In a Chronicle of Higher Education article published about a month ago, a pair of authors from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) opined that Republicans might "Save the Humanities".
This is also an interesting post to consider re: the skills necessary for civic engagement. Is the goal to create political hobbyists with the wrong skill set to do the real thing?
> the incentives are just totally screwed up when we do this kind of political hobbyism. The other big problem, and I think we see whenever the hobbyists try to show up in real life for the first time, is that they’ve learned all of the wrong skills for politics. You've learned how to sort of emote and express yourself and get your point across and feel good. And then when you go do real politics, you realize, shoot, the goal here is to get other people to agree with me and to build some kind of majority coalition.
> When are we engaged in strategic behavior? ... in politics, in real politics, that's what it's like too, because you've got to build that coalition. In hobbyism, you're practicing this crazy alternative skill. And so that's why you see sometimes a bunch of people descend on a school board meeting or show up on a campus protest and just say insane things that are super provocative, because they've learned the totally wrong skill set for this.
I'm really glad to see these kinds of programs proliferate. I don't get why they're only part of a conservative agenda. I keep asking myself what is college for? Yes, job/career prep. But a close second? Becoming a good citizen and member of society. (A close third -- or maybe it would be ranked first or second: "general education" as an intrinsic good.)
These paragraphs from the article stood out to me.
> No discipline now operating in our colleges systematically seeks to understand and develop the capacity for acting and thinking like a citizen. While political science seeks to understand political life, it does so not from the engaged standpoint of the citizen, but from the detached standpoint of the scientific observer of human behavior. There is space for the development of a humanistic discipline of political life.
> If, however, political pressure drives new programs in civic education to devolve into a “catechism,” as Collins warned, they will be vulnerable to the critique...
> The leaders of these programs also need to make clear that they understand that an academic program is not the public square... there is a difference between the freedom of speech that characterizes a public marketplace of ideas and the academic freedom that allows for the unfettered development of scholarship. The broadening of views these programs aim to introduce to campus should be in the service of improving scholarship, not replicating the polarized echo chambers of the contemporary public arena.
Why is engaged citizenship, the workings of the public square, the freedom of speech necessary for a marketplace of ideas somehow foreign to academic research or the goals of higher ed?
A second immediate thought comes to mind. It might not be the 18-22 year olds who need basic education along these lines the most. Without a civically competent adult population, what are the youth going to do? Then again, just like we now have whole generations of digital natives, it might be time to cultivate a whole new generation of civically-minded natives, a mindset all but lost on their seniors.
This is also an interesting post to consider re: the skills necessary for civic engagement. Is the goal to create political hobbyists with the wrong skill set to do the real thing?
> the incentives are just totally screwed up when we do this kind of political hobbyism. The other big problem, and I think we see whenever the hobbyists try to show up in real life for the first time, is that they’ve learned all of the wrong skills for politics. You've learned how to sort of emote and express yourself and get your point across and feel good. And then when you go do real politics, you realize, shoot, the goal here is to get other people to agree with me and to build some kind of majority coalition.
> When are we engaged in strategic behavior? ... in politics, in real politics, that's what it's like too, because you've got to build that coalition. In hobbyism, you're practicing this crazy alternative skill. And so that's why you see sometimes a bunch of people descend on a school board meeting or show up on a campus protest and just say insane things that are super provocative, because they've learned the totally wrong skill set for this.
From: https://www.persuasion.community/p/eitan-hersh-on-the-perils-of-political
I'm really glad to see these kinds of programs proliferate. I don't get why they're only part of a conservative agenda. I keep asking myself what is college for? Yes, job/career prep. But a close second? Becoming a good citizen and member of society. (A close third -- or maybe it would be ranked first or second: "general education" as an intrinsic good.)
These paragraphs from the article stood out to me.
> No discipline now operating in our colleges systematically seeks to understand and develop the capacity for acting and thinking like a citizen. While political science seeks to understand political life, it does so not from the engaged standpoint of the citizen, but from the detached standpoint of the scientific observer of human behavior. There is space for the development of a humanistic discipline of political life.
> If, however, political pressure drives new programs in civic education to devolve into a “catechism,” as Collins warned, they will be vulnerable to the critique...
> The leaders of these programs also need to make clear that they understand that an academic program is not the public square... there is a difference between the freedom of speech that characterizes a public marketplace of ideas and the academic freedom that allows for the unfettered development of scholarship. The broadening of views these programs aim to introduce to campus should be in the service of improving scholarship, not replicating the polarized echo chambers of the contemporary public arena.
Why is engaged citizenship, the workings of the public square, the freedom of speech necessary for a marketplace of ideas somehow foreign to academic research or the goals of higher ed?
A second immediate thought comes to mind. It might not be the 18-22 year olds who need basic education along these lines the most. Without a civically competent adult population, what are the youth going to do? Then again, just like we now have whole generations of digital natives, it might be time to cultivate a whole new generation of civically-minded natives, a mindset all but lost on their seniors.