THE ORIGINAL CURRICULUM AS A CONCEPTUAL EXPLORATION

The original curriculum pursued a key objective that is best expressed as a proposition: students who are beginning their college studies should learn how to apply and assess classic methods and theories of ethics and politics in their own lives. Since those methods and theories have had a powerful influence on the development of our civilization, they can have a corresponding influence on the development of individuals.

To this end, the original curriculum required that students read classic authors who help them develop a clear understanding of ways that conscience and power intersect at four levels of political activity: international politics, national politics, group politics, and individual political behavior. We read primary sources and scholarly works by 17 different authors, but I emphasized the insights and alternative conceptions of political activity that we find in the work of Plato and Aristotle, Hobbes and Locke, Calvin and Machiavelli, and Thoreau. In truth, I wanted my students to take politics in each of these contexts as analytically and personally as Thoreau or Calvin or Aristotle or (better still) Socrates.

The economic collapse of 2008 and 2009 prompted a thorough reconsideration of my teaching. Our country faced a fiscal crisis that few experts anticipated (Krugman Reference Krugman2009), and our fellow citizens and students faced personal economic challenges that most did not understand (Lusardi Reference Lusardi2009). It was bad enough to observe that prominent experts were wrong, but it was both galling and disheartening to learn that my students did not demonstrate, either in their conversation or their work, that they would be able to make good lives using their political science training. I have no impact on the effectiveness of public scholars, but in my teaching, I should have a discernible impact on the political and practical efficacy of my students.

THE REVISED CURRICULUM AS A BLEND OF CONCEPTUAL EXPLORATION AND FINANCIAL ANALYSIS

In the expectation that civic and economic engagement might depend on the presence of very personal challenges to students, the revised curriculum paired a new proposition with the original: at the beginning of their college studies, students should learn how to study and interpret the parallel problems of national finance and personal finance. The new proposition grew out of two complementary hunches. First, the student who has learned to see the practical limits of his or her financial alternatives may be able to see how practical limitations in the national budget produce both ethical and political constraints on the uses to which we can put our government. The hard choices of ethics and politics may become meaningful and even useful when we consider how we choose among alternatives during individual and group budgeting. In short, students might take national politics personally if they could see themselves in the political decision making. Second, the analysis of public finance is most intelligible when it is directly contrasted with the analysis of personal finance. Students might find it useful to study revenues, expenditures, and debts at the national level when they match their macroanalysis with the microanalysis of revenues, expenditures, and debts at the personal level. In crude terms, the student who cannot understand the trade-offs involved in amortizing $35,000 in personal debt will not be able to understand the trade-offs involved in servicing and paying down the $10,618,718,703,374 national debt that we confronted on January 22, 2009, when the spring semester began (U.S. Treasury, Bureau of the Public Debt 2009).

THE STUDENTS' PHILOSOPHICAL AND PRACTICAL CONCLUSIONS

At the end of the course, we reconsidered some of the philosophical concerns that we had investigated during the first half of the course. Because I had hoped that students would develop individual political philosophies that would serve them after the course was completed, we returned to three questions that I expected to prompt the integration of classic thought with modern fiscal analysis.

First, what is the purpose of government? Students knew from Plato that the goal of public rule might be construed as harmonious work in the interest of the commonwealth, accomplished by people who develop their special capacities (Plato Reference Jowett1901, 2, 369a–372a). However, once they had thoroughly investigated fiscal constraints on personal and national priorities, remarkably few students accepted Plato's compound proposition. Instead of applying their special capacities to the needs of the group, they were more determined to assert the primacy of individual needs than they were at the beginning of the course. When confronted with a choice between individualism and collectivism, students effectively assessed the philosophical pros and cons of individualism and collectivism. But they came down on the side of individualism, because they could not make a case that favored group needs over individual needs that was demonstrably superior to the case that favored individual needs over group needs. My students could not speak honestly or authoritatively for the collective when it was explicitly differentiated from the individual, but they could speak honestly and authoritatively for themselves.

Second, how do the ultimate goals of individual life relate to the ultimate goals of collective political life? Students knew that Aristotle, in his works on self-governance and community governance, tells us that both sets of goals converge in the maximization of human potential (Aristotle Reference Ross1908, 1, 1094a–1095a; Aristotle Reference Jowett1885, 1, 1252a). Since Aristotle's aggregation of individual and collective goals suggests to many students that collective benefits might derive from individualistic activities, even as individual benefits derive from a well-developed state, many students were prepared to serve the collectivity so long as they could also serve individual goals. The students who seriously reconsidered Aristotle were able to make both financial and philosophical connections between social welfare and private life. Unfortunately, most students made either financial or philosophical connections between social welfare and private life—a problem addressed in the final section of this article. Although their calculations generally seemed less idealistic (as would be the case in pursuing a conception of “The Good”) than materialistic (as is the case in pursuing a quid pro quo), students clearly related the aggregate success of a society in promoting group welfare to the individual prospects of citizens seeking to maximize their individual potential. When students did not need to think of their goals as distinct from the aggregate goals of the collective, they were not reluctant to speak for the needs of the state and the individual.

Third, what should we expect of government if it is to provide individuals with the best opportunity to maximize their potential as human beings? Students had spent a good deal of time contemplating Locke's answer to this question in The Second Treatise of Government, in which he asserts the primacy of security, freedom, and prosperity as individual rights upon which government should not infringe (Locke Reference Locke1688, VII, 87). Assuming that rights translate into goals, students readily grasped the trade-offs that often arise among Lockean goals, as when social expenditures on “guns” compete with social expenditures on “butter.” They just as readily grasped the way that certain goals might advance the cause of other goals, as when prosperity permits people to enlarge their enjoyment of freedom. However, students were no more effective than lawmakers in establishing how trade-offs among policy objectives should be decided at the national level of analysis. Most overspent when they established national priorities, and they knew very well why they overspent: they could not make collective decisions that impaired the prospects of valued goals. In contrast with their performance as “lawmakers,” students were very effective in establishing priorities in personal finance. With very few exceptions, students demonstrated in prospective budget after prospective budget that they knew how to keep expected financial resources in line with expected investments in their future prosperity. Students do not plan to overspend on an individual level, because they expect to “do without” as individuals in ways that they do not expect to “do without” as a commonwealth.

THE INSTRUCTOR'S PEDAGOGICAL CONCLUSIONS

The effectiveness of a theory course that emphasizes the interplay of ethics and politics was substantially improved by systematically integrating fiscal choices at the personal and national levels of analysis. Despite my lack of controlled testing and outside assessment, I believe that the strategy and findings reported here are sufficiently thought-provoking to warrant presenting them to the larger political science community for its consideration.

First, the concepts, propositions, and questions posed in classic philosophical literature on politics are easily illustrated and examined within the context of personal and national finance. Because politics is an enterprise that makes collective choices that generally require trade-offs and reluctant agreements, financial choices of both a personal and public nature provide an excellent framework for weighing the values that underlie the dollars at issue. Students readily traverse the intellectual terrain between philosophy and finance when they can see themselves occupying that terrain. Indeed, in their conceptual autobiographies, students made clear connections between the ideas of philosophy and the issues that they have been raised to consider during the first two decades of their lives. Philosophy is as recognizable as a bank balance and a budget to young students precisely because each focuses on trade-offs among desirable objectives.

Second, in open-ended student evaluations drafted at the end of the semester, students repeatedly declared that the course provided them with the means to think analytically about their futures, both as public citizens and private citizens who participate in a national political economy over which they have little control. They believe, and their contingent budgeting demonstrates, that they are equipped with the analytical skills necessary to respond as individuals to changes, both adverse and favorable, in the national political and economic environment. At a minimum, the recast course enhanced students' perceptions of their political and economic efficacy. They believe that they will be able to make good lives using some of their political science training.

Third, despite the foregoing observations, I was disappointed by the low degree of philosophical and financial synthesis that I observed in student work at the end of the course. I had not taught them how to integrate abstract theory and financial analysis in ways that contribute to a personal political philosophy. In the final analytical essay (which asked students to formulate philosophical assessments of desirable and compromise objectives for themselves and the nation), students generally confined themselves to financial analysis that was juxtaposed with philosophical phrases. In this assignment, student performance was almost uniformly excellent in confronting the financial dimensions of national and personal life during the next decade, but it was also disappointing inasmuch as half of the students neglected to include explicit philosophical argument. Fine accomplishments on the conceptual autobiography and the national and personal budgets had prompted me to hope that almost everybody would write essays that effectively blended narrative and analysis that would be both policy oriented and philosophical. That said, I did receive essays that would greatly please any policy analyst and every parent: they thoughtfully assessed the interdependence of national circumstances and choices on the one hand and personal objectives and alternatives on the other hand. When writing about the future in contingent terms, almost all students were explicit about the assumptions that they were making when they planned a “realistic,” desirable future for the United States and themselves; additionally, almost all students were able to scale back on national and personal objectives in the event that life might not proceed as planned.

Student accomplishments in this course show that young members of our society can successfully confront the management of their national and personal lives by knowing what the issues are, by assessing why they value certain goals as opposed to others, and by learning to use specific skills that give them some control over their private and public lives. The solution to the fiscal crises of our state and our individual lives is thus likely to be a joint product of specific factual knowledge, particular philosophical values, and special skills that are applied to the governance of our public and private lives. In essence, the solution is citizenship, which Aristotle defines as participation in politics (1985, 3, 1275a22–11275b13). In the course of working with students in these two political science classrooms, both my students and I learned to develop and refine this concept into two key points. First, citizenship is governance. Second, just as a person is a citizen of his own life to the extent that he governs or manages his individual life, a person is a citizen in his or her community to the extent that he or she governs or manages the collective life.