's certain things that schools need to do in particular that can address some of those goals. So when we think about the needs of citizens in a democratic society that might differ from the needs of citizens in other societies, I can name a few goals that I think schools should take on directly.
I'll just address maybe three of those, but there are many more that I'm sure listeners can think about. The first is that students in democratic society need to really learn to ask difficult questions about the world around them, right? Because we're charged with improving that world, with coming together to make decisions about how to move forward. And so to do that, you have to ask questions about the world. You have to see that problems exist in the world and that those problems need our help in solving. So asking questions is a big, a big thing. And sometimes those questions can be uncomfortable, for adults in the room, but it's important to emphasize the importance of asking difficult questions. The second is that students really need to be able to think critically about that world around them. So once you ask questions, the different possible solutions to those questions and the different perspectives on those questions are important to be able to deal with, which is the third thing as well is to be able to deal with multiple perspectives.
Lisa (00:10):
Well, and it strikes me that today, more so than ever, we're moving away from schools as places where we're supposed to be teaching and learning critical thinking to places, for example, that do job training. I mean, certainly this is true in high schools and also in colleges that success is measured by the jobs your graduates get.
So much so now that we barely have the language to talk about other goals of schooling. Students enter school. Thinking that it's about job training. Parents bring their kids to school feeling like it's about job training. And so we lose a lot of the broader and richer goals of schooling when we do that. I just recently saw a booklet cross my desk called job training skills for kindergartners, which. Which shows the kind of the depth of the madness that, that we've reached around this idea of schools as job training. But of course, schools have many other goals that we all care about, that parents care about, that the kids themselves care about and that we care about as a society. Things like social and emotional development. Do our kids leave schools having the knowledge and skills and attitudes that they need to pursue their passions to be excited about the world? Can they enter healthy relationships? Can they know what kinds of things to pursue to make themselves happy? Do they know how to contribute to society in a way that will be rewarding for them and for the society at large? There's lots of goals of schooling around. There's social goals and emotional goals and political goals, lots of goals that go beyond job training. And we always need to remember those broader goals, especially for schools in a democratic society.
So much so now that we barely have the language to talk about other goals of schooling. Students enter school. Thinking that it's about job training. Parents bring their kids to school feeling like it's about job training. And so we lose a lot of the broader and richer goals of schooling when we do that. I just recently saw a booklet cross my desk called job training skills for kindergartners, which. Which shows the kind of the depth of the madness that, that we've reached around this idea of schools as job training. But of course, schools have many other goals that we all care about, that parents care about, that the kids themselves care about and that we care about as a society. Things like social and emotional development. Do our kids leave schools having the knowledge and skills and attitudes that they need to pursue their passions to be excited about the world? Can they enter healthy relationships? Can they know what kinds of things to pursue to make themselves happy? Do they know how to contribute to society in a way that will be rewarding for them and for the society at large? There's lots of goals of schooling around. There's social goals and emotional goals and political goals, lots of goals that go beyond job training. And we always need to remember those broader goals, especially for schools in a democratic society.
Joel (00:13):
Yeah. I mean, and that's, what's so, so ironic about it is that of course, we can't know what kinds of job requirements there's going to be 20 years from now or 10 years from now, kids are looking for jobs. And so it's the broad kinds of skills like critical thinking, like thinking period that at least for good jobs and the most rewarding jobs people need, but too often now businesses have done a sleight of hand. You know, it used to be that people had a general education , but that the specific skills that a job requires were job training. And job training was a purview of businesses. When you got a job in a large corporation or a small business, you were paid to get training at the beginning of your job. You weren't expected to jump in and be able to do everything. You were trained for it, and you were trained for it While receiving a salary, businesses have now pulled this sleigh of hand where they've downloaded or have tried to download all that training on to public schools and schooling in general, and that's not really the purview of schools, both because it's sort of a fool's errand because we don't know what specific skills are going to be needed for every particular job that a student is going to go into later, but also because it pushes out of the way so many important goals for schooling that we all hold dear.
And while we want kids to have the basic skills they need, nobody doesn't want that to be able to function in the workplace. We don't want that to dominate every aspect of schooling.
Well, I'll tell you a little bit about research that colleagues and I have done that formed the basis of this kind of work. Then we can certainly talk about examples that are out there. But work I did way back originally with Joe Kahn, who's a professor at University of California, Riverside. And he and I many years ago were very interested in the kinds of programs that were out there that claim to be teaching. good citizenship, good democratic citizenship.
And what we were interested in is, you know, if you went out to the street and asked 100 people whether they think schools should teach good citizenship, most people, you'd get a lot of head nodding agreement. You know, most people would say, yes, of course, schools should teach good citizenship. But if you ask a follow up question and you say, What exactly do you mean by good citizenship? What is a good citizen and what exactly should schools do to teach that? That's when that easy consensus will start to fray. You'll get a lot of disagreement about what it means to be a good citizen. And that is precisely the question that Joe Kahn and I were interested in when we started doing this research, which is programs and education based programs, school based programs in particular, say they're teaching good citizenship. What do they imagine the good citizen to be? What kind of citizens are they imagining leaving the schoolhouse doors when they graduate? And so what we did was we studied a series of programs. We started with 10, but then it became hundreds and other people have taken a framework that we developed and studied thousands of programs, not just in the U. S., but worldwide. And we found certain categories remarkably consistent across all these programs. What we found was that, loosely speaking, a lot of these programs could be placed into three visions of what a good citizen is. You know, professors love to put things in boxes, so it doesn't mean that every program fits perfectly in one of these one and only of these boxes, but it gives us a helpful way to talk about the different visions of these programs.
Lisa (00:17):
"Yes absolutely, is this part of the good citizen framework?"
So I'll tell you a little bit about each one. The Personally Responsible Citizen, those were programs that wanted kids to be, personally responsible. They wanted kids to show up to school on time, to dress nicely, to help others, to be nice people, to maybe volunteer in their community, not to do drugs, not to litter, to pay their taxes, to get a good job.
But some programs also looked at a different kind of vision of a good citizen. The second one I mentioned is the participatory citizen. And those were programs that emphasize the idea that in a democratic society, it's important for students to participate in the community and participate in thinking about ways that we organize ourselves.
These were programs that wanted kids to ask and think about the root causes of problems. They wanted them to know that there were problems in the world that need solving, but to think about what the root causes of those problems are, and how to change them, and how to address those problems. So these programs might ask kids to learn about social movements and social change, how social change happens in history, how the women's rights movement happened, how civil rights movement happened, what kind of organization did that require?
But most importantly, they wanted students to think about the problems that need addressing in the world and what the causes of those problems are and how we might, you be able to move towards solutions to those problems. So if I use that example I was using before, if the participatory citizens are organizing a food drive and the personally responsible citizens are donating cans of food, the social justice oriented citizens might be asking, How come in one of the richest countries in the world, we have people who are hungry? And what can we do about that?
You might notice that the personally responsible citizen might have something to do with good citizenship, being a good person, but it has nothing to do with democratic citizenship per se. In other words, there's not a leader of a country around the world in any type of country that doesn't want citizens to pay taxes, or to show up to work on time, or to give blood when blood is needed or to help an old person across the street, right?
I'm wondering how we are seeing that play out in our schools. Specifically, like, are we seeing the community respond and say, Yes, it is important to have more of that social justice perspective. It seems like perhaps we've swung in the other direction. In some cases, where the community's not responding and saying, Yes, that's what we want.
Joel (00:24):
Yeah, I would say that it's split but as a whole school reform writ large has been moving in the other direction over the past couple of decades and maybe is ready to swing back but something we haven't talked about yet and might be important to mention is the problems with our obsession in school reform right now with standardized testing and standardization across the curriculum. We've been emphasizing standardized testing in only two subject areas, math and literacy. And when we sort of hijack the whole curriculum for only preparation in those two subject areas, we lose a lot of what's rich about the broader school curriculum and a lot of what's important in other subject areas. No one, thinks that it's not important for kids to learn to read and to write and to add numbers, right? There's no group called parents and educators against kids knowing how to read like there's no there's no such, there's no such group. We all think that's important. But most educators and most parents frankly think that that's not enough. That's not the only thing that schools should be doing . But standardization is a problem because not because all standardized tests are bad or that we shouldn't do spot checks on the system and know what's being taught and what, where we need more work. The problem is that standardized tests measure such a narrow part of what's important about schooling. Even within the subject matters that they test, let's say in english and math, they're still measuring only a small portion of what's taught in those subject areas. I've never met an English teacher who said oh, yes, you know what's tested on those tests, that's everything that I teach. There's nothing else that, that I teach about other than what's on the SATs or what's on the ninth grade standardized exam. No, teaching is a much richer endeavor and enterprise than these standardized tests can capture. And that's partly because our testing technology is not that sophisticated yet.
Yeah, I would say that it's split but as a whole school reform writ large has been moving in the other direction over the past couple of decades and maybe is ready to swing back but something we haven't talked about yet and might be important to mention is the problems with our obsession in school reform right now with standardized testing and standardization across the curriculum. We've been emphasizing standardized testing in only two subject areas, math and literacy. And when we sort of hijack the whole curriculum for only preparation in those two subject areas, we lose a lot of what's rich about the broader school curriculum and a lot of what's important in other subject areas. No one, thinks that it's not important for kids to learn to read and to write and to add numbers, right? There's no group called parents and educators against kids knowing how to read like there's no there's no such, there's no such group. We all think that's important. But most educators and most parents frankly think that that's not enough. That's not the only thing that schools should be doing . But standardization is a problem because not because all standardized tests are bad or that we shouldn't do spot checks on the system and know what's being taught and what, where we need more work. The problem is that standardized tests measure such a narrow part of what's important about schooling. Even within the subject matters that they test, let's say in english and math, they're still measuring only a small portion of what's taught in those subject areas. I've never met an English teacher who said oh, yes, you know what's tested on those tests, that's everything that I teach. There's nothing else that, that I teach about other than what's on the SATs or what's on the ninth grade standardized exam. No, teaching is a much richer endeavor and enterprise than these standardized tests can capture. And that's partly because our testing technology is not that sophisticated yet.
We're very good at telling whether students can add two plus two and get four. We're pretty good at understanding whether students can decode the words of a sentence and understand its meaning, but we're less good at measuring other things that are very important to us. Things like critical thinking, things like creativity, things like engagement and passion. So we all care that kids can learn to read and that they can decode those words of the sentence, but many people also care about, for example, kids learning how to understand what's worth reading and how that reading links to their life outside of school. The same with math. We want kids to be able to add numbers or get the correct change in a supermarket.
So we have this pressure from the parents who are saying, how are my kids performing on these tests? And on the other hand, we're seeing record numbers of students who, for example, are opting out of these kinds of standardized tests and assessments, who would be in complete agreement with what you said, you know, where they're saying this isn't even assessing what it is I know and learn and what I may be able to take to my life, to the workforce, to my community after formal education.
Because there's certain things that we can measure, we put numbers to those. The problem is that there's certain things we can't measure and we don't have numbers for those. So what happens is instead of measuring the things we care about, we start to care about the things that we can measure and we're drawn to those numbers.
And that involves all of us, right? We all then become beholden to these numbers and we lose a lot of what's important in schooling. You mentioned, Lisa, the opt out movement and that's really been a vast movement that's made a huge difference and that has maybe pushed the pendulum in the other direction because frankly, parents were tired of their kids coming home in tears about the pressure of these tests and also realizing that these tests only measure certain things about school and so for anyone who doesn't know, these opt out movements allowed individual students, they, they sometimes were groups of students or classes, sometimes whole schools opted out, and sometimes even school districts opted out of these standardized tests when it was allowed to opt out sometimes, and even when it wasn't allowed.
Lisa (00:30):
You know, you've talked about the three different visions that people have around what a good citizen is with the good citizen framework. And I'm wondering, can you give us some examples of the types of schools? Like what are those schools that go all the way from being a good personal citizen to participatory to actually understanding the root cause in the social justice component of it?
And each of the four major subject areas, science, social studies, language arts, and math sort of oriented the teaching and learning around this issue and problem of hunger and homelessness. The school had a roof that was unused on the school. And one of the things they did was they built a community garden on the roof, but the students helped build it. So the math teachers did geometry with, you know, constructing these boxes and figuring out how much soil would be in volume and so forth. The science teachers had the students study soil composition and then the sunlight needed and plant growth and so forth. The social studies teacher of course, had students engaged with issues of hunger and the history of hunger and homelessness in the community and the language arts teacher had students read books about, um, about these issues and novels that raised issues of hunger and homelessness. And they all came together around this curriculum. It didn't mean that every class was oriented only around this issue, but it meant that in the background, this issue was always there and students were always sort of drawn back in to engaging with this issue.
They ended up growing food on this roof. And someone knew the famous Bay Area chef, Alice Waters, and she actually came to the school and cooked a meal with the vegetables that the students had grown. And that served as a fundraiser to raise money. The students then researched programs in the community and decided which ones to, to donate the money to.
Of course. And that sort of begs the question of how do you scale something like that? I'm guessing that not all schools are going to be in a position to take something like that on. Yet we want to encourage that kind of thinking and that kind of critical thinking and participation. Well, what do you think about this idea of how you could take this as a sort of general idea and make it your own in terms of scaling this in other kinds of education communities.
But there's also a lot of national programs that try and do work. It's sometimes called Action Civics. Sometimes called service learning certain aspects of service learning. And there are programs that do that nationally and that provide curricular resources for schools and even developmental resources for schools that want to pursue that. So one example is a program called mikva challenge and they have several different kinds of courses curriculum that they bring to schools. But one of their curriculum is called issues to action. And it's very similar to what I just described. This curriculum gives a kind of step by step process for youth activism that asks students to look at the community, identify issues of importance to the community and to the students, and then conduct research about those issues, look at different power relationships that those issues bring up, and develop strategies and take action to, to have an impact on those issues, and to even impact policy around those issues, and to tie that to their academic curriculum.
That's one example. There are many, many others. There's a program called Generation Citizen. There's iCivics. There's the, we, the people curriculum. So there are efforts to scale up, but the one thing we should keep in mind though, is that scaling up also has to come with some cautionary words, because I think that what makes some of the magic of these programs, the local magic is the fact that they're local. They take on issues in that particular community and they build on the experiences and passions and interests of not just the students, but the teachers in a particular school. And so we can't have a cookie cutter, scaled up curriculum. And most large scale programs don't try and do that, but the ones that do can fall flat from the richness that we see in some of these local initiatives, right?
And that makes so much sense. I can't think of a community across our country that wouldn't have unique and local issues and passions and interests that this could be applied to. I really love that. This idea of scaling, often we think about it in a negative way, similar to how we think about standardized tests, but we're not just trying to have a cookie cutter approach and make everything the same, but how do you take that kind of thinking and expertise and apply it in your own context? That would be very, very powerful.
Joel (00:37):
Absolutely. It doesn't mean we can't have common goals, right? Both for civics curriculum and for curriculum. And of course there's some common goals that we all share. The problem is when we try and standardize everything and make everything identical because schools are not McDonald's, right? In McDonald's, we want, uh, cheeseburger to be the same in every McDonald's that we go into. That's part of the reason we go into them if we go into a McDonald's. But schools are not McDonald's. We want schools brimming with the immediate local passion, ideas, and experiences that students and teachers bring to the learning experience.
So we have a lot of knowledge about what works. The bad news is that we have this huge push to what some people call a back to basics curriculum. And we still have the stranglehold of standardized testing that pushes the kinds of stuff we're talking about to the back burner or, or off the stove altogether.
And there are some people who raise concerns about this kind of work in schools, because they think that schools should not be in the business of developing these kinds of attitudes and dispositions toward democratic life. They think schools should only, um, be teaching how to add numbers and how to read.
Absolutely. And that's just such a good comment. I mean, a lot of this has to start in teacher education because a lot of teachers feel, Ill equipped to pursue the complex curriculum that you and I were talking about. These are not easy things to do in schools and people need training on how to do it.
Yes. I'm very excited about it. It's, , my book, " What kind of citizen? Educating our children for the common good." It's from Teacher's College Press. It is hot off the press, the second edition, and, uh, it just came out in 2024.
Lisa (00:42):
Great. Thank you. Well, this has been such a terrific conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this lens that you've given us to be thinking about good citizenship moving from how we're good people and good citizens to then how we're in community with each other, and then moving into this global challenge that we face today. I mean, between social media, the news, and everything we're able to see now from one side of the globe to the other, this has become so much more important. And I might argue a little differently than you did and say that whether you are in a democratic society or not, how we are good citizens and good people and how we interact with our community and participate to how we can address some of the global challenges that we are faced with is really more important than ever. So thank you so much.
If you enjoy our show, please rate and review us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can access our show notes for links and information on our guests, and don't forget to follow us on Instagram and Twitter at edu to be human. That is EDU to Be Human. This podcast was created by Lisa Petrides and produced by Helene Theros.
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