II. Civic Education or Civic Schooling?

When Mark Twain bragged that he never let school interfere with his education, he was admirably clear about the difference between the two. Unfortunately, writers about civic education are rarely so clear. Philosophers differ on how widely we ought to understand the concept of education, though all agree that any concept of education must be of a wider range than the concept of schooling. Some philosophers define ‘education’ in very broad terms as the whole ensemble of influences that shape the formation of a human person beyond what is given by natural capacity and mere maturation; in this sense, education takes in all of the formal and informal aspects of the fostering, nurturing, cultivating, and rearing of a person.²⁵

Social scientists employ this broad concept of education when they speak of ‘enculturation’ or ‘socialization’. Other philosophers restrict the meaning of ‘education’ to deliberate or intentional efforts to teach or to learn, thereby omitting the whole realm of tacit learning.²⁶ For my purposes of contrasting education with schooling, either view of education is acceptable, since all plausible understandings of education take in a vastly wider range of agencies than schools. And by ‘schooling’, I mean institutions that aim to inculcate general knowledge and skills rather than merely technical training for a particular occupation.

Unfortunately, in addition to these wider senses, the word ‘education’ is often used to refer merely to schooling, as when we speak of the “expense of education.” As philosopher John Passmore observes, “ ‘education’ does create troublesome ambiguities.”²⁷

As we shall see, writers on education display not just verbal but also deep conceptual confusion about the relation of schools to education. Part of this confusion is driven by rhetorical inflation: education is an elevated way to speak about mere schooling. However, this use of the concept of education to refer to mere schooling, by confusing the whole for the part, makes clear thinking about schooling nearly impossible. If we vest discussions of schooling with all of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual weight of human education, then rational assessment of schools becomes untenable. We might accept the endorsement of all manner of intellectual, moral, and spiritual aims in education until we discover that the endorser meant not ‘education’ but ‘schooling’. And to reject civic education seems suspiciously epicurean or even unpatriotic until we make clear that we reject only civic schooling. In the broad sense of education, all politics, indeed, all human endeavors take their truest measure in relation to their contribution to human education, but schooling is only one of many modalities of education. I think that our tacit confusion of education with schooling helps to explain the passion and bitterness of the politics of schooling: we think and act as though all of education were at stake!

Advocates of ‘civic education’ usually mean by this expression only ‘civic schooling’.²⁸

By implying that civic education is civic schooling, arguments for civic education in schools acquire great rhetorical force. Who could be against civic education? As advocates of civic education frequently point out, since the civic virtues are not innate, they must be learned. And from this true premise such advocates then falsely conclude that civic virtues must be taught in school. For example, political theorist William Galston writes: “In most times and places the necessity and appropriateness of civic education has been accepted without question. It has been taken for granted that young human beings must be shaped into citizens and that public institutions have both the right and the responsibility to take the lead.”²⁹ If ‘civic education’ here refers broadly to the range of agencies by which citizens are formed, then Galston is obviously right: every polity must see to the broad political education of future citizens. Conversely, if ‘civic education’ refers to ‘civic schooling’, then Galston is clearly wrong, since many polities have educated citizens without recourse to schools.

Unfortunately, Galston goes on to make clear that by civic education, he means only civic schooling: “In the United States today, however, civic education has become intensely controversial.”³⁰

Of course, it is only civic schooling that has occasioned controversy, not civic education. That Galston confuses education with schooling is also evident from his statement above that civic education is for “young human beings.” The classical view is that although schooling is mainly for the young, moral and civic education is mainly for adults. So contemporary advocates are right in asserting that civic education is traditional, but wrong to imply, as they usually do, that civic education has always meant civic schooling.³¹ Galston's impoverished view of civic education is also evident in his quotation from a recent manifesto from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT): “Democracy's survival depends upon our transmitting to each new generation the political vision that unites us as Americans…. Such values are neither revealed truths nor natural habits. There is no evidence that we are born with them.” Unfortunately, from these true premises the manifesto jumps rashly to the conclusion that it is the schools' responsibility to transmit these values.³² Curiously, in other contexts, Galston is well aware of the educative role of other institutions in American society. He points out that the U.S. Army might well do a better job of teaching racial harmony than American schools do.³³

Although most advocates of civic education simply conflate education with schooling,³⁴

some do attempt to distinguish education from schooling. Philosopher Eamonn Callan distinguishes “between common education and common schooling on the one hand, and separate education and separate schooling on the other.” He says that common education “prescribes a range of educational outcomes—virtues, abilities, different kinds of knowledge—as desirable for all members of the society….”³⁵ Here we might think that there are many possible agencies for creating a common education in a society, from mandatory public service, to public media, to the public legal culture, to the Boy and Girl Scouts, etc. But Callan seems to have an entirely scholastic understanding of ‘common education’. He rightly observes that a common education might be achieved by different kinds of schools: common schools can provide a common education, but so might properly regulated separate and private schools. If our conception of common education is a minimalist one, he says, then it will be easy to implement in separate schools, but if our conception of common education is demanding, then it will be harder to implement in separate schools.³⁶ On Callan's view, common education may be achieved through many kinds of schools, but it remains a wholly scholastic enterprise.³⁷ “What we need,” he argues, “are common schools worthy of the ends of common education.”³⁸ By reducing common education to a scholastic education, however, Callan undermines the force of his arguments for its necessity: “The necessity of a common education for all follows from the need to secure a sufficiently coherent and decent political culture and the prerequisites of a stable social order.”³⁹ Even if some kind of common education is needed in a democracy, there is no reason to think that democracy requires a common scholastic education.

The most important recent argument for civic education in schools is Gutmann's Democratic Education. She certainly distinguishes the school from other agencies of education. “A democratic theory of education focuses on what might be called ‘conscious social reproduction’—the ways in which citizens are or should be empowered to influence the education that in turn shapes the political values, attitudes, and modes of behavior of future citizens.” A democratic theory of education, she says, “focuses on practices of deliberate instruction by individuals and on the educational influences of institutions designed at least partly for educational purposes.”⁴⁰

Yet even assuming that a democratic theory of education should focus only on deliberate modes of education, Gutmann focuses almost exclusively on the school.⁴¹ Indeed, she admits that “it is hard to resist the temptation to focus entirely on schooling, since it is our most deliberate form of human instruction….”⁴² Among the agencies of deliberate instruction, why is school the “most deliberate”? There are many sources of deliberate instruction apart from a school: ministers have a curriculum, as do wardens, parents, doctors, journalists, advertisers, coaches, and Boy Scout leaders. Perhaps Gutmann means that deliberate instruction is more prominent at school than among these other sources of education? In any event, she offers no argument or evidence that schools are more significant or effective as agents of “conscious social reproduction” than any other deliberate educator.⁴³

Why must a theory of democratic education focus only on deliberate instruction? After all, many political theorists, from Aristotle to Tocqueville, believed that civic education, including, and perhaps especially, democratic civic education, was mainly the by-product of growing up and participating in a democratic polity. Perhaps democratic civic virtue is a matter not of deliberate instruction, but of “habits of the heart” acquired indirectly, yet profoundly, from activities in churches, voluntary associations, and juries.⁴⁴

But Gutmann explicitly sets aside the question of how democratic schooling relates to the larger processes of democratic socialization. Unfortunately, her characterization of the field of political socialization is very misleading. First, she says that studies of political socialization “tend to focus on what might be called ‘unconscious social reproduction’.” In fact, many of these studies seek precisely to compare the causal significance of both unconscious and conscious agencies of education;⁴⁵ in addition, there is a branch of political socialization studies dedicated to the examination of civic education in schools.⁴⁶ Second, Gutmann says that studies of political socialization are merely descriptive: “their aim is to explain the processes by which societies perpetuate themselves.” By contrast, she says, the aim of a democratic theory of education is normative, that is, “to understand how members of democratic society should participate in consciously shaping its future.” When education becomes assimilated into political socialization, “it is easy to lose sight of the distinctive virtue of democratic society, that it authorizes citizens to influence how their society reproduces itself.”⁴⁷

Gutmann's attempts to justify her focus on schools by setting aside the literature of political socialization fail. To begin with, the best studies of political socialization do not merely seek to describe the mechanisms by which society reproduces itself, but are designed precisely to answer normative questions in democratic theory, such as: What kinds of educational experiences lead citizens to various civic values, virtues, and activities? Moreover, anyone who consciously seeks to influence social reproduction should probably want to understand the mechanisms by which society reproduces itself. And even if democratic education turns out to be mainly the by-product of other kinds of social and political activity—even if citizens are formed mainly by informal modes of association—how does it follow that democratic citizens cannot deliberate about how to shape, influence, and encourage these indirect modes of civic education? Why cannot democratic citizens deliberate to shape, consciously though indirectly, the unconscious modes of civic education? Democratic deliberation can aim for full transparency, directness, and self-awareness even while conceding that democratic education proceeds mainly through obscure, oblique, and tacit agencies.

Finally, Gutmann offers no argument or evidence that the democratic education that takes place in schools, or could take place in schools, stems from direct, deliberate instruction rather than from indirect, tacit, and informal modes of student association. Indeed, although she claims that schooling “is our most deliberate form of human instruction,” she argues that schools can and should teach moral values by means of their “hidden curriculum.”⁴⁸

Yet, to the extent that schools teach civic virtues tacitly, they are not instruments of “conscious social reproduction”; and if schools are, in part, instruments of unconscious social reproduction, then how does Gutmann justify her neglect of all other instruments of unconscious social reproduction? In short, her distinction between conscious and unconscious modes of education does not serve to distinguish schools from other modes of socialization. Perhaps all institutions and associations engage in both kinds of education? Stephen Macedo follows Gutmann into this untenable conundrum when he celebrates the “hidden curriculum” of civic education in public schools and then attempts to argue that “public schools have an important moral advantage with respect to civic education: they pursue our deepest civic purposes openly and allow people to argue about these purposes in local as well as national democratic venues.” ⁴⁹ So public schools pursue civic education openly through their hidden curriculum! As we shall see from a number of empirical studies, the effect of schools on civic virtue is mainly tacit and indirect. So the focus on schools in these accounts of democratic education lacks any theoretical foundation.

Before we begin to understand the proper role of civic education in schools, we must first think more clearly about the relation of scholastic to other kinds of education. If we understand education to refer broadly to all kinds of learning experiences, then it becomes clear that little of our learning takes place in school, but instead takes place at home, among peers, on the job, at the library, and in places of worship, as well as under the influence of the media. Even if we understand education to refer more narrowly to deliberate instruction, then we still can see that a schoolteacher is only one of many teachers in our lives: clearly our parents are teachers, as are our ministers, coaches, librarians, and doctors. Our friends also often act as teachers, as do journalists, advertisers, employers, judges, and scoutmasters. So most of our learning does not occur in school, and most of our teachers are not schoolteachers.

Lawrence Cremin describes the relation between the school and other agencies of deliberate instruction as an “ecology of education.”⁵⁰

A school can relate in a general way to other agencies of education by confirming them, complementing them, or counteracting them. Which of these relations makes sense will depend, in part, upon the nature of the subject matter. Schools have a virtual monopoly on some kinds of knowledge, for example, chemistry, Latin, and calculus; schools generally avoid other kinds of knowledge, say, of obscure religious doctrines or job-specific information. But many kinds of knowledge are shared between schools and other educational sources, from English and history to sex education and, of course, civics. Since most of what we learn about politics we learn from our families, friends, the media, and voluntary organizations, schoolteachers and administrators ought to decide whether what they teach about politics should confirm, complement, or counteract what students are learning or will learn from their other educators. Unfortunately, advocates of civic education almost never ask, let alone attempt to answer, this question.

We will need to think creatively about other modes of civic education because of what empirical research tells us about the effectiveness of schools. Since public schools have a long and pervasive history of engaging in civic education, political scientists over the past five decades have attempted to answer basic questions, such as: Where do citizens acquire their civic knowledge, skills, and virtues? What role do schools play in this acquisition? And, in particular, what role do high school civics courses play?

It is always risky to ground normative claims in empirical research: empirical beliefs generally change more quickly than do normative commitments. Our empirical findings (like our normative commitments) are always fallible, especially as they shape our beliefs about politics and society. And even though the best empirical studies of politics are framed in ways that attempt to answer normative questions about politics, these studies rarely answer our precise normative questions. The best normative arguments about civic education rely on subtle and sophisticated concepts of civic knowledge, motivation, reasoning, dispositions, skills, and virtues; but the empirical studies of civic education are usually framed in much cruder terms, such as knowledge and values. As we shall see, many studies that seem to present conflicting findings about the role of schools in civic education can be shown to converge once we distinguish civic knowledge from civic skills and from civic virtue. Moreover, when empirical studies do not converge, it is always risky to attempt to adjudicate disputes among scholars who rely on divergent studies. But, when there is a consistency of empirical findings and a substantial consensus among researchers, then normative theorists ought to take note. Research about political socialization has achieved a substantial convergence of findings and a substantial professional consensus about the relative importance of schooling and other factors in civic education. Let us cautiously consider what these studies might teach us about the proper role of the school in civic education.

Many students of political socialization follow Tocqueville in arguing that the most important schools of democracy are not schools at all but voluntary and civic associations. Studies focusing on the acquisition of civic competence or civic skills have found, not surprisingly, that these skills are mainly acquired not by children in schools but by adults in churches, unions, civic organizations, and workplaces. Gabriel Almond's and Sidney Verba's classic 1963 study, The Civic Culture, examined the formation of civic knowledge, skills, and attitudes in five nations. These researchers found that schools had some effect on civic skills, but not a strong effect compared to the salience of workplace experiences.⁵¹

Almond and Verba confirmed Adam Smith's view that ordinary employment is the most powerful educative force in the lives of most people: “Of crucial significance here are the opportunities to participate in decisions at one's place of work.”⁵² The effect of schools on civic competence was mainly indirect: schools link students to all kinds of other associations.⁵³ Later, in 1980, Almond said about The Civic Culture that it “was one of the earliest studies to stress the importance of adult political socialization and experiences and to demonstrate the relative weakness of childhood socialization.”⁵⁴

Nothing is more characteristic of the modern confusion of education and schooling than the assumption that education is for children. In a major, more recent study (1995), Verba, Schlozman, and Brady found that the institutions most responsible for fostering civic skills and political participation were jobs, voluntary associations, and churches. They also found that American high schools provide civic education “not by teaching about democracy but by providing hands-on training for future participation.”⁵⁵

Similarly, Robert Putnam's famous book, Bowling Alone (2000), endorses the findings of Verba, Schlozman, and Brady that we acquire our democratic virtues in our voluntary associations. Putnam argues that “voluntary associations may serve not only as forums for deliberation, but also as occasions for learning civic virtues, such as active participation in public life.” He says that schools could do a better job imparting civic knowledge in the classroom and indirectly fostering civic skills by encouraging participation in service learning programs and extracurricular activities. He never suggests that schools themselves could become nurseries of civic virtue.⁵⁶

Other researchers focus less on civic skills and more on civic knowledge and civic attitudes. Among these researchers, there is a widespread and long-standing consensus that an individual's civic knowledge and civic attitudes are best predicted by his or her years of schooling. For example, M. Kent Jennings and Richard Niemi survey a huge body of literature about the role of education in political socialization. They report a broad consensus that interest in politics, the possession of political skills, political participation, and support for the liberal democratic creed, all increase with years of schooling.⁵⁷

Does this suggest that schools are effectively teaching civic virtue? Actually, there is no agreement about how to explain the simple correlation between educational attainment and civic virtue. Since years of schooling correlates strongly with parental intelligence, education, and socioeconomic status, as well as with a student's own intelligence and subsequent socioeconomic status and occupation, it is very difficult to tease out the independent role of schooling. Perhaps some other factor (or factors), such as parental education or the student's own intelligence, causes both high educational attainment and civic virtue?

Some researchers believe that schooling shapes political attitudes by socializing students into a distinctive scholastic culture; this process of socialization is thought to be primarily informal and extracurricular. Others believe that schools do not so much socialize students into a common scholastic culture as allocate students to quite different socioeconomic milieus: “Schools confer success on some and failure on others over and above any socialization outcomes.”⁵⁸

Jennings and Niemi believe that schools both socialize students into a common culture and allocate students into quite different socioeconomic ranks; however, they report that their data more strongly support the allocation theory.⁵⁹ To the extent that schools merely allocate students into various social classes, they simply reproduce the socioeconomic hierarchy of the wider society. In this sense, the main effect of schooling on political conduct is to sort students into various social classes, each with its own distinctive political culture.

More recently, Norman H. Nie, Jane Junn, and Kenneth Stehlik-Barry propose two mechanisms by which schooling fosters levels of civic virtue: the first is by sorting citizens into social and political ranks, each with its own level of civic knowledge and virtue; the second is by enhancing the cognitive sophistication of students.⁶⁰

Nie and his colleagues found that students with more formal education were likely to be more politically tolerant, not because of anything taught in school, but simply because of their greater verbal proficiency.⁶¹ These findings confirm many earlier studies of the relation of educational attainment to political toleration, that is, the willingness to accord civil liberties to those with whom one disagrees. Samuel Stouffer pioneered this research in the 1950s. He argued that college graduates were more tolerant than others simply as a by-product of their greater cognitive sophistication.⁶² Philip E. Jacob then investigated what it might be about college that could foster greater political tolerance: the curriculum did not seem to matter, except that students who focused on the liberal arts were better informed about politics and more active; the quality of teaching had almost no effect on the attitudes of students; and, perhaps most surprising, the style of pedagogy, that is, whether classes involved student participation or not, did not matter.⁶³ Other studies of the effects of college on political values also find that college increases political tolerance; these studies attribute this effect to the sheer increase in knowledge and cognitive sophistication among college graduates.⁶⁴ In a newer study, Nie and D. Sunshine Hillygus confirm the importance of sheer verbal proficiency in fostering political engagement, political knowledge, and public spiritedness. In their view, the only aspect of the curriculum that matters is the number of social science courses taken; these authors claim that these courses also contribute to greater civic participation.⁶⁵ Many researchers warn against attributing too much weight to schooling in shaping political attitudes: “Education is very weakly related to tolerance, when the relationship is controlled for other variables.”⁶⁶ Jacob's finding that the liberal arts foster political involvement, combined with the consensus that the sheer amount of political knowledge and understanding fosters political tolerance, strongly suggests that the main role that school can play in fostering civic virtue is to enhance the general knowledge of students.

If schooling itself were effective in fostering civic virtue, then we should expect Americans today to exhibit a much higher degree of civic virtue than Americans of the mid-twentieth century. After all, Americans today have much more formal schooling than they did fifty years ago, let alone a century or two ago. Clearly, schooling cannot be the royal road to civic virtue, since virtually all measures of political and civic engagement in the United States show a steep decline over the past half-century.⁶⁷

Americans' vastly greater attainments of schooling have not even made them more knowledgeable about politics, let alone more inclined to vote or volunteer: citizens today know no more about politics than they did a half-century ago.⁶⁸ These paradoxes strongly suggest that the role of schooling in fostering civic knowledge and civic virtue must be quite indirect.

Most states in the United States require public schools to teach civics courses. Since advocates of civic education in public schools strongly support such courses, we might ask: What role do civics courses play in fostering desirable political knowledge, attitudes, and conduct? After a series of studies in the early 1960s, Kenneth Langton and M. Kent Jennings published in 1968 a very influential article concerned with the effects of high school civics courses on a range of political knowledge, attitudes, values, and interests.⁶⁹

They found that the high school civics curriculum had very little effect on any aspect of political knowledge or values: “Our findings certainly do not support the thinking of those who look to the civics curriculum in American high schools as even a minor source of political socialization.” It is important to note, however, that they found a greater effect of civics courses on political knowledge than on political values or attitudes.⁷⁰ In 1974, Langton and Jennings, now with the addition of Niemi, revised and enlarged their earlier article. They now found that the educational level of parents and the amount of political discourse at home had a much greater impact on the measured knowledge and values of individuals than did high school courses; where high school civics courses had any effect, it was only on those students who were just finishing those courses.⁷¹ A subsequent study by Paul Allen Beck and Jennings (1982) reconfirmed the impotence of civics courses but found that participation in extracurricular activities, both in high school and beyond, fostered later political participation by young adults.⁷²

These and other studies created a lasting professional consensus that the scholastic curriculum in general has some effects on the civic knowledge, but little or no effect on the civic values, of students and that civics courses in particular have essentially no effect on political attitudes or values.⁷³

Richard Niemi and Jane Junn challenged this consensus in their major 1998 study, Civic Education: What Makes Students Learn. Niemi and Junn analyzed data that enabled them to study the effects of different kinds of civics courses on students' political knowledge and attitudes. They hypothesized that certain kinds of teaching methods might significantly add or subtract from learning about politics.⁷⁴ They found that, although the civics curriculum had much less effect on political knowledge and values than did the home environment, civics courses did matter. In particular, civics courses that were taken quite recently, had a large variety of topics studied, and included discussion of current events, fostered significantly greater political knowledge.⁷⁵ As with earlier studies, Niemi and Junn found that although the curriculum had some effect on political knowledge, it had virtually no effect on political attitudes.⁷⁶

It is too soon to tell if this study by Niemi and Junn will alter the existing consensus that civics courses do not matter; some reviews suggest that the current consensus is likely to prevail.⁷⁷

At a deeper level, though, this study largely confirms the conventional wisdom: Niemi and Junn surmise that one key reason that they found civics courses more significant than did Langton and Jennings is simply because the earlier study focused mainly on the effects of civics courses on attitudes, while their own analysis focused mainly on the effects on civic knowledge. In short, all of these studies confirm a more qualified consensus that civics courses might have some role in fostering civic knowledge but essentially no role in fostering civic attitudes or virtues.⁷⁸ The differential impact of schooling on knowledge and values is strongly confirmed by the two largest studies of the long-term impact of schooling: Herbert Hyman and Charles Wright's classic studies of the enduring effects of schooling on knowledge and on values concluded that schooling has a much larger effect on knowledge than on values.⁷⁹

Ironically, political theorists have come to eagerly embrace education for civic virtue in the schools just at the moment when political scientists have reached agreement that civic education in schools has little effect on political knowledge and less effect on political attitudes.⁸⁰

Of course, the descriptive findings of social scientists, while relevant to the normative debates about civic education, are not conclusive. If one favors education for civic virtue in schools, then one is likely to regret that such education is ineffective; conversely, if one rejects education for civic virtue in schools on normative grounds, then one might be pleased to discover that it does not work. Gutmann cites the scholarly consensus about civics courses but then correctly observes: “Empirical studies measure the results of civics and history courses as they are, not as they might be.”⁸¹ No one can doubt that civics and history courses could be much better than they usually are; and perhaps these better courses might be more effective.⁸² In the end, however, Gutmann concedes that political socialization at home is always likely to be much more formative than anything at school: “This conclusion is compatible with the claim that history and civics courses can and should teach democratic virtue, so long as we understand democratic virtue to include the willingness and ability of citizens to reason collectively and critically about politics.”⁸³ Usually we assume that one ought to do something only if one can do it. While there is some evidence that schools can effectively teach political knowledge, there is virtually no evidence that schools can effectively teach political virtue, that is, a disposition to want to become a good citizen by, for example, reasoning collectively. Here we have the perfect triumph of hope over experience.

We ought not be surprised by the evidence that civic virtue is not acquired by children in school. After all, our contemporary political scientists have merely ratified the wisdom of the greatest political philosophers, ancient and modern, who insisted that civic virtue is acquired only by adults from active participation in public affairs. Plato's guardians, for example, must wait until they are thirty-five years old to begin their fifteen years of civic education, which takes place not in school but in direct participation in governmental affairs.⁸⁴

Aristotle is also clear that “a youth is not a suitable student of political science” because, although the intellectual virtues can be taught, the moral virtues result from habit.⁸⁵ For Aristotle, civic education is the responsibility of the legislator, not the teacher: the legislator uses law to educate citizens by ensuring that they acquire the right habits as they grow up.⁸⁶ Once citizens have grown up with the right civic virtues, then, as mature citizens, they might benefit from Aristotle's teaching about politics. Tocqueville beautifully captures the ancient view that schools foster academic knowledge just as politics fosters civic virtue: “The institutions of a township are to freedom what primary schools are to science; they put it within the reach of the people; they make them taste its peaceful employ and habituate them to making use of it.”⁸⁷ For Tocqueville, then, schools must be dedicated to imparting knowledge; civic virtue, by contrast, will be learned in town meetings, in churches, and on juries. What we find, then, in Plato, Aristotle, and Tocqueville are very sophisticated analyses of the various agencies of civic education and a conception of civic education that does not rely on the institution of the school.⁸⁸

Both classic political philosophers and contemporary political scientists seem to agree, then, that deliberate instruction aimed at inculcating civic knowledge and virtue is strikingly ineffective. Some knowledge of the history, structure, and functions of government and of the nature of politics might well be taught in civics courses, but not proper civic attitudes, such as a desire to contribute to the common good, a respect for democratic values, a love of country, or toleration of opposing views. Yet advocates of civic education in schools insist that it must aim not only at civic knowledge but also at civic virtue. Naturally, advocates of civic education are free to insist that although existing methods of teaching civic virtue in schools are ineffective, some new and better kind of civics courses might work. At the same time, those of us who object to the whole endeavor of using public schools as instruments of partisan civic indoctrination may take some comfort in its near total failure.

III. Civic Virtue or Intellectual Virtue?

Curiously, leading contemporary advocates of civic education in schools admit that it is ineffective.⁸⁹

What drives the passion for civic and other kinds of moral education is not the conviction that they are effective, but the conviction that without civic and moral education, schooling lacks any compelling moral purpose. It is no accident, then, that advocates of civic education in public schools all share the fundamental assumption that purely academic education consists only in the acquisition of skills and information and thus lacks an inherent moral dimension. If academic education merely involves the acquisition of amoral information and skills—if it is merely about ‘the 3 Rs’—then we might as well ask: Why should any society make a fundamental and expensive public commitment to common schools?

The view that education seeks to put an amoral intellect in the service of a moral heart is powerfully expressed by Immanuel Kant. Education by means of teaching and instruction, says Kant, aims solely at the acquisition of skillfulness, and ‘skillfulness’ he defines as a capacity for achieving any possible end.⁹⁰

Of course, it would be deeply immoral simply to arm students with powerful weapons and give them no guidance for their use, so Kant insists upon a supplemental education in ‘moralization’ (Moralisirung): “Man must not simply be skillful for any possible end, unless he also develops a character so that he chooses only purely good ends.”⁹¹ Because Kant defines academic instruction as the acquisition of amoral skills, no amount of academic learning will contribute to moral goodness: “A man can be physically and even mentally quite cultivated but still, with poor moral cultivation, be an evil creature.”⁹² Thus, by describing academic education in the amoral terms of the acquisition of skills, rather than in the moral terms of conscientiousness in the pursuit of truth, Kant has created a moral vacuum in academic education and generated the need for compensatory moral education. In contemporary debates about academic schooling, progressive educators emphasize the learning of certain skills, such as critical thinking skills, while traditionalist educators emphasize the mastery of certain kinds of information; but all of our contemporary pedagogues follow Kant by describing the aims of academic education in the amoral terms of information and skills.

In the current debates over civic education in schools, both advocates and critics universally frame the debate as “between people who insist that the community should be able to teach democratic values and others who insist that the community should have no more authority than is necessary to teach intellectual skills.”⁹³

Framed in this way, a rich conception of civic virtues looks much more attractive than an impoverished conception of academic skills. Once we make a moral vacuum of academic education, how can anyone object to the need for a compensatory moral or civic education? Gutmann consistently contrasts her morally rich conception of democratic education to the morally impoverished conception of purely academic education called ‘civic minimalism’. Gutmann, like the advocates of ‘civic minimalism’, always defines this purely academic education in the most amoral of terms: “literacy and numeracy,” “the 3R's,” or “basic skills.”⁹⁴ If citizens expect civic education in addition to mere academics, “then they are authorized to impose some values on schools.”⁹⁵ In short, academic education does not involve “values.” Gutmann's conception of a proper civic education includes not only academics but also moral values: “It would need to include teaching literacy and numeracy at a high level. It would also need to include teaching—not indoctrinating—civic values such as toleration, nondiscrimination, and respect for individual rights and legitimate laws.”⁹⁶

Gutmann argues that academic knowledge helps children to live a good life in the “nonmoral” sense,⁹⁷

and, she says, the skills that we acquire from a nonmoral education can contribute to the moral education of citizens.⁹⁸ She labels as “amoralism” the view that schools should stick to only teaching academics: “An apparent attraction of this solution is that schools would thereby rid themselves of all the political controversies now surrounding moral education and get on with the task of teaching the ‘basics’—cognitive skills and factual knowledge.”⁹⁹ Yet, she insists that amoralism is impossible in practice, because schools teach moral virtues and values informally through the “hidden curriculum” or ethos of the school. This is true, but we still have to decide whether to try to orient the ethos of the school toward intellectual or civic virtues. Macedo also describes academic schooling as equipping students with amoral weapons for any possible end: “Children must at the very least be provided with the intellectual tools necessary to understand the world around them, formulate their own convictions, and make their own way in life.”¹⁰⁰

Callan worries that if common schools eschew all moral and civic aims, then they will sink to the “lowest common denominator” of society's understanding of what children can learn. Such morally vapid common schools will be, he says, “unacceptable to the adherents of separate education and uninspiring to those of us who once looked to the common school with strong social hopes.”¹⁰¹

Purely academic education is only a “lowest common denominator,” “unacceptable” to some, and “uninspiring” to others if we assume, with Kant, that it is intrinsically amoral. Given this prevailing conception of academic education, Callan rightly alerts us to a dilemma for the common school: if we reject controversial moral and civic aims in common schools, then we must defend an “uninspiring,” not to mention amoral, education; but if we embrace a rich conception of moral or civic education, then our schools become inspiring to some and unacceptable to others. A minimalist academic education undermines the ideal of the school, while a maximalist moral education undermines the ideal of the common school.

Gutmann and others offer civic education as precisely the way of escaping this dilemma: they rightly argue that amoral academic minimalism fails to honor the moral ideal of schooling just as maximalist liberal or conservative moralism fails to honor the ideal of the common school. Therefore, to fill the moral vacuum of amoral academic education, Gutmann and others champion civic education not just as one aim of common schools, but as the primary aim.¹⁰²

Similarly, Macedo asserts that “the core purpose of public schooling is to promote civic ideals.”¹⁰³ And Callan says that because schooling has such a large place in children's lives, “the evolution of the roles and ideals that the institution offers to children as their schooling progresses should be designed with an eye to whatever pattern of moral development issues in the virtue of the citizen.”¹⁰⁴ We can now better appreciate why advocates of civic education in schools care so little about the effectiveness of schools as instruments of civic education: public schools need a compelling moral purpose and civic education is a compelling moral purpose. Gutmann goes so far as to argue that without civic education, public schooling does not merit public support.¹⁰⁵

If academic education intrinsically lacked a compelling moral purpose, then I would agree that our students need a compensatory moral education—and an education in the civic virtues might well be the most apt kind in a pluralistic democracy. But, as every good teacher knows, mere information and skills cannot be the aim of academic education because apart from a virtuous orientation toward truth, information and skills are mere resources and tools that can be put into the service of sophistry, manipulation, and domination. Only when the acquisition of information and skills is combined with a proper desire for true knowledge do we begin to acquire ‘intellectual virtue’, which may be defined as the conscientious pursuit of truth.¹⁰⁶

Every virtue theorist has his or her own catalogue of virtues, but what matters more than the particulars on the list is the relation among them. My developmental hierarchy of intellectual virtues begins with the virtues of intellectual carefulness such as single-mindedness, thoroughness, accuracy, and perseverance. Having acquired these virtues in elementary school, students must then learn how to resist temptations to false beliefs by acquiring the virtues of intellectual humility, intellectual courage, and intellectual impartiality. Finally, adults ought to strive for coherence in what they know and for coherence between their knowledge and their other pursuits by acquiring the virtues of intellectual integrity and ultimately wisdom. John Dewey thought that the aim of academic pedagogy was the inculcation of certain traits in students, among them open-mindedness, single-mindedness, sincerity, breadth of outlook, thoroughness, and responsibility. Dewey insisted that these academic or intellectual virtues “are moral traits.”¹⁰⁷

Once we grant that academic education is itself a limited kind of moral education, then the question we face is not whether to pursue moral education in schools: academic schooling is intrinsically a kind of moral education. The questions we face are, rather, What kind of moral education is appropriate to the institution of the school? Schools seem apt instruments for some but not all kinds of moral education. And is civic education compatible with the intrinsic moral aim of academic schooling, namely, the conscientious pursuit of true knowledge? As we shall see, civic education, both in theory and in practice, subverts the intrinsic moral purpose of academic schooling.

What happens to academic education in the context of schools committed to civic education? Whether we look to the history of civic education or to the ideas of civic educators, the answer is quite certain: the academic pursuit of knowledge will be corrupted through a subordination of truth-seeking to some civic agenda. The history of civic education in the United States is a cautionary tale, indeed. Many advocates of civic education rightly invoke the prestige of Jefferson, who was a leading pioneer and prophet of using common schools for republican civic education.¹⁰⁸

What these advocates fail to notice, however, is how Jefferson's commitment to civic education corrupted his own intellectual integrity. Jefferson's initial vision of his proposed University of Virginia reflected his lifelong commitment to the freedom of the human mind from every tyranny erected over it: “This institution,” he wrote, “will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”¹⁰⁹ But as a civic educator, Jefferson could not bear the thought of future students at his university being exposed to and corrupted by politically incorrect ideas. Thus, in order to protect them from the seductive Toryism of David Hume, Jefferson spent two decades promoting the publication of a censored, plagiarized, and falsified but politically correct edition of Hume's History of England.¹¹⁰ When he could find no partners in this intellectual crime, he then enlisted James Madison's support as a fellow member of the Board of Overseers of the nascent University of Virginia to draft regulations aimed at suppressing political heresy and promoting political orthodoxy. Jefferson and Madison succeeded in passing a resolution to “provide that none [of the principles of government] shall be inculcated which are incompatible with those on which the Constitutions of this state, and of the U.S. were genuinely based, in the common opinion….” This resolution goes on to specify the texts that must be taught in the school of politics (Locke, Sidney, The Federalist Papers, and U.S. and Virginia constitutional documents).¹¹¹ Moreover, Jefferson came to agree with Madison's argument that “the most effectual safeguard against heretical intrusions into the School of politics, will be an able [and] orthodox Professor….”¹¹² To this end, Jefferson and later Madison worked to ensure that only those professors who espoused a strict constructionist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and the doctrine of states' rights would be appointed to the school of politics.¹¹³ Because of his passion for civic education in republican virtue, Jefferson abandoned his commitment to intellectual freedom in favor of partisan indoctrination at his own beloved University of Virginia. That such a champion of intellectual freedom who swore undying enmity to every tyranny over the mind of man should himself attempt to whitewash, censor, and suppress what he called “heresy” powerfully illustrates the poisonous consequences of using schools as instruments of civic education.

Jefferson has truly been the poisoned wellspring of American civic education in schools ever since. Some historians have systematically analyzed the civic values taught in public school civics, literature, history, and social studies courses. It should be no surprise that in order to teach civic values, American textbook writers in every epoch have systematically sanitized, distorted, and falsified history, literature, and social studies in order to inculcate every manner of religious, cultural, and class bigotry—including racism, nationalism, Anglo-Saxon superiority, American imperialism, Social Darwinism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-intellectualism.¹¹⁴

An early text from 1796 warns of the danger posed by the importation of French ideas and persons: “Let America beware of infidelity, which is the most dangerous enemy that she has to contend with at present….” The author goes on to teach schoolchildren that Native Americans lack all science, culture, and religion; that they are averse to labor and foresight; and that “the beavers exceed the Indians, ten-fold, in the construction of their homes and public works….”¹¹⁵ Later, in the wake of large-scale Irish immigration during the 1840s and 1850s, school texts begin a massive campaign of slander and calumny against Roman Catholicism. Textbooks not only describe Catholicism as an anti-Christian form of paganism and idolatry, they even blame the Church for the fall of the Roman Empire. One speller asks: “Is papacy at variance with paganism?” A historian says that no theme in school texts before 1870 is more universal than anti-Catholicism; according to these texts, Catholicism has no place in the American past or future.¹¹⁶ In the period after 1870, religious bigotry gives way to racial bigotry and all non-Anglo-Saxon peoples are described as permanently and immutably inferior due to their intellectual, moral, and physical degeneracy. Beginning in 1917, during World War I, many states began to pass laws forbidding any instruction in public schools that might be disloyal to the United States, including the teaching of the German language; at the same time, many states also passed laws requiring all public schoolteachers to be American citizens and to swear an oath that they would teach patriotism.¹¹⁷

This subordination of knowledge to civic uplift is not merely a relic of the past: in many states, Creationism is taught in place of biology and geology because of the perceived moral dangers of Darwinism. And many states continue to require American history to be falsified in order to promote patriotism. The Texas Education Code provides that “textbooks should promote democracy, patriotism, and the free enterprise system”; this provision is still employed to sanitize the teaching of history in Texas.¹¹⁸

In 2002 the New York Board of Regents was found to have falsified, on moral grounds, most of the literary texts used in its exams; here classic literature was bowdlerized in the interests of political correctness.¹¹⁹ Some systematic examinations of current social studies and history textbooks find extensive evidence of how American history is distorted, twisted, and falsified in order to emphasize the previously neglected contributions as well as the victimization of women and minorities.¹²⁰ Although Anglo-Saxon triumphalism now frequently gives way to multicultural victimization, nothing has changed in the American passion for subordinating truth-seeking to moral and civic uplift.

No one should be surprised that American schoolbooks, like any form of human knowledge, should often prove mistaken and misguided. But textbooks do not go astray merely because their authors are fallible human beings sincerely seeking true knowledge; rather, texts go astray because their authors deliberately subordinate the pursuit of knowledge to an agenda of civic education. American textbooks are often explicitly anti-intellectual: they repeatedly emphasize that moral and civic virtue is far more important than mere knowledge.¹²¹

What again and again proves fatal to the pursuit of knowledge is the conviction that civic virtue is more important than truth.

Civic education aimed at civic virtue in schools usually involves various kinds of duplicity on the part of educators: teachers pretend to teach American history, but actually merely use historical examples to covertly attempt to impart one or another civic virtue. This subordination of knowledge to civic uplift often proceeds through the presentation of genuine facts, but facts selected by an ulterior motive of inducing patriotism or cosmopolitanism. Just as nothing can be more misleading than a photograph, so nothing can be more fictitious than a biased selection of “facts” in the presentation of history or social studies. In response to the traditionally rosy and uplifting versions of American greatness designed to instill patriotism, we now find dark and brutal narratives of American imperialism and racism designed to covertly instill multicultural tolerance. Both the traditional and the radical narratives of American history might be equally factual just as they are equally false. Of course, any presentation of American history will be selective and, hence, in some ways biased or misleading, but the effort to present American history truthfully (using the consensus of historians as a proxy for truth) will surely fail if our motive is to use that history to inculcate one or another civic virtue.

Both conservative and progressive civic educators routinely subordinate the quest for truth to a preferred agenda for civic uplift. As we shall see, some civic educators frankly espouse the falsification of history or the weakening of academic standards in pursuit of civic virtue. Yet so deep-seated is the urge to falsify American history that even when civic educators claim to reject “brainwashing” or “indoctrination,” they proceed to advocate precisely that.¹²²

Advocates of civic education devote virtually all of their analysis to the question of what values ought to be taught or ought to be permitted to be taught in schools. It is almost always taken for granted that knowledge should be subordinated to moral and civic uplift, so the only questions are: What values ought to be inculcated? And who should decide? Some argue that a common democratic culture requires a common democratic education in all schools, while others argue that our pluralist democratic culture requires a wide diversity of moral and civic education in schools. In legal theorist Michael McConnell's pluralist vision, every school, public or private, ought to have the right to corrupt the pursuit of knowledge in the service of its preferred ideology.¹²³

Apparently we must choose either to subordinate knowledge to an official orthodoxy or to permit the subordination of knowledge to all manner of unofficial orthodoxies. Just as those who see no intrinsic value to art discuss it purely in terms of its moral upshot, so those who see no intrinsic value to the pursuit of knowledge always discuss it purely in terms of its moral upshot.¹²⁴

We might distinguish two very different ways in which the virtues of truth-seeking might be subordinated to, and corrupted by, civic schooling. The first concerns the ‘curriculum’, that is, the content of what is taught, and the second concerns the ‘pedagogy’, that is, the methods employed to convey the curriculum. Galston is refreshingly frank about the danger that civic education poses to the truth-seeking virtues of the academic curriculum. He distinguishes a philosophical education oriented toward truth-seeking and rational inquiry from a civic education oriented toward producing good citizens. He rightly observes about the purposes of civic education: “It is unlikely, to say the least, that the truth will be fully consistent with this purpose.”¹²⁵

But Galston is a champion of civic education, so he bites the bullet and defends the imperative to falsify history: “For example, rigorous historical research will almost certainly vindicate complex ‘revisionist’ accounts of key figures in American history. Civic education, however, requires a more noble, moralizing history: a pantheon of heros, who confer legitimacy on central institutions and constitute worthy objects of emulation.”¹²⁶

Certainly young children are incapable of understanding complex accounts of American history, not because such accounts are “revisionist,” but simply because they are complex. Children of any age, however, are capable of understanding that their nation, like their family, is both lovable and far from perfect. To suppose that children need to be taught in school to love their country is equivalent to supposing that children need to be taught in school to love their mothers. No advocate of patriotic education in schools has ever furnished any evidence suggesting that American students do not love their country. Galston's particular arguments here are very weak, indeed; few other major advocates of civic schooling have expressly embraced his open subordination of the truth.¹²⁷

But Galston rightly sees that there is an inevitable tension between educating for citizenship and educating for knowledge, even in a liberal democratic society.

Galston's moralizing history pretends to teach actual history while covertly attempting to inculcate civic virtues; other parts of the curriculum are also misused, perhaps more subtly, to covertly teach civic virtues. Yet Callan admits, in his understated way, that when teachers try to be moral educators, “[t]here are certainly risks that the intellectual authority of the teacher will be abused.”¹²⁸

The case of Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education reveals the widespread abuse of the intellectual authority of the teacher in many contemporary public schools.¹²⁹ In this case, Robert Mozert, a Christian fundamentalist, objected to a reading series required by his local public school that included stories about a Catholic New Mexican Indian settlement, a boy who likes to cook, Anne Frank's unorthodox religious opinions, etc. This court case has provoked endless controversy about what values ought to be taught in schools and about who should have the authority to decide. To my mind, what is troubling about this case is that these stories were part of a curriculum in English, yet they were selected not because of their beauty, renown, or even the felicity of their English style, but for the civic purpose of promoting tolerance by favorably illustrating a diversity of lifestyles.¹³⁰ Soviet education followed the same model: “Before the Revolution, Russia had 1,000 tractors; now thanks to comrade Stalin we have 250,000 tractors. How many more tractors do we have under developed socialism?”

The hijacking of academic aims for a covert moral and civic agenda is more troubling than the questions of the merit of the values being taught and who should have the authority to select textbooks. According to Macedo, what might be objectionable is a covert civic agenda heavily biased in favor of only one ethical way of life; he insists that civic education promote respect for a variety of ways of life.¹³¹

The issue is deeper than one of balance: the issue is whether deliberately attempting to inculcate moral or civic values under the guise of teaching English or any other field of knowledge constitutes an abuse of the proper intellectual authority of teachers.¹³² American teachers do not claim to be exemplars of civic virtue; they are neither certified nor hired on that basis. Their authority, such as it is, rests solely on their passion for, and command of, a body of knowledge and of the techniques for communicating it to students. Teachers ought to be exemplars of intellectual virtue; whether they are exemplars of other kinds of moral and civic virtues is not essential to their authority as teachers. To place their limited but real moral authority in the service of promoting nonacademic virtues is an abuse of that authority.

Just as the academic curriculum can be wrongly subordinated to an agenda of civic education, so can academic pedagogy. Indeed, much of what is known as ‘progressive’ educational pedagogy—that is, teaching that attempts to respond to the spontaneous curiosity of the student, often in hands-on, collaborative projects—has long been advocated on moral and civic grounds as much as on academic grounds. Dewey, in particular, championed many progressive pedagogical innovations because he thought that they turned classrooms into laboratories of democracy. Progressive pedagogues have always insisted that their methods are egalitarian, democratic, tolerant, and caring, and that they foster autonomy in the child. Indeed, some contemporary advocates of civic education argue that democratic civic education might be pursued best not by direct manipulation of the curriculum, but through the indirect means of progressive pedagogical methods.¹³³

Political theorist Joe Coleman points out that it is “no accident” that progressive pedagogical techniques “have a distinctly civic dimension”; after all, he suggests, they were designed largely for that reason.¹³⁴

Instead of raising the fundamental moral question of whether it is appropriate to deploy pedagogical techniques for civic ends, Coleman proceeds directly to recommending the use of progressive pedagogy to inculcate liberal civic education on the grounds that using the curriculum to do so is too “heavy-handed.”¹³⁵ So a deft and subtle mode of indoctrination is superior to a crude and blunt one? Coleman argues that progressive pedagogy has also been advocated on purely academic grounds, so progressive educators need not harbor a desire to indoctrinate: “Intentionally or not, then, student-centered learning is a civic pedagogy.”¹³⁶ It would indeed be a wonderful world if the most academically effective pedagogy just happened also to be the ideal kind of civic education. But how likely is that? As Coleman knows, the progressive pedagogies that he champions on civic grounds have been subjected to decades of withering attack on academic grounds by educators and psychologists.¹³⁷ We cannot hope to adjudicate that dispute here, but Coleman should tell us how to set priorities if our academic and civic aims conflict. Gutmann, by contrast, is quite clear about how to set priorities. She says that the moral primacy of political education means precisely that school pedagogy may rightly be designed to promote democratic values and virtues even at the cost of purely academic achievement.¹³⁸

In practice, then, and in theory, we have compelling evidence that civic education represents a permanent and fundamental threat both to the academic curriculum and to academic pedagogy: the quest for civic virtue will forever attempt, and often succeed, to trump the pursuit of knowledge. How seriously we take this subordination of academic to moral education will depend upon our understanding of the values and virtues intrinsic to an academic education. I cannot attempt here to develop a full normative theory of the aims and methods of academic education. However, I can offer some reasons and evidence for my assertions that intellectual virtue is the proper aim of schooling, that intellectual virtue is a kind of moral virtue, and that, therefore, the cultivation of intellectual virtue is the kind of moral education appropriate to the institution of the school.

Ever since Kant, academic education has been pervasively defined in amoral terms as the acquisition of information and skills that might be put to use for good or bad ends. Indeed, the obvious way to object to my claim that academic education is a kind of moral education is to point out that the information and skills acquired in school are just as easily put to use in the service of sophistry as in the service of truth-seeking. But this view of academic education in terms of mere information and skills misdescribes the actual point of scholastic education, which is to acquire information and skills in the context of a love for genuine knowledge, that is, a love for what Zagzebski calls “cognitive contact with reality.”¹³⁹

In other words, good math, history, science, and English teachers do not attempt to arm students with morally neutral resources and weapons and then hope for the best. Good teachers attempt to fuse the growing acquisition of information and skills to a growing desire for genuine knowledge. In other words, proper academic education does not seek merely to provide the means for whatever ends might be chosen by the student; proper academic education encompasses both the means and the end. Dewey saw this clearly: “The knowledge of dynamite of a safecracker may be identical in verbal form with that of a chemist; in fact, it is different, for it is knit into connection with different aims and habits, and thus has a different import.”¹⁴⁰

A scholastic education is the acquisition of information and skills in the context of acquiring a love for truth and knowledge; a scholastic miseducation is the acquisition of information and skills in the context of learning to subordinate truth-seeking to the desire for things such as power, wealth, or fame. Indeed, if academic education were merely a matter of information and skills, then we might well wonder why we need teachers at all. Computers are quite effective at conveying information and coaching skills; thus, given how we normally describe academic education, it is not surprising that computers are increasingly replacing human teachers. The indispensable role of the human teacher is motivational: our relations to our teachers, which often rest on deep currents of affection and a desire for emulation, foster and inspire our love for learning and for the joys of a life devoted to learning. The deep affective energies between student and teacher properly serve to bond the acquisition of information and skills to a genuine love for knowledge.

We often contrast the academic education of the mind to the moral education of the heart. Indeed, Aristotle famously distinguishes intellectual virtues as perfections of the rational part of the soul from moral virtues as perfections of the nonrational part of the soul.¹⁴¹

However, if academic education involves not only intellectual skills but also the right motivation, then the scholastic virtues are not merely intellectual, but also involve feeling, passion, and love. The pursuit of truth involves just as much passion as any other love. Just as any morally virtuous person is emotionally attracted to what is good, so any intellectually virtuous person is emotionally attracted to what is true. So the contrast between an education of the intellect and an education of the sentiments is untenable since the virtues of teaching and learning require both the mind and the heart. Indeed, the very language of ‘intellectual’ virtues or virtues of the ‘mind’ is deeply misleading; the virtues of truth-seeking are as passionate as any other kind of moral virtue.

In short, our relation to our intellectual virtues is just as deep as our relation to our other moral virtues. At the same time, however, our relation to any one of our virtues is fundamentally different from our relation to our capacities and skills. Capacities and skills, like any resource or tool, are things we can use or misuse; we recognize a kind of “distance” between our selves and our resources or skills. Virtues, whether intellectual or other kinds, are aspects of persons or traits of character; virtues cannot be misused because they cannot be used at all. This is why the maxim “honesty is the best policy” is so paradoxical, for policies are things we deliberately deploy while honesty is usually thought of as an aspect of a person. An honest person cannot deploy honesty any more than he or she can deploy dishonesty. Academic education properly aims to shape who we are as persons—namely, as persons who care about the truth—and not merely to enhance our capacities and skills.

The first stage of my developmental hierarchy of intellectual virtues consists of the virtues of carefulness, such as single-mindedness, thoroughness, accuracy, and perseverance. These seem, at first, more like capacities or skills than like virtues; after all, why cannot a sophist or any other bad person make use of single-mindedness, thoroughness, accuracy, and perseverance? Here Passmore usefully distinguishes the skill of carefulness from the virtues of carefulness: a sophist can certainly acquire the skill of carefulness, but a good student learns to care about being careful: he learns to love single-mindedness, thoroughness, precision, and perseverance because these traits are inseparable from truth-seeking.¹⁴²

The higher-order virtues of intellectual courage, intellectual impartiality, and intellectual honesty are more obviously traits of character rather than mere capacities or skills. Whereas (ideally) teachers tend to focus on the virtues of carefulness in primary school, teachers in high school and college attempt to inculcate intellectual courage, impartiality, and honesty by requiring students to consider several points of view on a question, to stand up for their own judgments, to be willing to consider new and unfamiliar ideas, and to admit the limits of their own knowledge and the fallibility of their own judgments.

Finally, in our practices of praising and blaming persons, we certainly treat intellectual traits as if they were moral traits. Just as we praise people for being morally honest, courageous, and conscientious, so we praise people for being intellectually honest, courageous, and conscientious. Here, perhaps, our practices of blame are more revealing than our practices of praise, because we often praise people for admirable nonmoral qualities, such as their beauty, talent, and strength; yet by praising them we do not assume that they exercise voluntary control over these qualities. By contrast, we tend to blame people only for qualities over which they do exercise at least indirect voluntary control. It seems wrong to blame people for being ugly, frail, or untalented.

We blame people for qualities that we hold them responsible for, and we hold them responsible for qualities that they have voluntary power to avoid; such qualities are moral qualities. Our practices of blame show that we expect people to be conscientious in the pursuit of truth, just as we expect them to be conscientious in the pursuit of their moral duties. Do we blame people for the quality of their beliefs? Indeed, we have a rich vocabulary for blaming people for what we take to be their unjustified and irrational beliefs. We call them (in Zagzebski's list) narrow-minded, careless, intellectually cowardly, rash, imperceptive, prejudiced, rigid, or obtuse. I would add superstitious, gullible, dogmatic, and fanatical.¹⁴³

Of course, to say that an education in the intellectual virtues is a kind of moral education is not to say that it is a complete moral education. One can easily possess all the virtues of truth-seeking and still morally fail in many other ways through intemperance, injustice, and many other vices. As Thomas Hobbes was the first to concede about himself, intellectual courage is quite compatible with physical cowardice. Neither good teachers nor good students need be moral paragons. Does this mean that the intellectual virtues might be misused by morally bad people? Does conscientiousness in truth-seeking make a bad person even more dangerous? As we noted above, intellectual virtues cannot be misused because, being aspects of persons, they cannot be used at all. Nor is it plausible to suppose that moral evil might be aided and abetted by truth-seeking; indeed, since moral evil almost always involves false belief, conscientiousness in truth-seeking is likely to mitigate moral evil. So we must avoid claiming either that the intellectual virtues are the whole of moral virtue or that they are not even a part of moral virtue.

Even if we were to agree that an academic education is itself a kind of moral education, we still might wonder why the school is the best instrument for this kind of moral education. Aristotle says that virtues of thought can be taught, while moral virtues can only be learned from experience and habit.¹⁴⁴

On his account, many virtues of thought presuppose moral virtues and, hence, moral experience and habituation. His moral virtues require the guidance of the intellectual virtue of practical wisdom—thus the necessity of teaching. Still, Aristotle seems right to observe that teaching plays a greater and more fundamental role in the acquisition of the intellectual virtues than of the other moral virtues. No one doubts that schools are apt instruments for promoting the acquisition of information and intellectual skills, but what about the motivational dimension of intellectual virtues? Are schools apt instruments for teaching the love of knowledge and a desire for truth? Here we must distinguish the child's natural desire for knowledge in general from his or her acquired desire for a particular body of knowledge. A student's love for a particular branch of knowledge, cannot, like any deep motivation, be directly taught, but, as they say, it can be caught; to the extent that schools are a setting for students to be exposed to and “infected” by the love of knowledge, then schools are apt instruments for intellectual virtue. As Passmore rightly asks: “And where else, if not a school, is the child to acquire the intellectual loves?”¹⁴⁵

What evidence do we have that schools are the proper instruments for academic education? We noted above that empirical studies of civic education found that schools do have some small effect on civic knowledge even if virtually no effect on civic attitudes or virtues. There are no empirical studies, to my knowledge, of the effectiveness of schools in inculcating the intellectual virtues. However, the most influential study of the effects of scholastic attainment on the knowledge of adults may be suggestive of the important role of schools not only in inculcating a body of information but also in fostering a disposition to the lifelong acquisition of knowledge. In The Enduring Effects of Education, Herbert Hyman, Charles Wright, and John Reed surveyed the knowledge of adults many decades after they had completed their schooling. These authors found not only that every year of schooling contributed positively to the knowledge base of adults, but also that every year of schooling contributed positively to the propensity of adults to continue learning by reading newspapers, magazines, books, and seeking out opportunities for adult education. By including in their survey knowledge of current events, these researchers were able to establish that those adults who had the most schooling were also keeping abreast of current events most effectively. So we have some evidence that schools do effectively foster a lifelong love for learning.¹⁴⁶

Once we see that the conscientious pursuit of knowledge is the inherent moral purpose of schooling, we will not be surprised by the absence of any agreement about which civic virtues we ought to teach in schools. Since none of the civic virtues is intrinsically related to the inherent moral purpose of schooling, there is no academically principled way to decide which civic virtues ought to be taught in schools. I quite strongly value a commitment to human rights, the rule of law, public service, and a love of America, but I do not see what these noble virtues have to do with pursuing knowledge of physics, French, English, chemistry, history, and math. No catalogue of civic virtues can be shown to be a prerequisite of academic excellence, a part of academic excellence, or the product of academic excellence. The simple truth of the matter is that one can be a paragon of academic virtue and a lousy citizen. Many great scholars, scientists, and educators have notoriously lacked the civic virtues by being resident aliens, cosmopolitans, or epicureans. Trying to decide which civic virtues to teach in schools is like trying to decide which sports or which crafts to teach: since none of these is intrinsically related to academic education, there are no academic grounds for deciding these matters.

Why is civic education in schools so ineffective? We saw that civics courses may well have some modest effect upon civic knowledge but essentially none on civic attitudes or motivations. Let us consider some reasons offered. Some educators argue that civics courses are inherently irrelevant to the academic curriculum. Because civic education, like driver or consumer education, lacks an intrinsic relation to the academic curriculum, it quickly becomes regarded by teachers and students as purely ancillary and irrelevant. The purely ancillary nature of civics courses may help to explain why they prove to be so ineffective. To overcome this irrelevance, many advocates insist that civic education become incorporated into the core academic curriculum, so that English, history, and social studies courses impart lessons in civic virtue. But here we become impaled upon the fundamental dilemma of civic education: if we teach civic virtue in a way that respects the integrity of the academic curriculum, then civics becomes merely ancillary and irrelevant; contrarily, if, to overcome this irrelevance, we attempt to incorporate civic education into the academic subjects, then we inevitably subvert the inherent moral aim of these subjects by subordinating the pursuit of truth to civic uplift.

Indeed, there may be something paradoxical and self-defeating about the whole project of teaching civic virtue in schools. Niemi and Junn speculate that civic education might be ineffective largely because it is so whitewashed. In the attempt to make civics promote patriotism, American civics courses, they observe, present a “Pollyannaish view of politics that is fostered by the avoidance of reference to partisan politics and other differences of opinion….” So instead of a nasty contest between interest groups, we get “how a bill becomes law”—a presentation of civics cleansed of all politics as well as of all possible interest. Niemi and Junn also decry the Whiggish distortions of American history, in which the “problems”of the past (such as racism and oppression) are invariably “solved” in the present. Niemi and Junn worry that these attempts to inculcate civic trust might not just be ineffective, but might actually backfire by creating greater political cynicism.¹⁴⁷

The authors of a new civics curriculum designed to foster great tolerance for the diversity of beliefs claim that it has made many students more tolerant even though it also made some students dramatically more intolerant.¹⁴⁸ These perverse effects call into question the whole project of attempting to manipulate students' attitudes. Similarly, political theorist Christopher Eisgruber observes of the attempt to inculcate values through an academic course: “How would students react to such a course? My suspicion is that any student old enough to understand such a course would also be old enough to recognize it as propaganda—and to resent it for that reason.”¹⁴⁹ Students are often adept at detecting when knowledge is treated merely as a vehicle for carrying moral attitudes; these students then rightly suspect the credibility of such knowledge. If teachers express such contempt for the value of the knowledge they teach, why should students value learning?

It is, in many ways, reassuring that civic education aimed directly at civic virtues is ineffective. But it would be deeply unfortunate if, as many argue, the attempt to inculcate civic virtues serves to undermine the teaching of civic knowledge. Instead of constantly subordinating knowledge to moral uplift, we ought to have more confidence in the sheer moral value of knowledge. As we have seen, the cognitive sophistication cultivated in schools by itself strongly contributes to political tolerance, that is, the willingness to extend civil liberties to those with whom we strongly disagree.¹⁵⁰

A leading team of political scientists offers this hypothesis: “If we are correct that the number of years of formal schooling acts to increase tolerance regardless of the manifest and subtle political content of that education, then educational attainment should act to increase tolerance even in regimes with contrary messages.” These political scientists found strong evidence that years of schooling increased political tolerance even in Hungary under the Communists. Ironically, intolerant regimes foster toleration simply by schooling their citizens—even when (or especially when?) this schooling is designed to foster political intolerance.¹⁵¹ In the United States, specifically political knowledge has been shown to promote political tolerance, active participation in politics, more coherent political opinions, and a more rational relation between participation and one's political goals.¹⁵² So we ought to be confident that we are contributing significantly to civic virtue merely by attempting to impart to our students genuine knowledge and, in particular, civic knowledge. In light of the ineffective and often counterproductive nature of civic education aimed directly at civic virtue, we have many reasons to believe that schools are better advised simply to stick to their essential task of pursuing genuine knowledge. No doubt this scholastic kind of civic education is seriously deficient, but we must remember that most of what we learn in life is not learned in school, and most of our teachers are not schoolteachers.

What is the relation of schooling to civic education more broadly? This is a very large question that would take us far beyond the scope of this essay, but I will briefly consider, by way of a partial answer, the relation of the intellectual virtues to the civic virtues. A good citizen ought to possess the intellectual virtues because they will help him or her to resist false beliefs. Bad politicians frequently tempt us to believe things that are false by appealing to our national pride, our greed, our resentments, or our fears for the future. ‘Intellectual virtue’ means acquiring precisely those dispositions that lead us to resist these temptations to false beliefs. A good citizen need not care only about the truth of his or her political beliefs, nor must a good citizen, as a partisan, advocate the whole truth. However, a good citizen must care about whether the views that he or she advocates are true. So intellectual virtue might be necessary for good citizens, but it is hardly sufficient. An intellectual paragon might well be a lousy citizen: no amount of conscientiousness in the pursuit of truth constitutes or even reliably leads to a zeal for public service or to the courage to defend one's nation. Indeed, as Plato famously observes, those who most sincerely love genuine knowledge are often the most repelled by the inevitable simplifications and distortions of political ideology and rhetoric. It is very difficult to reconcile a passion for knowledge with the political imperatives to advocate partial truths, to hide the truth at times, and to appeal to nonrational passions. None of this, I believe, amounts to a fundamental incompatibility between intellectual and civic virtue, but it does suggest some real tensions and moral challenges. So a scholastic education is only a partial civic education, and the intellectual virtues are only a part of the civic virtues.