Polarization has become one of the defining threats to American democracy. The philosopher Robert B. Talisse distinguishes between two kinds of polarization: political and belief polarization.
Political polarization can be good for democracy, he argues, as democracy “presupposes political disagreement” among citizens who have staunch convictions. “Any response to the challenge of sustaining democracy that calls on citizens to set aside their rivalry is a dodge,” he writes.
But belief polarization undermines democracy by fostering groupthink, inciting people to become dogmatic, “less responsive to counterevidence,” and hostile toward those with differing views. This diminishes the quality of our lives—ruining friendships, unsettling families, and exacerbating anxiety. Polarization also impedes social progress as it enables politicians to be elected by stoking toxic culture rather than by doing the hard work of solving complex societal problems.
To address these issues, some schools have turned to civics content, media literacy, and dialogue initiatives. These efforts are well-intentioned, and civics knowledge is essential. But they misunderstand the problem. Polarization is more than a knowledge deficit. It is a self-government deficit.
I believe citizenship requires habits that can only be cultivated through experience. People must live with disagreement while sustaining relationships with a shared community. You cannot lecture students into those capacities. They have to practice them consistently.
Yet many students spend more than a decade in schools that emphasize compliance over agency. In that context, more civics content, while valuable, can leave the underlying problem untouched. To address polarization and prepare students to become stewards of democratic life, we need to rethink the culture of schooling.
The difference begins with how schools approach behavior. There is a fundamental distinction between managing students and teaching students to manage themselves. The first instills obedience; the second, agency. “If we train our children to take orders, to do things simply because they are told to,” John and Evelyn Dewey wrote in 1915. “We are putting an almost insurmountable obstacle in the way of overcoming the present defects of our system and of establishing the truth of democratic ideas.”
Agency and collective responsibility are the habits of democratic citizenship. One solution in the classroom is to invite students at the beginning of each school year to design behavioral norms: how they will treat one another and how they will comport themselves. This starts by asking students to talk about how they want to feel in school, for example, “protected,” “happy,” and “like I can be myself.” We then should ask: if that’s your goal, how should you act? From those discussions, students can develop a set of shared agreements.
Students can reference these agreements throughout the year, including during daily acknowledgments and apologies at the end of the school day. One afternoon, I observed this in a fourth-grade classroom. “I want to apologize to Brandon,” one boy said. “In math, I broke our commitment to not laugh when someone makes a mistake.” He looked at Brandon and said, “I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay,” Brandon replied. It is through such actions, repeated daily, that students begin to learn what it means to sustain a community.
Too often, civics education alone falls short if students learn how a bill becomes a law but spend 13 years in institutions that do not ask them to do the hard work of exercising judgment, taking responsibility, and sustaining respectful relationships.
Of course, every school needs rules and consequences, and students must be held accountable. But the deeper goal is to teach students to hold themselves accountable. This is how schools develop leaders rather than followers: students capable of moral reasoning, reflection, and responsibility.
Students must be taught the value of considered debate. They should be exposed to competing views and learn to articulate multiple sides of an issue. And instruction should be designed to cultivate intellectual curiosity. When encountering a new idea, a well-educated student does not immediately take a stance, but approaches it with humility and an interest in understanding its history, implications, and nuances.
Schools must defend free inquiry, reject dogma, and privilege the unencumbered search for truth. We need to teach students to reject the lazy path of conformity. We need to teach them that citizenship requires standing by your views, regardless of what is popular. That following the mob is neither cool nor sophisticated, and is certainly not independent thinking.
I fear that American public life has become more shallow, performative, and divided. But schools are one of the few places where democratic stewardship can still be deliberately cultivated. The consequences of not doing so risk further eroding our politics, our communities, and our civic culture.
When the United States established public education, it did so with a clear belief: schools are the essential incubators of democratic participation. As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, we need our schools to live up to this grand idea.
To do so, and to build a less polarized country, we cannot simply add more civics courses. The real test isn’t whether students can describe democracy. It is whether they’ve practiced it.
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