CULTURE & SOCIETY

The Civic Education Crusade: A Heretic’s Analysis

Carl L. Bankston III

Published online: 8 October 2013
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

In January 2012, the National Task Force on Civic Learning
and National Engagement of the Association of American
Universities and Colleges released its report, A Crucible
Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future. The re-
port called for a program of civic learning and of training in
civic engagement that would pervade every aspect of higher
education. This program would be linked to similar efforts at all
other levels of schooling. In the words of the report, “[t]he
central work of advancing civic learning and democratic en-
gagement in higher education must, of course, be done by
faculty members across disciplines, by student affairs pro-
fessionals across divisions, and by administrators in every
school and at every level. The fourth prominent group of actors
are the students themselves [bold in the original]. The collec-
tive work of these groups should be guided by a shared sense
that civic knowledge and democratic engagement, in concert
with others and in the face of contestation, are absolutely vital
to the quality of intellectual inquiry itself, to this nation’s future,
and to preparation for life in a diverse world” (p. 2). It called for
fostering “a civic ethos across all parts of campus and educa-
tional culture” (p. 31) (See: http://www.aacu.org/civic_learning/
crucible/documents/crucible_508F.pdf).

Although the report was not particularly original or well-
written, I read it with interest for several reasons. First, I am
one of those “faculty members” mentioned in the report, and I
always pay attention when people want to re-write my job
description. Second, I work in a university in which “civic
engagement” became the official dogma a half-decade ago .
Third, I recently published a book on education as American
civil religion and I see the contemporary civic engagement
movement as an extension of our national educational faith. In

the present essay, I want to pass over the personal sources of
interest and focus on the third. Looking at the effort to use
instruction for citizenship training as a development of civil
religion can help us understand the reasoning and motivations
behind this effort and some of the problems with this type of
campaign, particularly in higher education.

Background: The History of American Education
as Civil Religion

In Public Education—America’s Civil Religion: A Social
History (2009), Stephen J. Caldas and I drew on sociologist
Robert N. Bellah’s concept of American civil religion to look
at the development of American schooling. We argued that
Bellah’s controversial idea was not only useful for understand-
ing the history of education in this country, but that his three
major periods in the national faith (from the founding to the
Civil War, from the Civil War to the mid-twentieth century,
and from the time of the civil rights movement onward) were
closely linked to the development of ideas about schooling.
We maintained that education was both a means of propagat-
ing the doctrines of civil religion and consistently a key tenet
of those doctrines.

Looking at the period of the emerging common schools,
during the first half of the nineteenth century, we found that
influential Americans of the time already saw schooling as a
way to remake the nation and to remake their fellow citizens
according to an ideal national image. As early as 1800, Noah
Webster’s Blue Backed Speller presented a “Federal
Catechism,” aimed at inculcated a Constitutional and
Federalist set of beliefs, as well as a social morality. By the
second third of the century, educators such as Horace Mann
were describing the commons schools as the machinery that
could produce the right types of citizens for American democ-
racy. These educators often sounded utopian in their faith in

C. L. Bankston III (*)
Department of Sociology, Tulane University, 220 Newcomb Hall,
New Orleans, LA 70118, USA
e-mail: cbankst@tulane.edu

Soc (2013) 50:629–634
DOI 10.1007/s12115-013-9728-z

http://www.aacu.org/civic_learning/crucible/documents/crucible_508F.pdf
http://www.aacu.org/civic_learning/crucible/documents/crucible_508F.pdf


the power of universal schooling to create a new order of the
ages. Based mainly in the northeast, the apostles of education
often pointed to the widespread availability of schooling in
their region as one of the keys to their superiority over the
slave states. When the Civil War ended, missionary efforts at
spreading schooling among freedmen and others played a
large part in Reconstruction.

American educational ideology as we know it today de-
rives some its character from the era of the common schools.
But our modern institution of education is really a post-Civil
War phenomenon. Schools and especially the system of public
schooling spread throughout the U.S. as it entered a period of
unification in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Nationalism was one of the great themes of the Progressive
Era, the time that shaped schooling as an institution in this
country. During the heyday of Progressivism, schools became
central to the American civil religion in two respects. First,
they were means of conveying beliefs about the nation. Flag
ceremonies, the pledge of allegiance, national celebrations,
and reverential narratives of the founders became standard
events in American public schools, which served as churches
of the American civil religion. Second, public schooling itself
took a key position in the American creed. Schools would
create national unity; they would enable individuals to devel-
op their talents according to their natures; they would train
citizens for a democratic society; they would socialize an
efficient workforce; they would create a new and more perfect
society.

One effect of the legacy of Progressive education was to
firmly establish the idea that schooling was the way in which
American society could reach the fullness of its ideals. The
period between the two World Wars saw a continuation and
extension of Progressive education. On the one hand, the idea
of education as a means of cultivating nationalism and shaping
the future citizenry for economic and civic participation be-
came deeply entrenched. On the other, Progressive educators
throughout the twentieth century saw schools as tools for
engineering a better society. For example, the influential “so-
cial reconstructionist” George S. Counts believed that the
American people needed to be transformed in order to be
suited to his vision of the American future, and that schools
were the places to achieve the transformation. In his pamphlet,
The Schools Can Teach Democracy, initially delivered as an
address before the Progressive Education Association on
Washington’s Birthday in 1939, Counts argued that the
proper business of schools was to create a democratic
society through cultivating “democratic habits, disposi-
tions, and loyalties,” as well as relevant political knowl-
edge in students (p. 22). Through schooling, “the entire nation
would be subjected to the most critical examination for the
purpose of revealing submerged and exploited regions, occu-
pational groups, and racial, national, and religious minorities”
(p. 26).

World War II and the Cold War intensified the emphasis on
the nationalistic side of the American creed in schools. In
addition, the postwar period saw the beginning of greater
federal involvement in schooling. Although nationalism had
long been at the heart of the civic faith taught by the schools,
education had always been highly local in its support
and control. As federal participation increased, Americans
also spent much greater portions of their lives in educational
institutions. By the 1950s, the overwhelming majority of
Americans were finishing high school and growing numbers
were going on to college. Expanding economic opportunities,
often linked to rising levels of formal education, fostered the
belief that upward mobility should be available to all and gave
a new twist to the doctrine of social reconstructionism in
American education. Americans believed both that ev-
eryone should be better off in the surrounding abun-
dance and that each individual should get ahead through
free competition. With their history of national faith in
education, Americans often portrayed schools simultaneous-
ly as fields of meritocratic competition and as arenas of
equalization. With ever greater proportions of the student
population going on to college, belief in schooling as the
means to create a more prosperous, just, and egalitarian future
began to include higher education, as well as the primary and
secondary levels.

The most recent great crisis in American civil religion came
in the 1960s and 1970s, with the civil rights movement and its
immediate aftermath. Schooling continued to be both a vehi-
cle of faith and an article of faith, but the moral drama of the
movement reshaped the tenets of national beliefs. The defin-
ing characteristic of this reshaping was a heightening of the
emphasis on egalitarian goals, especially through the inclusion
of disadvantaged categories of people. Following the turning
point of this era, a new and intensified social reconstruction-
ism came to dominate the thinking of many educational
theorists. In schools Americans would be taught the values
of diversity, inclusion, and tolerance. Schools themselves
could be re-structured in order to remake American society.
“If we want a segregated society,” remarked the eminent
social scientist Christopher Jencks in his 1972 book
Inequality, “we should have segregated schools. If we want
a desegregated society, we should have desegregated schools”
(p. 106). The comment sounds incontrovertible: what reason-
able person, especially in the post-civil rights movement era,
wants a racially segregated society? But it betrays the belief
that it is possible to change an entire society by changing its
schools. Educational institutions would be the means of cre-
ating an egalitarian and inclusive future and the means of
propagating commitment to an ideology of egalitarianism
and inclusiveness.

The federal government became even more active in edu-
cation from the time of the civil rights movement onward and
improving American society through the schools became

630 Soc (2013) 50:629–634



central to federal education policy. In 1965, urged by President
Lyndon Johnson, Congress passed the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which made large sums
of money available to school districts. However, this money
could be withheld from districts that failed to comply with the
provisions of the Civil Rights Act, passed the previous year. As
part of the War on Poverty, moreover, Title I of the ESEA
directed funds to schools and school districts that held high
percentages of low-income students.

Federal support for higher education grew at the same time,
promoted by similar social reconstructionist aims. In
November 1965, President Johnson proudly signed the
Higher Education Act (HEA). The HEA provided need-
based scholarships, part-time jobs, and interest-free loans for
low-income students, with the idea that all high school grad-
uates should be able to go on to higher education. The HEA
was conceived of as a partner to the ESEA, bringing higher
education into closer coordination with elementary and sec-
ondary schooling.

In 1972, Congress made new provisions for subsidizing the
college educations of low-income students in postsecondary
schooling when it introduced Basic Educational Opportunity
Grants, which became known as Pell Grants after Rhode Island
Senator Claiborne Pell, who was the bill’s primary sponsor. For
those judged to have exceptional financial need, Pell Grants
were later supplemented with Federal Supplementary
Educational Opportunity Grants. By the 1970s, then, the na-
tional faith in education had taken a definite turn toward social
reconstructionism, federal involvement in education had in-
creased greatly, and all levels of schooling were becoming more
tightly coordinated. The social reconstructionist ideology and
the close integration of educational institutions and government
became the foundations of the contemporary civic engagement
movement.

The Rise of the Civic Engagement Movement

The belief in education as a vehicle for teaching a doctrine of
social reform and a means of bringing about social reform
took firm hold in the years around the civil rights movement.
The National Service-Learning Clearinghouse begins its his-
tory of service learning, a central facet of the civic engagement
movement, by recounting that “[t]he civil rights movement of
the 1960s, and the formation of the Peace Corps in 1961, and
Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) in 1965 brought a
new passionate energy to activist education by engaging
young people and giving them real opportunities to make a
difference in the world. It was during this time period that the
early pioneers of the service-learning movement began to
emerge and attempted to combine ‘service’ to ‘learning’ in a
direct and powerful way” (See: http://www.servicelearning.
org/history-service-learning-higher-education).

The Clearinghouse website tells us that this sixties-era
passion to put learning in the service of social causes led to
conference on college service learning in Atlanta in 1969,
sponsored by the Southern Regional Education Board, the
City of Atlanta, the Atlanta Urban Corps, Peace Corps,
Vista, and the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and
Welfare. The conference ultimately recommended that all
colleges and universities should encourage community ser-
vice, integrate it into academic activities, and give academic
credit for community service. Institutions of higher education,
the conference suggested, should make opportunities and
funds available for service learning. Finally, community ser-
vice and service learning should be planned and run by
students, faculty, and public and private agencies.

Barbara Jacoby and Associates, authors of the manual
Civic Engagement in Higher Education: Concepts and
Practices (2009) agree that the push for service learning that
came out of 1960s activism gave rise to the modern civic
engagement movement. While the movement started with the
activist commitments of individuals, though, from this very
beginning the movement clearly entailed efforts to institution-
alize these commitments and to make them into totalizing
government-college programs, in which all students, faculty,
and officials would work together to affirm officially ap-
proved beliefs about citizenship and social and to put these
beliefs into practice.

Jacoby and Associates trace the rise of a new wave of civic
engagement advocates to the 1980s and 1990s, when many in
academic and policy making circles became concerned that
Americans were excessively individualistic and that this was
undermining the nation’s cooperative foundations. My co-
author and I have argued the 1980s and 1990s were a time
of anxiety about the nation’s economic competitiveness and
that a new emphasis on standardized testing and on nation-
wide educational goals grew out of the historically shaped
civic faith that all public problems are rooted in education and
can be solved through education. This faith combined with the
heightened federal involvement and tightened coordination of
levels of schooling to produce the first nation-wide goals for
American education in George H.W. Bush’s utopian “Goals
2000,” created between the Charlottesville Education Summit
and the Goals 2000 Act of 1994. This anxiety over the
country’s future and the faith in education as the answer to
all problems also produced the National and Community
Service Act, which the same President Bush signed into law
in 1990 to support service learning and service programs for
students at all levels, including college students. Under the
guidance of the federal government, every level of education
would be standardized and coordinated to serve national goals
and to consolidate Americans into a committed and coopera-
tive national community.

Calls for service and engagement drew heavily on popular
versions of social capital theory. This theoretical perspective

Soc (2013) 50:629–634 631

http://www.servicelearning.org/history-service-learning-higher-education
http://www.servicelearning.org/history-service-learning-higher-education


most often argues that social ties are investments that people
make in each other that help them achieve individual and
collective goals. The most influential social capital argument
during the 1990s shared the general anxiety over the state of
American civic health. This was the “bowling alone” argu-
ment of political scientist Robert Putnam, who maintained that
the participation of Americans in communal activities, such as
bowling leagues, parent-teacher organizations, and clubs had
declined and that this decline was indicative of a loss of
national social capital. Readers of Alexis de Tocqueville
may recognize this as an updated version of Tocqueville’s
identification of voluntary associations as the foundation of
American democracy. Rebuilding America’s supposedly
diminishing stock of social capital through promoting the
civic involvement of citizens became one of the main goals
of the educational social reconstructionists by the beginning of
the twenty-first century.

The new wave of federally supported and encouraged
community service in schools accompanied federally promot-
ed standardized educational assessments throughout the ad-
ministrations of the three presidents who followed the first
President Bush. The Clinton Administration, for example,
presided over the passage of the National and Community
Service Trust Act of 1993, which created the Corporation for
National and Community Service.

The American Association of Colleges and Universities
(AAC&U) has been an outspoken advocate for service-
learning and civic engagement education. It should be noted
that the AAC&U is a highly politicized organization with its
own distinctive view of how American society should be
reconstructed and a fondness for expressing this view in the
millenarian rhetoric of “struggles” and “calls to action.”
Immediately after the election of President Barack Obama in
2008, the AAC&U issued a statement applauding the presi-
dent’s election as a “…historic moment made possible by
many years of struggle” (See: https://www.aacu.org/about/
statements/2008electionstatement.cfm). Not surprisingly, the
AAC&U has had close ties to the Obama administration and
its task forces operate as federal policy planning committees.

The AAC&U’s most recent task force on Civic Learning
and Democratic Engagement released its “call to national
action” at an official White House event with the melodramat-
ic title, “For Democracy’s Future: Education Reclaims Our
Civic Mission,” sponsored by the White House Office of
Public Engagement and the U.S. Department of Education.
A Crucible Moment builds on the belief that education offers
the means of meeting the individual needs of all Americans
and reconstructing American society. It cites a breathtaking
array of “pressing issues,” including “growing global eco-
nomic inequalities, climate change and environmental degra-
dation, lack of access to quality health care, economic

volatility, and more.” The answer to all of these problems lies
in “expanding students’ capacities to be civic problem-
solvers.” The report does not go into detail about how the
professors and teachers, who do not necessarily possess such
great social problem solving skills, will produce this genera-
tion of superbeings, but it does recommend that institutions
foster what is variously called a “democratic ethos” and a
“civic ethos” on every campus through “service learning”
and “community engagement.” Whatever its limitations, this
federally sponsored report certainly does not fall short in its
belief that through education all things are possible.

The Civic Education Doctrine and Higher Education:
Problems and Contradictions

In pointing out that education has historically been a central
element in the evolving American national faith, I am not
suggesting that commitment to the American nation per se is
a bad thing, nor am I suggesting that schooling has no part to
play in socializing young Americans, producing a thoughtful
and knowledgeable citizenry, or preparing us to meet the
demands of our economy. The danger of faith, though, is that
it tends to lead us to assume rather than to examine. In this
case, we tend to take education as a panacea. We do not
consider carefully what it can do and what it should do. We
often take it as simply given that problems such as national
competitiveness and unequal opportunities for social mobility
can be solved by coming up with the right plan for the schools.
In seeing education as the answer to everything, we are
tempted to extend the bureaucratic reach of formal schooling
to every area of life. Instead of “de-schooling” society as Ivan
Illich advocated, we try to move toward a total schooling of
society and everyone in it. This is precisely where I find the
civic engagement trend in our belief in education goes beyond
what schooling should do in a liberal democracy.

By the second decade of the 2000s, in many circles of
academia and government the question was not whether ev-
eryone in primary and secondary schools, higher education,
and government should collaborate in training students for
social and political involvement but how they should do so.
This unthinking commitment is disturbing because it over-
looks the paradoxical nature of faith in education as a means
of building a democratic nation.

When Alexis de Tocqueville described voluntary associa-
tions as a basis for American democracy, he was referring to
associations that the people themselves had formed of their
own will, not public commitments decided upon and directed
by the collaboration of governmental and educational bureau-
cracies. While different people and different political philos-
ophies use the word “democracy” in a variety of ways, the

632 Soc (2013) 50:629–634

https://www.aacu.org/about/statements/2008electionstatement.cfm
https://www.aacu.org/about/statements/2008electionstatement.cfm


term most commonly refers to a system of government in
which people either make political decisions for themselves
(direct democracy) or elect representatives to make political
decisions (representative democracy). In the former, there is
no question of anyone “re-making” the people, since the
people think for themselves and have the freedom to be what
they are. In the latter, also, the goal of re-shaping a society
along democratic lines is a contradiction because a represen-
tative government represents its public as it is; the government
does not try to re-make its constituents.

Since a society is made up of people and of the total of
formal and informal relations among people, changing a so-
ciety means changing the people and their relations with each
other. It is a profoundly authoritarian effort and even, as it
approaches a goal of total reform, totalitarian at its extreme.
Political reform is a matter of changing laws. Economic
reform involves changing policies relating to matters such as
taxation, public expenditures, or interest rates. Either of these
may be consistent with democracy. But governmental reform
of an ethos aims at changing people and their relations with
each other. This is a reversal of the direction of action and
control of a democratic society, since it involves the authori-
ties attempting to constitute or re-constitute the public, rather
than the public constituting the authorities. It is reminiscent of
Bertolt Brecht’s 1953 quip that the East German people had
apparently lost the confidence of their government, so the
government should “dissolve the people and elect another
one.” Creating a new society is precisely the attempt to dis-
solve the people as they are and to appoint the people as one
would like them to be.

At the level of higher education, a crusade to build social
capital poses special kinds of problems. Social capital refers to
networks of social relations that promote efficacious action
through the control and direction of network participants. I
have found in my own work on ethnic networks as forms of
social capital that the same tight community connections that
promote the upward mobility and academic achievement of
young people also penalize nonconformity. In other words,
social capital is a mechanism for mobilization and social
control. Communities that can mobilize and control their
members can indeed engage in many constructive activities,
but they also tend toward conformity in expression and be-
havior. We probably want high levels of social capital and
high levels of conformity in some of our institutions, such as
the military. Within families and many types of associations,
limitations on individual freedom are often desirable. If a
university is to be a forum for the open and free exchange of
ideas, though, it must be a low social capital institution.
Individuals in a university may be highly committed to their
ideas and goals, but these must be their ideas and goals, not
those approved and promoted by the institution. From the

perspective of a traditional liberal education, colleges and
universities are exactly where we should not be making blue-
prints for building social capital.

For a university or college to become a community of faith,
as it must if it is to adopt promulgating civic engagement as its
mission, it has to set up tenets of orthodoxy. Someone has to
decide what constitutes appropriate “engagement.” The insti-
tution may be relatively lenient in enforcement of doctrine and
reluctantly tolerate heretics, but it cannot fulfill its mission
without trying to get students and faculty to fall into line
and march in the right direction. It is entirely appropriate
for a religious organization to call its adherents to be-
come soldiers of the faith. But few things are more
inconsistent with the intellectual freedom essential to a
university than the expectation that its students and fac-
ulty will become social missionaries. A regime of social
commitment discourages intellectual diversity, even if it
does not openly forbid it.

The word “heresy” comes from a Greek verb meaning
“to choose.” Heretics are those who do follow their own
reason or inspiration instead of the correct teaching of the
authorities. If we are to be intellectually free in higher
education and not bound by orthodoxy, we must be free
not simply to choose our own forms of public engagement
but to choose disengagement. Take, for example, the
American heretic Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was de-
cidedly disengaged. He wrote his most famous book while
living alone in the woods. When he took his best-known
stand on the public issues of his day, he did so by refusing
to pay taxes and by denying the authority of the government.
Whatever one thinks of Thoreau’s heresy, taking disengage-
ment of his sort or another has to be a legitimate option in a
free forum of ideas.

The all-encompassing nature of the contemporary civic
engagement movement makes the threat to intellectual diver-
sity especially alarming. The report A Crucible Moment not
only demands the participation of every person involved in
education, but it insists that every course in every subject
incorporate its message. Issued as “a call to national action,”
the social and political agenda it intends to implement in every
classroom comes with the imprimatur of the U.S. Department
of Education. As I read the report, I find its demands for
inculcating a “democratic ethos” perplexing. Beyond the fact
that in a liberal democracy neither the government nor com-
mittees sponsored and subsidized by the government decide
what type of ethos the people should have, the ideal of
integrating all levels of schooling into a unified social pro-
gram, and inserting this program into every subject appears to
be promoting a kind of new bureaucratic corporatism, aimed
at absorbing everything into the state and leaving nothing
outside the state.

Soc (2013) 50:629–634 633



The proper response to dramatic calls to national action
might be to temper our faith in the education with reflec-
tion, examination, and careful criticism. Universities and
colleges can make available to students advanced intellec-
tual skills, in abstract reasoning and analysis. They can
provide access to practical skills and to the cultural heritage
of humanity. They can furnish forums for sharing ideas
from all perspectives. But we put the things these institu-
tions can do at risk if we make education a vehicle for a
committee’s vision of social reconstruction. The incorpora-
tion of a mandated social creed into the “mission state-
ments” of institutions limits the operation of reason.
Directing all courses of study along lines that an adminis-
tration or a task force have decided serve the mission of
social reconstruction subordinate the teaching of practical

skills and the humanities to ideological direction. Most
importantly, perhaps, civic action that derives from an
institutional program, rather than from undirected indi-
vidual decision, contradicts not only the principle of
intellectual freedom, but the essential character of liberal
democracy.

Carl L. Bankston III is professor of sociology at Tulane University. His
research interests include sociology of education, international migration,
historical sociology, and sociology of religion. He is author or editor of 18
books and over 100 journal articles. His most recent books have been
Public Education—America’s Civil Religion: A Social History (2009) and
Forced to Fail: The Paradox of School Desegregation (2005). He is
currently working on a book on social capital and social networks in
immigration, to be published by Polity Press.

634 Soc (2013) 50:629–634


	The Civic Education Crusade: A Heretic’s Analysis
	Background: The History of American Education as Civil Religion
	The Rise of the Civic Engagement Movement
	The Civic Education Doctrine and Higher Education: Problems and Contradictions