Civic education

When suicidal Muslim fanatics flew airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, taking thousands of people with them to their deaths, most Americans were satisfied with seeing this as simply mindless, inexplicable evil.  It was certainly evil, but it was neither mindless nor inexplicable.  However, the efforts of some educated, thoughtful people to understand and explain 9/11 were widely viewed in America as unpatriotic, even equivalent to treason.

Americans’ willing ignorance about the culture and geo-politics of the Middle East made it easy for the Bush Administration to frame the invasion of Iraq as retribution for the terrorist attacks of September 2001.  Seven years later, after thousands of lives have been sacrificed and billions of dollars have been spent on the Iraq War, little progress has been made in bringing to justice the men responsible for 9/11.  Understanding what motivated them, without excusing it, would have led to the development of much more effective and efficient strategies for disabling al-Qaeda.

The December 2006 & January 2007 issue of Policy Review (a publication of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution), includes an article by Peter Berkowitz titled “Liberal Education, Then and Now.”  Berkowitz explores the ideas of 19th century British philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill regarding the purpose of a university and compares those ideas to today’s typical university education.

Here is Berkowitz paraphrasing, then quoting, Mill: “Liberal education is the civic education, or education for citizenship, proper to liberal democracy because it aims to form a human being fit for freedom:

The proper business of a University is . . . not to tell us from authority what we ought to believe, and make us accept the belief as a duty, but to give us information and training, and help us to form our own belief in a manner worthy of intelligent beings, who seek for truth at all hazards, and demand to know all the difficulties, in order that they may be better qualified to find, or recognize, the most satisfactory mode of resolving them.

Would Americans be better educated for citizenship if they all went to college?  Not necessarily.   Despite a widespread belief that we need to send more young people to college, many Americans deeply distrust and resist the kind of education Mill advocates.  Also, Berkowitz argues that colleges and universities are not doing a very good job of providing this ideal of a liberal education.  I’ll explore his argument further in another post.