Putting the People Back in Politics
FREDERIC J. BROWN VIA GETTY IMAGES
In our recent Bridging Differences conversation in Education Week, Deborah Meier points out that schools are ideal places for people to learn how to engage in debate, especially if they are diverse in race and ethnic history.I'd add partisanship. In much of education, Republicans are the "other." And for all the gestures toward weighing of evidence and the importance of diverse ideas, the politics of educators (especially in higher education) is often highly moralized, dividing the world between the righteous and the damned, the latter usually described as ignorant bigots. Of course this is part of a broader pattern as well.
Today people think "politics" is a kind of warfare, funded by the superrich, revolving around parties, politicians, and professionals as detached experts. Citizens need to reclaim politics as the way to negotiate differences to get something done and work out how to live together. This was politics descending from the Greeks, revolving around the people in their role as citizens. I like Wynton Marsalis' description of democracy as like jazz, in Ken Burn's "Jazz": "an argument with the intent to work something out." It is also a description of citizen-centered politics.
How can we introduce children to citizen politics and its skills in our divided and demonizing world? And how can schools and classrooms be free spaces, sites for political education that builds democratic habits and democracy as a way of life?
One method is teaching and spreading what are called "deliberative practices." There is a growing movement to teach deliberation and its political skills- learning to cool the heat, listen to other people with different perspectives, and incorporate different ideas in "public judgment" not only "private opinion." The Kettering Foundation and the National Issues Forums have been leaders here. A forthcoming study by Stacey Molnar Main has shown striking increases in both teacher and student civic interests and skills among those who use deliberation.
At the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College, Dennis Donovan and Elaine Eschenbacher have been training students to moderate deliberative discussions and also to organize such discussions in communities.
A third example: Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy have a new book, The Political Classroom, which shows that many teachers, even the most partisan, are eager for students to hear radically different viewpoints. Teachers also experience pressure to "scrub" any controversy from their curriculum, so they need support in enacting this. Diana Hess is chair of the College of Education at UW-Madison.
In my experience, low income and minority students often deliberate more effectively than upper middle class professionals. Two recent experiences illustrate.
The first was a forum on "the legacy of slavery" several weeks ago that involved about 40 people. Almost all were upper middle class professionals from Putting the People Back in Politics:
