Second, the civic knowledge that adults require is both continually expanding and incomplete at the same time. Each week, if not daily, developments challenge the capacity of citizens to respond with understanding and competence. Third, understanding the political environment requires engagement with it. Since the conditions are dynamic, there is much we cannot know until we try it. Only in the political process are certain kinds of insights possible.
Civic knowledge arises out of the interconnection between reflection and action.
The integral elements of adult civic education are information, values, and action. To practice democracy, citizens require information about complex local and national issues from air quality to zoning and the skills and wisdom to put the information to effective use. Thus knowledge about often increasingly technical issues, as a resource to be shared by citizens, as well as values, virtue, and moral judgments about political actions, are all inescapable elements in citizenship. An objective in adult civic education should be to help citizens learn how to use the aid of experts and qualified professionals in making public policy decisions while limiting it to citizen review and control. At the heart of choices about concrete and specific situations lie inescapable questions about often conflicting values.