Particularly for Americans, patriotic history is a kind of glue for an extraordinarily diverse republic. Civic education requires students engage with their history--not only to know whence conventions, principles, and laws have come, but also to develop an attachment to them. This article looks at how American history should educate, but also…

Education in the United States has a foundational public purpose: to prepare students for effective citizenship. The idea that an educated and engaged citizenry is essential to the health of a democracy motivated the creation of government-run "common schools" in the early decades of the nation and remains an important value in modern…

This study aims to find a link between strong civic norms at school and engagement in the political process. Although adolescent civic engagement has been a topic of concern for many years, it has not been put to a careful empirical test, in part because few surveys of students contain detailed contextual information about their school community…

Innumerable foundations, commissions, state initiatives, and federal programs are now seeking to renew civic education in American schools. But solutions run headlong into a series of barriers. Four of these seem especially troublesome: (1) Efforts to develop a civics curriculum are snagged by a basic truth about America: beyond a narrow core of…

Many supporters of school choice argue that neighborhood assignment to public schools results not in diversity, but in the opposite: schools that are less likely to contain a diverse mix of students and that are more internally segregated along racial lines than are schools of choice. In recent years, a number of empirical studies of the effects…

Americans are rightly concerned that schools are not providing students with the knowledge and habits necessary to be good citizens. With the notable exception of volunteer activity, every form of civic engagement among the young has declined. As a response, increasing attention is being paid to civic education in the schools. But strangely, at a…

The modern character education movement emerged in the 1980s as a consequence of growing parental and public concern for moral drift, or what sociologist James Davison Hunter referred to as "the death of character." This public anomie was captured in these words from Sanford McDonnell, chairman emeritus of McDonnell Douglas and chair of…

It is an odd mark of this time that the first question people ask about character education is whether public schools should be doing it at all. The question is odd because it invites everyone to imagine that schooling, which occupies about a third of a child's waking time, somehow could be arranged to play no role in the formation of a child's…

Traditional civil disobedience has usually combined deep spiritual beliefs with intense political ones. And while appreciating the differences in the two worlds--render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's--practitioners respected both. While sometimes willful and defiant and sometimes passive to the point of self-extinction, the…