Civic Education, Civic Engagement, and Youth Civic Development

Alan R. Gitelson is professor of political science at Loyola University, Chicago. His most recentpublications include American Government, 7th Edition Iwith Robert L Dudley and Melvin DubnickJ, andAmerican Elections: The Rules Matter {with Robert L. DudleyJ. He serves as a member of the American PoNitical Science Association Standing Commiffee on Education and Professional Development. He can be reached at agitels@luc.edu. In one of her first acts as president of the American Political Science Association in 1996, Elinor Ostrom created the "Task Force on Civic Education for the Next Century." Ostrom pointed to the need to address contemporary, "deep concerns about the viability of democracy in America. . .," concerns rooted in the perceived "decline in civic engagement, political efficacy, and in the capacity of citizens to organize themselves...." Ostrom went on to argue for a number of remedies to deal with the need for greater civic education and civic engagement in the United States (1996, 755-58). The discussion that Ostrom opened, led to the establishment, in 2002, of an APSA standing committee on Civic Education and Engagement. Of course, the roots of this discussion are far deeper than recent APSA initiatives. Theorizing on the conditions necessary to sustain civic responsibility in a political regime can be traced back to ancient political theory. Similarly, the role, status, and evolution of civic education and engagement, particularly among American youth, preoccupied much of the work of Progressives (e.g., Dewey 1900, 1916). Indeed, many of the Progressive reformers devoted considerable attention to the link between education and citizenship. Post World War II political scientists reentered this discussion with the creation of a distinct field known as political socialization. 1967; Hess and Torney 1967) and their sense of nationality (Davies 1968) proliferated in the 1960s and 1970s. So prodigious were students of political socialization that by the end of the 1960s Greenstein declared, "Political socialization is a growth stock" (1970, 969). Political socialization research may have been a growth stock in 1970 but by 1985 Timothy Cook (1985) was pointing out that the bull market had turned decidedly bearish. The number of publications in political socialization between 1977 and 1982 markedly declined and more importantly the number of articles dealing with those younger than high school seniors all but disappeared from political science journals. As Cook (1985, 1080) noted, "childhood . . . disappeared in political science." This rapid decline is often attributed to methodological quarrels centering on the use of survey instruments. Many researchers began to doubt the validity of administering survey instruments to children. Indeed, to some, the responses gleamed from surveys were simply nonattitudes, susceptible to instability and produced by the children's willingness to provide socially correct answers, further contaminated by response set bias (Kolson and Green 1970; Connel 1972; Vaillancourt 1973). But methodological qualms alone cannot explain the fall from favor that political socialization research experienced. Although survey research was the dominant methodology, inventive researchers found other ways to address the questions. Greenstein (1975), for instance, used semi-projective tests and Merelman (1971) used hypothetical dilemmas. For Cook, the decline of political socialization research in the late 1970s is attributable to the failure to take into account psychological models of development. The field's focus on the attitudes of children lead researchers to ignore, sometimes unintentionally, other times quite intentionally (see Greenstein 1970), the fundamental questions of cognition.