In his important new book, Ian MacMullen offers a philosophically sophisticated political theory of civic education. The question of how to cultivate good citizens of a democracy who are not mere subjects has long been a concern of students of politics. According to many political philosophers, from Aristotle to Tocqueville, and according to many political scientists, from Gabriel Almond to Robert Putnam, we learn how to become good citizens mainly by participating in local social and political institutions, ranging from bowling leagues to the PTA, from serving in the army to serving on juries. In this view, being a good citizen is not primarily something we are taught, but is something we learn in the course of belonging to and leading some of the myriad small platoons that make up a complex pluralistic democracy.
Ian MacMullen, following many other contemporary political theorists, such as Amy Gutmann, Dennis Thompson, William Galston, and Stephen Macedo, argues that these informal modes of political socialization are not adequate and that, in addition, children need deliberate instruction in civic virtue if they are to become good citizens. Most advocates of deliberate civic education look to schools, especially public schools, as vehicles for such instruction. MacMullen says that he is agnostic about the proper division of educational authority among parents, churches, voluntary associations, and schools. Yet his own conception of civic education proves so philosophically sophisticated that it is difficult to imagine implementing it anywhere but in a scholastic setting, ideally, a graduate school philosophy seminar.
MacMullen parts company with liberal civic educators over the role of moral autonomy in civic education. Most liberal civic educators want civic education to foster, above all, the development of critical thinking and independent judgment in future citizens; they understandably fear the use of state power to attempt to inculcate particular moral judgments, beyond the essential values of toleration and respect for the rights of others. Civics Beyond Critics is a largely persuasive effort to show that critical reasoning skills are not adequate if we seek to form citizens with the strength of character necessary for civic virtue in the face of very powerful temptations to shirk our civic duties and to free-ride on the virtue of others. MacMullen describes himself as a “value pluralist” in the tradition of Isaiah Berlin and Galston. He certainly values moral autonomy but not as an overriding value. He shows in great detail how moral autonomy can be in tension with other important civic values, which require a nonautonomous and even nonrational attachment to one’s polity and the trust to support its laws and institutions. Like the Rousseau whom he often quotes, MacMullen deploys reason to defend prejudice, and cosmopolitan values to defend parochial attachments. He also uses conservative and Burkean arguments to defend a bias in civic education in favor of existing institutions and laws. As always, he describes with great care the risks of presumptions for the status quo and the risks of critical assessment by young people of political institutions they have not fully understood. When a young person claims to be an atheist, the Solomonic MacMullen wisely says: “You don’t know enough to be an atheist!”
Where the author parts company with conservatives is his rejection of civic education aimed at patriotic love for one’s country. Unlike many theorists and advocates of patriotism, MacMullen does not define patriotism in terms of loyalty but in terms of love. He argues that patriotic love, like any form of love, blinds us to the vices of the beloved. He does not deny that some patriots have a balanced and just appraisal of their homeland. He just thinks that patriotic love too strongly biases us to see only the good; hence, in his view, it weakens our motivation to reform our own nation. MacMullen’s most innovative contribution to debates about civic virtue is his defense of civic identification instead of patriotic love. He claims that young people can be lead to identify with their polities without feeling affection for them. Such a person would feel pride when his country succeeds and shame when his country fails, just as we might feel pride and shame about the deeds of our own family. His distinction between civic identification and patriotic love is subtle and illuminating. Yet even he concedes that civic identification can be easily biased in favor of civic pride, in which case it would suffer the same debilities as patriotic love. He insists, however, that civic identification is a motive less intrinsically biased than is love.
Ultimately, this book is more a fine-grained study of the contours of civic virtue than it is a guide for the civic education of children. MacMullen describes with great care and subtlety, for example, how a conscientious person should think about the question: Why should I obey the law? His discussion of the interplay of intrinsic moral force and claims of legal authority, his discussion of better and worse reasons for obeying the law, and his discussions of when disobeying the law is permitted or required are all very insightful and illuminating. He is especially acute in identifying the keen temptations we all feel to shirk our civic duties and the need to develop the strength of character to resist them. To read his book is to witness a mature and sophisticated citizen reflecting upon the rational and nonrational sources of his own civic commitments. For adults who seek to become better citizens, MacMullen’s analyses of civic motivations are illuminating and helpful.
Civics Beyond Critics offers principles that political theorists could use to evaluate existing practices of civic education. MacMullen clearly hopes, in addition, that his book may provide guidelines in the design of curricula, both formal and informal, for the civic education of children. This does not seem feasible to me. The strength of the older tradition of political socialization is the recognition that we learn to become good citizens as adults by reflecting upon our own civic engagements. Yes, children can acquire some kinds of civic knowledge and some rudimentary civic skills; but MacMullen’s conception of civic education assumes knowledge and skill, and it is focused upon a delicate balancing of rational and nonrational motives in the exercise of those skills. His subtle principles are clearly beyond the competence not only of students but also of most teachers; they would require considerable conceptual sophistication to be put into practice.
MacMullen accepts the current orthodoxy that robust and healthy civic life requires that we teach civic virtue to children. But he discusses virtually no empirical evidence concerning whether virtue of any kind can be taught. There is a long history of attempts to teach civic virtue in schools and a large body of research designed to assess the effectiveness of those attempts. The results are not promising, to put it mildly. MacMullen himself notes that when students become aware that a teacher is attempting to alter their values, they usually reject the attempt. So his mode of civic education would have to be indirect and manipulative. In his conclusion, Macmullen concedes that attempts to shape students’ motivations by, for example, visiting prisons or hearing about the dangers of drug use often backfire. In the end, he is much more persuasive about the nature of civic virtue than he is about whether it could be imparted to children.
