Democratic Education to Reduce the Divide.

We should laud the Partnership for 21st Century Skills for highlighting civic literacy. Today, we have a much more robust understanding of what constitutes high-quality democratic education than we have ever had in the past, and this framework represents an opportunity for improving the civic and political literacy of our nation's youth. At the same time, we are witnessing an increasing "democracy divide" among young people based on educational quality and attainment. This divide presents a grave challenge to the very foundation of our democratic way of life. If left unchecked, it threatens to overwhelm the many positive elements of the Partnership's framework and other efforts at improving democratic education. What constitutes robust and powerful democratic education is clear. Due to the hard work of teachers, researchers, and democratic education programs, we know more about the influence of various approaches to democratic education than we did in the past. The Civic Mission of Schools (CMS) report--compiled by a wide variety of stakeholders and interest groups, ranging from the Heritage Foundation to the American Civil Liberties Union--identified six research-based components that constitute "best practice" in democratic education: (1) instruction in important content; (2) discussions of current events and controversial issues; (3) service learning; (4) participation in extra-curricular activities that teach civic skills; (5) participation in school governance; and (6) simulations of democratic processes. (1) Although the report does not delineate the precise content in component one that students should learn, there are two ideas that seem particularly important based on my experiences as a teacher and researcher. First, students should study and deliberate the contested meaning of democracy. On both theoretical and practical levels, people disagree about what democracy does and should mean. However, the glory of the very concept of democracy rests in the reality that it has yielded great benefits in the past and has the potential to continue to do so in this new century. Consequently, the meaning of democracy deserves careful and systematic teaching, not mere sloganeering. The dynamism inherent in the concept of democracy explains why its meaning has changed over time and will continue to do so in the future, which is precisely why it is so important to invite young people into the conversation about what it should mean. We also need to teach that a dynamic democracy is capable of both great progress and stunning defeats. We are very good at teaching students about the admirable progress of our nation across time, such as scientific and technological discoveries, standard of living improvements, and the extension of political rights and educational opportunities. However, that history also includes a period when the federal government used the "rule of law" to deny suffrage to millions of people. Moreover, at some points in U.S. history, portions of the population actually lost civic and political privileges. Recall, too, that at one time in the United States, thousands upon thousands of people rallied around the concept of "workplace democracy"--a potential advance in democratic life that we hear little about today, when most people are at-will employees. Unfortunately, things do not always get better. Creating a national narrative of pure progress is disingenuous and, consequently, does young people no favors. Much of a democracy's policy work involves preventing conditions from getting worse. If people have the false belief that the nation always moves in a forward direction, they are not likely to act politically so as to prevent harm. The developers of the framework of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills identified three important goals for civic literacy: "participating effectively in civic life through knowing how to stay informed and understanding governmental processes"; "exercising the rights and obligations of citizenship at local, state, national and global levels"; and "understanding the local and global implications of civic decisions 7 Although these objectives are reasonable and desirable aspirations for U. …