"Silent Night" 1914

 

In 2001, historian Stanley Weintraub published Silent Night, the true story of a spontaneous, if very informal and temporary, front lines truce in December 1914 between German and English troops during the first months of World War I.  In Silent Night, Weintraub describes a time when soldiers on both sides of that war found the common truths of their lives and tried to grasp anew the meaning of Christmas. 

Weintraub had recently retired as Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at Penn State, after heading Penn State’s Center for the Arts and Humanistic Studies.  An internationally known expert on George Bernard Shaw, Weintraub wrote widely about the people and events of the twentieth century.  Silent Night was the first of several books in which Christmas was the focal point of historical events.  Others included:  General Washington’s Christmas Farewell: A Mount Vernon Homecoming, 1783 (published in 2003); Eleven Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944 (published in 2006); General Sherman’s Christmas: Savannah, 1864 (published in 2009); and Pearl Harbor Christmas: A World at War, December 1941 (published in 2011).

In Silent Night, we learn that the Christmas Eve truce of 1914 was not an isolated event, but a series local truces that extended into Christmas Day, bringing German and British troops out of the trenches in different spots along the front to share holiday treats, sing songs, and, in some cases, play soccer with each other. Before returning to what would become a world war. 

The song Christmas 1915 by Irish musician Cormac MacConnell, tells a similar story.  It resonates this year, when our sense of ourselves once more is under fire, but in a way far different from those sad holidays a century ago. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG3l-OBdcPI&list=RDMMJG3l-OBdcPI&start_radio=1

Moving Toward a K-14 Educational System

 

One important aspect of the initial “infrastructure” debate in Washington was an Administration proposal to support the nation’s ability to fully embrace and lead the Information Revolution:  President Biden’s proposal to extend free public education beyond high school.

The Administration described the initiative as “free community college tuition.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, three quarters of new job hires are in occupations that require at least a baccalaureate degree.  However, two-thirds of American adults lack a degree.  The goal of offering free community college tuition was to greatly enhance the ability of young people to better prepare for jobs that require expertise beyond high school and, in the process, help to the economy—and society in general—adjust to rapid technological change.  

The stalemate on this issue is a symptom of the blindness among politicians and their backers to the nature of change that is underway in our society.  Extending access to schooling beyond high school is a critical need in our new society.  Just as the Industrial Revolution led to the creation of new public colleges and universities and the expectation that all citizens would have free access to high school, today’s transformation—whether you call it the Information Revolution or the Third Industrial Revolution—demands new skills of all of us, both in our role as workers and as citizens.

The idea of extending universal access to education beyond high school and into college has a precedent.  In the early 1900s, many adults did not attend high school.  They went through the eighth grade, but high school required them to pay tuition, so they dropped out and went to jobs in the new industrial economy.  As the impact of the Industrial Revolution increased, however, it became apparent that more education was needed to prepare students to compete for jobs—industrial and social—in the new environment.  As a result, communities began to fund access to high school, creating the K-12 model as we know it today.  Today, the majority of K-12 funding comes from States and local communities.  The federal government provides about 8 percent of the total K-12 funding in the form of grants that are then managed by the States.

The language that the Administration used to describe the proposed change was based on recent initiatives in New York and a few other states, where the State government allows in-state high school graduates to attend state-funded community colleges without paying tuition fees.  These experiments are a harbinger of change, but likely not an end in themselves. 

Long term, the solution is not simply free community college, but a fresh consideration of our society’s need for education in the new environment—a move from K-12 public education to a K-14 system.  Given that the proposed free tuition proposal was not accepted, here are some thoughts on how the Administration might act to set the stage for K-14 in the years ahead as part of a long-term vision for public education in the information society. 

A National Commission

President Biden should create a National Commission on K-14 Education to look at the need for universal K-14 schooling.  The Commission could begin by looking at the current experiments in free community college tuition and how a national initiative could build on those, but also consider related practical issues, such as how the innovation should be supported financially, how a K-14 education would relate to the rest of the undergraduate curriculum, and how a mature K-14 system might change both K-12 education and undergraduate collegiate education. 

Here are several implications that this National Commission might consider as it designs a national strategy for educational change:

Curriculum Integration There is a longstanding concern about duplication between high school and the first two years of college.  How many courses on American history are needed?  How many introductory algebra courses?  How many “Introduction to Physics” courses?  If a K-14 approach means that the percentage of high school students who go on to the general education curriculum at their local community college increases significantly, the Commission should look at how best to minimize unnecessary duplication.  At the same time, it should explore how best to fill classrooms that become available due to reducing duplication, perhaps by enhancing the array of career specialization courses. 

Dual Credit  One way that students have already begun to blend high school and college is by enrolling in college courses that allow students to earn college credit while also meeting high school graduation requirements.  It is one tool that schools can use to minimize duplication of instruction while also speeding up students’ progress to the associate degree (https://www.edglossary.org/dual-enrollment/).  What role should this play on the road to a K-14 system?

The Gap Year As we move toward an educational system in which most, if not all, young people spend a minimum of 14 years in education, we should also consider the value of a “gap year” for the long-term health of our youth and their ability to make good career choices.  One way to think about the gap year is to see it as a year of service, in which young people could work as volunteers in social service organizations or governmental agencies (national parks, for instance) or in social agencies that use the skills the students will gain.  A gap year might help students consider their personal and career goals.

Impact on Higher Education  How can K-14 best be structured in states where community colleges currently are not available in every county or regional educational unit?  Should other public institutions—state colleges and universities—be involved?   If high school graduates are encouraged to attend community college for their first two years of postsecondary education, this could have significant impact on four-year colleges and universities, which might conceivably lose significant numbers of students in their freshman and sophomore classes and, by extension, weaken the student pipeline to upper division courses that lead to baccalaureate degrees.

These are just a few of the issues that are sure to arise as a National Commission explores a pathway to a true K-14 educational environment.  This approach may be the more practical, less politically divisive way to explore the territory and build a new social contract to meet the needs of a mature post-industrial society.

            Thoughts?

“Mammals about to be born dream of the world to come.”

One of my favorite features of Harper’s magazine is “Findings,” a collection of briefly stated scientific facts strung together in a few paragraphs on the last page.  The October 2021 issue had this statement as the final “Finding” of the month:  “Mammals about to be born dream of the world to come.”

It is enticing to think: even before we are born, we are able to dream.  I had to learn more, so I did a web search.

It turns out that this finding is based on research done by Michael Crair, a professor and vice provost for research at Yale University.  He and his team studied images of the brains of mice shortly after birth but before their eyes opened.  They discovered that the mice’s retinal waves immediately after birth flowed in a pattern that mimics what would occur if the mouse was moving forward through the environment (Hathaway, para 6).  “These brain circuits are self-organized at birth and some of the early teaching is already done,” Crair said. “It’s like dreaming about what you are going to see before you even open your eyes.” (Hathaway, para. 12).

Crair and his team have given us a description of a pre-birth experience that benefits beings after they are born.  That said, on a philosophical level, when I read the “Finding” in Harper’s, the first thing I thought is what C.S. Lewis once said:  “We don't have a soul. We are a soul. We happen to have a body.”  

A Lesson from Ernest Hemingway

 

Here is a quick lesson on writing--or, more specifically, on what to do when NOT writing--from Ernest Hemingway.  Writing about his work room in Paris, he notes:

 

It was in that room too that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing about from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day.  That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it.  Going down the stairs when I had worked well, and that needed luck as well as discipline, was a wonderful feeling and I was free then to walk anywhere in Paris (A Moveable Feast, p. 13).

It is interesting advice that, I suspect, applies not just to writing.

Bob Ubell’s “Staying Online”

 

Many colleges and universities moved online over the past year in response to the COVID pandemic.  This year, many of those same institutions are considering the ongoing role of online learning in their overall teaching and learning environment as they seek to establish a new normal that better integrates virtual and face-to-face learning for the long run.

            Robert Ubell’s new book, Staying Online: How to Navigate Digital Higher Education is a powerful resource for administrators and faculty who are working to help their institutions make the most of an aspect of education that is moving quickly into the mainstream.  Many chapters in the book are adapted from essays that Ubell has published over the past few years, updated to best fit the new environment that online learning is helping to create today.  As he says in his introduction, “the aim of these extended essays is to explore which virtual practices are likely to be best for students, increasingly tossed unwittingly into unfamiliar digital academic environments. All have been updated and include more recent material to give shape and substance to earlier pieces requiring broader current perspectives.”  For readers, it provides the opportunity to have a veteran pioneer at your side as you plan your own innovations as we continue to respond to the emergency and, at the same time, build the basis for the post-pandemic environment.

            Ubell organized the chapters around four broad themes: (1) moving to online learning as an emergency resource during the pandemic, (2) theory and practice issues, (3) scaling up, and (4) problems and considerations facing institutions as they scale up.  A final chapter explores areas where has changed his mind about a topic since the essays were originally written.

            In many ways, Ubell suggests, the use of virtual education during the pandemic has provided a point of comparison with a properly designed online course.  “Most faculty had no time to prepare a virtual course that drew thoughtfully on valuable pedagogical methods, like active learning, project-based inquiry, and peer-to-peer instruction . . .Without planning faculty just take their face-to-face lectures and put them online.”  That experience has spurred new thinking about the design of online learning—the new normal that faculty and institutions are working to find while they manage the pandemic emergency.  The effect of the rapid pandemic-spurred conversion has been to give many faculty and their institutions a first experience with online learning at scale and an opportunity to consider what it takes to make the transition to this new environment.  The lesson he learned was that:

Teaching online demands that instructors find new ways of captivating students they often can neither see nor hear, a radical departure from centuries of conventional instruction. Virtual instruction does not depend on one’s expressive face, spirited movements, or an affecting speaking voice, but on altogether new pedagogies introduced in the last century and practiced by inventive early adopters in this century. To recover from the stumbling emergency semester, surely the first item on the higher ed agenda was to guide faculty in digital instruction best practices. 

In the “Theory and Practice” section, Ubell recounts his personal experience as a first-time online instructor, the obstacles he encountered, and the importance of instructional design and media development support in helping him find way in a new environment that encourages multiple kinds of engagement among faculty, students, and content.  He goes on to examine how innovation over the past quarter century has led to standards—endorsed by a variety of professional associations—that institutions can use to guide their own development and to address concerns about how ensure that the environment is truly serving the needs of an increasingly diverse student population.

A chapter on the “digital economy” explores the changing academic environment—the increase in adult learners, the decrease in traditional-aged students, the increasing need for continuing study as students move into the workplace, etc.—and changes in the faculty itself as higher education responds to sometimes dramatic economic and social changes—and how online learning itself is evolving as institutions use it to address the new environment.

            In the 1990s, when we were creating the World Campus, Penn State’s online campus, a friend and associate dean for outreach in one of Penn State’s colleges, gave me some very helpful advice.  “If you want to successfully lead innovation in a university,” she told me, “you have to become a scholar of that field.  You have to become the source of knowledge about the field you are leading.”  Staying Online helps today’s new leaders achieve that goal.  By sharing the experience and perspective of a successful elearning innovator, Staying Online allows innovators to better help their institutions scale up online learning in this rapidly evolving field. 

Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice

 

Just finished reading Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice by Bruce Levine.  As Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Halm noted in his review of the book,

“Often reviled and generally misunderstood, Thaddeus Stevens has been relegated to a dark corner of the American historical stage. The distinguished historian Bruce Levine not only brings Stevens back into the light but also reveals his significance to the revolutionary dynamic of the Civil War and Reconstruction.”

When many modern readers think of Thaddeus Stevens what may come to mind first is the curmudgeonly Congressman played by Tommy Lee Jones in Steven Spielberg’s great bio-pic, Lincoln.  While Jones apparently got the personality of Stevens right in the film, Stevens role in the nation’s struggle over slavery was much greater than most people understand.  In order to properly tell about Stevens’ contribution to American life, Levine gives us a detailed history of how issues of emancipation and racial equality evolved in the decades leading up to the American Civil War and during—and after—the war itself and of Stevens’ central role in shaping our concepts of racial equality that resulted.  It is a remarkable story—one not given much time in our high school history classes—of how American politics and culture dealt with the issues surrounding slavery while fighting what many now see as the Second American Revolution.

Stevens was born in Vermont in 1792 and suffered from a club foot all his life.  His father abandoned the family when Stevens was six, and he grew up in poverty.  However, his mother encouraged him to read and to get a good education.  Thanks to a New England culture that provided access to education for poor students, he was able to attend Dartmouth College and then taught school while he studied for his law degree.  In 1816, he moved to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he established himself as a lawyer.  He was elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 1833, where he advocated for public school system, and served as a delegate to the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention in 1836-37.  After losing re-election, he moved to Lancaster to build his law practice and was elected to the U.S. Congress. Over the next three decades, until his death in 1868, Stevens was an outspoken advocate for full emancipation of slaves and their acceptance as full citizens. 

What is intriguing about Levine’s book is the detail that he provides on how emancipation and related issues gradually developed in the years leading up to the Civil War and during the war itself.  Politicians were so concerned to attract the Confederates back into the Union that they were reluctant to make any demands on the slave-holding states, even to the point of being reluctant to allow escaped slaves to serve in the military.  The result is a fascinating look at this aspect of our history that few of us got in high school or college American history classes.  Given today’s climate, where we again as a nation are struggling to overcome the idea of racial distinctions, it is a powerful bit of historical narrative.

Stevens was in the midst of the debate over these issues and championed freedom throughout his career.  He wrote this epitaph for himself, which was carved into his monument in 1868 at the Shriner-Concord Cemetery, then the only racially integrated cemetery in Lancaster, Pa:

I repose in this quiet and secluded spot not from any natural preference for solitude.  But, finding other cemeteries limited as to race, by charter rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life: EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR.

Thaddeus Stevens is a great read and a great lesson for our times. 

Online Technology and the New Normal for K-12 Education

 

In September 2020, I posted some thoughts about the return to school in the midst of the COVID-19 surge and the idea of a “new normal” stimulated by the pandemic.  I ended with this note:

In short, the new normal will be one marked by continuing change.  The immediate challenge will be to remind ourselves of the foundational principles on which the new normal must be based and to articulate them for this new environment.  As we move through the pandemic, it would be good to keep an eye out for innovations that could—or should—be part of the new normal, whenever that may come.

 

This month, as my son prepares for a new year of teaching high school English next week and his sons get ready to start their years as sixth and eighth graders later this month, the public is focused mostly on the extent to which our schools—both K-12 and higher education—are prepared to require masks for both students and faculty, given the prospect of a new surge in COVID-19 cases due to the Delta variant.  Let’s put that issue aside for a minute and take a look at where we stand with the “new normal” and what might lie ahead for both teachers and students.

 

One sign of movement toward a “new normal” is that some schools will continue to offer virtual as well as in-class instruction, but will fine-tune how they do it.  Last year, my son had to teach both in-class and virtual students at the same time.  It was not an easy task, since his virtual students could see him only if he sat at his desk all the time.  This year, they are taking a new approach.  The school will offer virtual sections as well as classroom sections.  Students can choose which one they want to attend.  Teachers will have only one environment at a time.  This is clearly an improvement for both teachers and students and a good starting place for normalizing virtual instruction as an option in an otherwise face-to-face environment.

 

That said, we can also expect to see more “blended” or “hybrid” teaching and learning environments—courses for which the teacher mixes live classroom sessions with occasional online learning elements. 

 

There is no question that technology will play an important role in defining this new environment.  Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when innovation was stimulated at least in part by the space race and geopolitics—not to mention the explosion of baby boomers into K-12 classrooms—public broadcasting played an important role by providing content for teachers to use in their classrooms.  I worked at WPSU-TV back then, and every weekday, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. during the school year, we broadcast television series chosen by teachers for use in area classrooms across grade levels.  We also produced a number of instructional K-12 television series.  Two of my favorites were Investigative Science in Elementary Education (ISEE), which showed scientific phenomena at work as the basis for classroom investigations and experiments in grades 1-3, and What’s in the News, a weekly news series for middle-schoolers designed to stimulate classroom discussion of civics. 

 

I was delighted earlier this week to learn that Pennsylvania’s public television stations—working together as Pennsylvania PBS, are continuing to refine and expand the use of their broadcast signals to provide expanded video lessons and other resources to schools in the area through data-casting—sending digital content on the stations’ broadcast wavelength.  While datacasting provides access to a large collection of instructional resources, it is limited in that it is a one-way delivery system.  That is a problem in rural areas like Central Pennsylvania, where broadband is often unavailable.  However, the federal government’s new infrastructure plan includes funds to provide broadband nationally—the information revolution’s counterpart to interstate highways—which will allow teachers and students to interact with data and remote students and content experts and complete the instructional cycle.  Other states are also experimenting with datacasting K-12 content to schools and homes, so adding broadband ultimately will create a powerful new instructional resource for all students across the nation.

 

What other innovations might play an important role as the new normal takes shape?  Here are some thoughts based, in part, on the experience of higher education institutions over the past two decades:

 

Open Educational Resources (OERs) For almost two decades, higher education institutions have worked together to create and share online instructional materials that are open and available free of charge for any instructor anywhere to use.  An example is the Community College Consortium for OERs (CCCOER).  Another example is the Pressbooks Directory, which hosts more than 2,000 open access e-books that have been developed by college and university faculty members.  In the new normal, we can expect K-12 schools and teachers to increasingly share locally developed instructional resources through a curated OER platform.  One example is Open-Up Resources, which describes itself as “a 13-state initiative to address quality gaps in the curriculum market.”  I would also expect to see other sharing collaboratives emerge at local, state, and regional levels to give teachers direct ability to share lesson plans, study guides, and other locally developed teaching materials with colleagues within a school district and in other districts that have a shared curriculum.  Public Broadcasting—whether it be within a station’s service area or among stations across service areas statewide, regionally, or nationally—can play an important role in encouraging and supporting access to K-12 OER sharing through datacasting services.

 

Course Sharing As online learning began to mature and be accepted in the higher education community in the 1990s—and as more and more institutions adopted online courses for local/regional use—institutions began to work together to share courses and share students. One example is the Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance (IDEA).  Universities in the Midwest have created online degree programs that integrate courses from several institutions.  Students enroll in a degree program at their local institution, but take online courses from several institutions as part of the curriculum.  Rather than compete, the institutions combine resources to ensure that all students have access to the best possible courses in a discipline.  In the K-12 arena, this kind of sharing might focus on sharing specialized courses, such as STEM courses that prepare graduating high school students to move into technical jobs after graduation.

 

Dual Enrollment High schools may also want to work with local colleges and universities to offer selected online undergraduate courses for dual enrollment, allowing high school students to earn both high school graduation credits and college credits toward an undergraduate certificate or degree.  

 

The Pandemic has been a shock to the system for K-12 education, but one which K-12 teachers have already begun to use to create a new normal for education in the Information Society.  It is a process that will extend well into the decade but that will create an educational environment responsive to the societal and technological changes that are now underway.

Acting on "These Truths"

 

In These Truths, author Jill Lepore paints the landscape of American history focusing on how Americans acted on the values that were described in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and other key historical documents and how the ongoing struggle over these truths shaped—and continues to shape—American politics and culture.

Toward the end of the book, she describes the social changes that began in the 1960s, many rooted in interpretations of the Constitution, that have continued to shape American culture and politics over the past few decades, in the process creating the divisions that plague our culture.  She writes:

In the waning decades of the twentieth century, liberals and conservatives alike cast the lingering divisions of the 1960s less as matters of law and order than as matters of life and death.  Either abortion was murder and guns meant freedom or guns meant murder and abortion was freedom.  How this sorted out came to depend upon party affiliation. ‘The economy, stupid’ became the mantra of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, when he tried to set aside the guns and abortion divide. That proved impossible.  Especially after the Cold War came to an end, a domestic cold war began uncompromising, all-or-nothing, murder or freedom, life or death (p. 648).

She goes on to examine the issues that began to divide the country in the waning days of the Cold War and that have continued to shape society for the past 50 years as three generations have tried to adapt to a society increasingly affected by technology and by an increasingly diverse culture.  With each issue, we may have found a middle ground, but in each case, the uncompromising extremes have driven us further apart. 

The list of issues that have created our divided society is long.  It begins with the longstanding issue of women’s rights, from voting rights to a woman’s control over her own body to issues of sexual freedom.  Lepore also discusses a wide range of other factors that have contributed to today’s oppositional politics:

·      Removing religion from public life

·      Race and Segregation

·      Taxation and the role of central government versus local government versus business

·      Gun control and interpretation of the Second Amendment

·      Immigration

·      “Originalism” in the judicial system

·      Nuclear weapons freeze

·      LGBTQ Rights

·      Personal Privacy Rights

·      Voting Rights

These are issues that people of my generation, who came of age in the sixties, have lived with all of our adult lives.  They have been part of the texture of daily life in America and beyond for decades, with one result being that we tend take them for granted as part of the environment rather than seeing them together in context and understanding their impact on the health of our overall democratic political and social cultures.

Another key issue that Lepore notes is the evolution of communications technologies and the impact of ending the Fairness Doctrine, which forced media outlets to present current events objectively.  The days of Walter Cronkite and Huntley & Brinkley are long gone.  Rather than seek out fairness in the news, we all tend to drift to news sources that reflect and reinforce our own biases, making it even harder to find a common understanding and shared values that brings our increasingly diverse population into a unified community based on shared values and truths, in which our differences allow us more ways to understand new phenomena rather than keep us at odds with other.  By the time of the Clinton Administration’s scandals, Lepore writes, “The nation had lost its way in the politics of mutually assured epistemological destruction.  There was no truth, only innuendo, rumor, and bias.  There was no reasonable explanation; there was only conspiracy” (These Truths, p. 711).

Our Common Purpose

 

This increasingly volatile environment is what spurred the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to establish a Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship in 2018, with the goal “to explore how best to respond to the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in our political and civic life and to enable more Americans to participate as effective citizens in a diverse 21^st-century democracy.”  They published their report, Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century , in June 2020.  As Academy President David Oxtoby notes in his introduction:

 

Throughout our country’s history, the American people have confronted moments of crisis with resilience and an openness to reinvention, enabling our nation to become a better version of itself. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the members of this Commission recognized that we found ourselves at a similar crossroads. The recommendations in this report touch all sectors of American life and offer a bold path that will require all of us to commit to reinventing aspects of our constitutional democracy. The realities of a disruptive media and information environment, outdated political institutions, economic and social inequality, and hyper-partisan political leadership have laid bare the urgency of this imperative. The Commission challenges us to achieve significant progress toward its recommendations by 2026, our nation’s 250th anniversary (Our Common Purpose, Section 1, para. 3).

The Commission identified 31 recommendations gathered within six strategies:

1.     Achieve Equality of Voice and Representation – This strategy includes eight recommendations, including enlarging the House of Representatives and the Electoral College to make them more representative of the population, setting limits on Supreme Court appointments, eliminate gerrymandering, and making election funding fairer.

 

2.     Empower Voters – The goals are to make the voting process less burdensome by giving voters more opportunity to vote—making election day a national holiday, for instance—automatically register eligible voters, and make voter participation in the election process mandatory.

 

3.     Ensure the Responsiveness of Political Institutions – Expand opportunities for citizen participation in the political process beyond voting so that citizens can better shape decision-making, budgeting, and policy at all levels; and provide better citizen access to elected officials so that citizens have more effective input into governance.

 

4.     Dramatically Expand Civic Bridging Capacity – This strategy calls for the creation of a National Trust for Civic Infrastructure to improve leadership at all levels and to build bridges to those who previously had little access to civic leadership opportunities.

 

5.     Build Civic Information Architecture that Supports Common Purpose—This strategy focuses on what the report calls, “the intersection of digital platforms, academic research, policy-making, jurisprudence, and economics” with the goal of re-designing our information technology-based platforms to better support constitutional democracy and our sense of purpose as a society.  This includes requiring for-profit social media outlets to provide “public-friendly digital spaces” on their media platforms. 

6.     Inspire a Culture of Commitment to American Constitutional Democracy and One Another –The five recommendations in this strategy are focused on ensuring the future.  They “aim to inspire a culture of commitment to American constitutional democracy and to one another. They imagine a future in which every American is expected to perform a year of national service and is paid for doing so. They envision national conversations to reconcile the noble aspects of our history with our greatest sins; a vibrant ecosystem of gatherings, rituals, ceremonies, and public debates in which Americans discuss what it means to be a citizen; and public media efforts that support grassroots engagement. They demand that we invest in civic education and educators for all ages.

Jill Lepore has reminded us that, for the last half-century or more, we have seen our democracy gradually pulled apart by issues that led us to take sides rather than to find common cause with our fellow citizens.  It has happened bit by bit, issue by issue, but over the past few years, it has also been a clear strategy of a political movement committed to pushing “these truths” aside in favor of gaining absolute power.  The report of the Academy of Arts and Sciences makes an excellent case that it is time for us to stop and forge a path of government that respects and builds on the core values—the truths—that define American democracy. 

 

------

Lepore, Jill.  These Truths. New York: W.W. Norton, 2018.

 

Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship. Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2018. Retrieved from the web at: https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose