For the Common Good

In an essay entitled "Civic Education and Western Civilization," the Honorable William H. Young explores the evolution of civic education from the founding of the American Republic to our current crop of progressive educators, who seek to construct, in the words of their progressive forefather, John Dewey, “a new social order…which would eventually bring into being a democratic socialist society.”

Young identifies the university’s turn from the traditional ideal of civic virtue, sometime after the Second World War (roughly following the chronology found in Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind). In the place of civic virtue, social justice and identity politics have come to serve as standards of righteousness, in the quest to eliminate systemic oppression. In the service of multiculturalism, Young claims that the universities have revised their reading of American history such that “[o]ur children are no longer taught the principles of the Constitution such as: popular sovereignty through representatives and institutions; control of factions and interests through deliberative processes; and actions based on reason, the common good, and majority rule. Most of our younger citizens no longer understand the civic virtue on which our nation was founded.”

In particular, Young considers a recent initiative with the U.S. Department of Education and the Association of American Colleges and Universities aimed at developing “a national action plan to increase the visibility and impact of higher education’s efforts to advance students’ civic learning and democratic engagement.” The rhetoric of the project promises that higher education should produce “responsible and responsive” citizens critical of “societal ills,” thus prepared for “democratic engagement…to fully repair the broken societal compacts that are weakening the contemporary social fabric.”

Young is not impressed by their rhetorical flourish and sees beneath the metaphoric veneer to an anti-republican vision of democracy:

In Part III, of his essay, “Domestic Faction in a Republic,” George Seaver explains that postmodern multiculturalism “found that civic virtue imposed unacceptable hierarchies, privilege and oppression in society.” Virtue became a construct of the individual or cultural group, “with no significance of one over the other. Hierarchy was abhorrent, and any attempt to impose one led to ‘privileging’ and oppressing the ‘Other’ in society.” The antidote for such privileging was “social justice,” for the group, not the individual.

As Young concludes, we must understand the intrinsic link between civic virtue and the strength of our nation. Thus, Young exhorts NAS to “continue to seek the return of our colleges and universities to teaching the civic virtue that formed the founding basis for our nation. We can only hope that we are not, as Dr. Seaver observed, ‘like Cicero, past our time.’”