We are living in a period of
Neoliberal failure
and
democratic decline.
My proposed solution is
Civic Education Reform.
... an underwhelming title.
Democratic Decline
What Is Civic Education?
Neoliberal Universities
Secularism As Amoral Education
Steps to Reform
Click on the pictures to read a detailed description of each step (it's scrollable!).
Primary and Secondary Education
Bureaucratic Reforms (?)
Bureaucratic Reforms
Due to the political challenges involved in the revising or replacing of older school laws, lobbyists and policymakers developed a tradition of piling countless new laws on top of each other as they gradually expanded the scope of federal funding in public schools.pp. 145-146
These laws were then mirrored at the state level, resulting in a complex web of prerequisites for school funding (on which schools are fundamentally dependent in order to function),source which has created a significant barrier to real reform in the public school system because this mass of laws, functioning as a set of necessary guidelines, has become too complicated to politically circumnavigate.
The transition from No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) has reduced (but has not extinguished) the influence of the federal government on school funding; however, state-by-state funding laws still remain overcomplicated.
Therefore, the first step in centralized education reform is the streamlining of these laws such that, while school grants still have a broad enough reach to help fund accomodating programs, they are no longer so overbearing, and reform outside of the private sector and charter schools becomes feasible as a consequence.
This initiative is already happening around the country to an extent due to the new opportunities for local change created by the restructuring of what had comprised the Department of Education.source
I will probably not end up becoming particularly involved in this process, and it isn't easy to find concrete relevant information on the details of these laws and their effects (or, more accurately, to even know what to look for) unless you are a part of the bureaucracy yourself, as far as I can tell.
Civic Education Pedagogy
Civic Education Pedagogy
The failure of the education system to adequately provide social studies education means that a massive portion of the population does not understand how to analyze and solve economic issues that have serious implications in the short and especially the long term. Furthermore, a concerningly small amount of people have any real concept of what it means to organize politically or any real understanding as to why political organization is important; even fewer understand lobbying and its role in political change, which means that despite the United States being an at least partially democratic nation, the people themselves are politically impotent, meaning that de facto democratic power is severely on the decline.
To care about one's country is to devote oneself to improving the areas in which the country falls short. The United States has continued to suffer many ongoing crises without an effective movement to mitigate any such problem, whether it is the cycle of poverty and crime consequent to centuries of slavery followed by about a century of legal segregation, or it is the more general drug epidemic that destroys lives and families not just in the "inner city" but throughout the country, reaching sparsely populated small towns and villages all the same, linked in part to the dramatic decline of the manufacturing industry with no solution brought about to ease the problem despite decades of evidence proving that regurgitated Neoliberal policies simply will not suffice. My generation in particular is facing a crisis in housing costs, caused in part by outdated zoning laws, local land monopolies, and a construction sector that still has not properly rebounded from the 2008 financial crisis, yet real solutions are only being reached slowly, if at all.
The empirical evidence for democratic decline lies in the abject failure of so many recent political movements such as environmental movements like the vegan movement, structural reform movements like Black Lives Matter, and now anti-war movements like those opposed to the United States participating in conflicts in the Middle East. Analysis of each of these movements results in the discovery of common patterns. First, the people devoting themselves to political activism are broadly incapable of honestly and critically studying the history of democratic movements and are instead relying on vague, often mythological reinterpretations of the past. Second, these activists are incapable of creating actionable roadmaps that result in concrete and measurable political change (see Sample Curricula). Third, these same activists, as well as people allied to them, are broadly incapable of honestly recounting their own failures and learning from their mistakes (that is, ideology takes the place of empiricism).
For this reason, I call for radical civic education reform. The Civic Education Pedagogy will be both a book and a free online document covering all the main points of my philosophy of (civic) education and in effect will be a compilation of what I will have written in essay form on this website. It will have two main sections: an explanatory section and an example section.
The explanatory section will be split into three parts: Problem (economic decline and democratic decline, etc.), Solution (civic education in theory, etc.), and Praxis (how to reform the education system).
The example section will be my attempt to illustrate what a civic education classroom would look like in practice. This will be done by going through hypothetical lesson and unit plans in a narrative way while also explaining how materials such as textbooks can be used with differentiated education in mind. Finally, the Sample Curricula (see next) will be attached at the end as part of the appendix.
Sample Curricula
Sample Curricula
The Sample Curricula will be a document laying out general K-12 subject matter as well as many detailed lesson and unit plans that could be used as a point of reference for a public school that is transitioning to a civic pedagogy.
The curricula will cover at least Language Arts, Mathematics, Civics, History, Economics, Science subjects, Programming, Art subjects, and Physical Education and will also include descriptions of proposed extracurriculars that would fit a civic pedagogy, such as a school lobbying team. (In some cases, there is no obvious link between a subject and politics, so these subjects will likely remain more or less identical to what is currently standard in schools.)
A general approach that will show up frequently in my proposed curricula (particularly within the social studies subjects) is my three-part method: Problem, Solution, Praxis.
The Problem part involves students finding or comprehending a particular problem, whether that is a current political problem, a past controversy, or even a practical real-life problem that individuals will be likely to face in their lives and their careers. In the context of a pure civics course, the Problem section introduces the subject: the students will be asked something along the lines of, "What do you think is the biggest political problem in America right now?" (Note: naturally, this direct approach to political issues will result in a highly polemic classroom, but if students cannot learn to engage civilly in the practice of political problem solving before they graduate, then there is absolutely no reason to expect anything better after they graduate.)
The Solution part requires students to come up with a feasible action or hypothetical project that would solve or mitigate the problem established in the first part. At this stage, students will be forced to engage with problem solving using full life-cycle analysis. The teacher's role will be to address potential problems that any given proposed solution may face in both the short and long term, and students will have to either revise their solutions to succeed in the long term or discard their naïve solutions and try to come up with better alternatives.
The Praxis part is perhaps the most important in a civics context because it deals with how to actually bring about a solution in the first place. Even if a solution makes sense, in a political context people need to organize, advocate, and lobby for real change; this is "praxis". For as long as the citizenship does not fundamentally understand how political organization works, what the various methods of advocacy are, how the (relevant) federal and state systems of law work, how lawmakers are persuaded one way or another, and how third-parties influence politicians both through advocacy as well as through financial coercion, The People will never be able to achieve political change, even if such change is believed to be important by the majority. Also, while I do emphasize civics, the same approach is useful for teaching teamwork and management skills too, because leaders, coworkers, and friends need to know how to effectively engage a team in order to solve practical problems.
Because I am not, of course, an expert in all fields, my hope is that I may find other people who are interested in integrating their own fields of expertise into what will become a coherent civic education curriculum. Click here if you want to work with me to make this happen.
Civic Education Advocacy
Civic Education Advocacy
Although there is some degree to which direct, bureaucratic approaches to education reform can improve the system, the depth of the kind of civic education reform that I am calling for will not possibly be achieved through lobbying for the passing of laws alone. Rather, it will require a substantial degree of social influence in the first place such that the idea of radical civic reform becomes a popular enough feature of education politics discourse that politicians, school administrators, and teachers begin to take seriously and discuss the potential implementation of substantial structural reform of the education system.
This will be, by far, the most difficult, long-winded, complex, and arduous process of the entire campaign as well as the most likely to fail. (In fact, I assume it will fail, but I will fight for it nonetheless.) There is no conventional step-by-step process on how to successfully make radical civic education into a hot topic, meaning that this phase will be the most open-ended and experimental.
The first step in advocacy will be to create a fact sheet covering the quantitative and qualitative problems in our system of education (and society at large) as well as the ways in which civic education reform will be able to solve or mitigate these issues. This can be supplemented by the distribution of the Civic Education Pedagogy and Sample Curricula for those who want a more in-depth look at the problems and solutions.
The aspect of civic education advocacy most predictable will be networking with and (when relevant) becoming members of civic education organizations such as ICivics, the Center for Civic Education, NCSS, and NCHE, especially by attending conferences. In addition, it may be worthwhile to send letters directly to senators and representatives covering the content of our fact sheet, though it would be unlikely that any congressperson would actually end up reading such a letter.
Ultimately, it will be necessary to have substantial media exposure, for which there is no concrete strategy guranteeing any level of success. I myself will become an explicitly political performance artist (online content creator, musician, and possibly stand-up comedian) in an attempt to get the message across to a broader audience, but by far my most important idea at this stage of advocacy will be to create an animation series about the education system called "Futoko", or "Dropout" that I will attempt to bring to a substantial audience (see CROSSROADS: Futoko (Dropout)). If you want to help me start a social movement for civic education reform, click here.
Lobby to Change State Standards
Lobby to Change State Standards
The vast majority of the work required to change the education system will need to be accomplished through advocacy, but there is still some room for political lobbying.
In Illinois, content standards are determined by the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE), and while there are some specific content requirements in Illinois state law (found in 105 ILCS 5/27), these requirements are mostly broad enough to grant ISBE significant leeway in deciding what comprises the state content standards (see How Education Standards Work).
There are three ways that laws pertaining to content standards may be changed: addition, revision, and removal. Addition is the easiest change as it merely requires appending a subsection to the school code by convincing representatives that a certain topic ought to be taught at some point in the public school system. Additions are technically not necessary for education reform since the Board of Education could decide on its own to add content that is not legally required; however, addition grants citizens the opportunity to directly lobby for specific topics to be added to content standards. An example of an addition that may be justified for civic education reform is requiring the teaching of 9/11 in the social studies curriculum.
The second way to change standards is revision, which alters but mostly maintains an already-existing law. Because a previous law needs to be changed, this is much more difficult than mere addition because both what is added and what is taken away within a revision must be justified. A relevant revision may be changing the graduation requirements for civics education (105 ILCS 5/27-3.10) to be three semesters total, one in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, rather than one semester total as is currently required.
The most difficult way to change standards is removal (or, technically, repeal), and this is because it requires that a content standard that had previously been considered important enough to be made into law (rather than incidentally included by the Board of Education) to be proven to the legislature to be either unneccesary in its own right or not worth the opportunity cost caused by taking up space that more important content could fill instead. The most important example with regards to civic education would be the repeal the part of 105 ILCS 5/27-22 that requires three years of mathematics in high school (so as to grant much more space for social studies content as well as to allow for a differentiated high school math curriculum), which would symbolically represent the official transition from a STEM pedagogy to a civic one.
Career Experience Lobby
Career Experience Lobby
I argue that contemporary education systems focus too much on the Neoliberal principle of mass specialization and too little on civic development. However, even if we take the Neoliberal philosophy for granted, the education system is still an utter failure as 72% of high school graduates felt less-than-well-prepared according to a 2025 survey by YouScience. The same survey found that 39% "reported receiving no help in discovering their aptitude" and 45% believed that they had received insufficient career guidance. Another study by Gallup found that "fewer than 30% of high school students feel 'very prepared' to pursue any of the postsecondary pathways they are considering," and only a minority of parents have much understanding of alternative career paths "including certification programs, learn-and-work models such as internships and apprenticeships, joining the military or starting a business."
The importance of education on career preparation is obvious, but this has become for many schools an obsession with pushing students to get accepted into college, whatever college it may be and whatever degree program they happen to end up applying for. The STEM curriculum essentially teaches students the abstract skills needed for engineering jobs, despite the fact that engineers only make up about 9% of university students;source even then, students are rarely ever provided with any substantial guidance as to what those careers actually entail in practice because, as of now, the curriculum effectively transforms high schools into machines that are designed to produce little more than productive test-takers.
As an extension to the Lobby to Change State Standards (or as an alternative if that initiative fails), part of the gutted STEM curriculum should be replaced with explicit career preparation, which can be achieved by creating a subject called, say, "career studies" and making it a requirement for high school graduation. (This would be an amendment to 105 ILCS 5/27-22.)
The "career studies" law would require at least one semester (possibly more) devoted to a course providing: (a.) an explanation of the various kinds of possible career paths, including university (making sure to mention extra details such as licensure requirements in certain fields, etc.), vocational school, apprenticeship, commerical and social (NPO) entrepreneurship, and military, detailing the skills required in each, how long each path may take, cost and return comparisons, etc.; and (b.) first-person exposure to a myriad of careers that can be reached through the various career paths, which would ideally involve real-life hands-on experience but, when unfeasible, may instead be the showing of videos that reveal the actual, everyday activities and conditions within different work contexts. An extra condition to (b.) may be that each path requires a minimum amount of careers to be shown to the students based on the career path in question. For example, it may be written that students should be exposed to at least 8 different careers that require a degree from a university (at least 2 of which requiring additional licensure), 8 different careers that require vocational school and/or apprenticeship, 2 different military careers, and a full life-cycle observation of the creation and management of both a for-profit and a non-profit organization. It may also be prudent to separate public sector jobs from private sector jobs, setting minimum requirements for each area.
An optional (c.) part may require a short independent unit (maybe only a few class periods long) where students do additional independent research to discover other careers that they may be interested in pursuing.
Higher Education
Tuition Reduction Lobby
Tuition Reduction Lobby
Higher education reform will inevitably have to become a sort of populist movement that appeals to the basic needs of the masses; one such need is reduced tuition. When accounting for inflation, the annual cost of the average four-year degree has increased from $3,663 in 1983 to $10,340 in 2024, about 2.8 times as much as the former.source This is despite the fact that when accounting for inflation, wages now are only about 1.4 times what they were in 1983source (while at the same time housing is far more expensive than eversource).
There are three main ways to reduce university tuition: reducing the annual maintenance costs of universities, reducing the amount of courses required for graduation (see Accreditation Reform Lobby), and taking part or all of the responsibility of payment away from the students (see Tuition Payment Reform).
A major factor in rising maintenance costs in universities has been an increase in the amount of bureaucratic oversight mandated by law. The primary challenge is that, in theory, these laws generally make sense and seem to be helpful in improving campus and classroom conditions while also having emotionally powerful justifications built into their passing.
For example, the Clery Act requires that all universities that accept federal aid (that is, effectively all universities) publish an annual report that details every crime that has occurred on campus so that prospective students may be aware of the level of safety (or lack thereof) at a particular campus before attending a university. This had been passed in the wake of the rape and murder of a 19-year-old student of Lehigh University named Jeanne Clery, at the time the 38th violent crime in three years on campus.source However, the actual implementation of the law requires an unnecessarily large bureaucracy to both hear about and report crimes, which has not seemed to have actually improved campus safety, and it and other additional mandates had cost (for example) the University of Virginia at least $20,000,000 in 2017 alone.pp. 2-16 For more information, Philip Carlton Williams' We're Smothering Our Universities provides an in-depth look at the costly burdens caused by laws such as the Clery Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, Title IX, the Higher Education Act, FERPA, HIPAA, and the Freedom of Information Act.
The solution is not to simply repeal all of these laws but rather to analyze each one and determine where revisions may be necessary to avoid unpredicted domino effects on costs. In some cases, the opportunity cost may have to be considered, and a non-bureacratic approach may have to take the place of what had to this point been a federally mandated law.
Additionally, university tuition more or less forces students to cover a portion of the overall cost of university maintenance. This means that students using one set of facilities are also in part paying for another set of facilities, most notably for sports. Though only a portion of university students are athletes, during the 2020 school year at James Madison University in Virginia, for example, the annual tuition fees every student included a $2,340 maintanence fee for the university's sports teams.source The second major step in maintanence cost reduction from the perspective of students, therefore, is to require students to pay only for the facilities that their majors entail that they will use (though this particular step is optional as I am not particularly confident in its viability or in its potential impact).
Both of these solutions entail a lobbying campaign that will premuably require some kind of populist reach (see Civic Education Advocacy).
Accreditation Reform Lobby
Accreditation Reform Lobby
Course reduction is the most straightforward way to save students' money and time. While, of course, it is common knowledge that the vast majority of bachelor's degree programs are four years long, few people have a concrete understanding as to why that is the case. The answer is that this had become the standard that all seven U.S. regional accreditors (ACCJC, HLC, MSCHE, NECHE, NWCCU, SACSCOC, and WSCUC) came to accept.
Though a university is not mandated to obtain regional accreditation, in practice, this is necessary for the university's degrees to hold any weight in the eyes of employers. As such, university programs must comply to the guidelines of the regional accreditation organization that represents the university's region (for example, universities in Illinois must comply with guidelines of the Higher Learning Commission (HLC)). Though their own accreditation guidelines vary, all regional accreditors base their guidelines on what are called "Assumed Practices", which, according to HLC, include the following: "The institution conforms to commonly accepted minimum program length: 60 semester credits for associate's degrees, 120 semester credits for bachelor's degrees and 30 semester credits beyond the bachelor's for master's degrees. Any variation is explained and justified." 120 hours roughly equates to four years, which means that while it is not impossible for a bachelor's degree program to be shorter than four years long, this is assumed to be the default length, and any variation must be "explained and justified."
If the point of a university degree is to establish that a graduate has the relevant skills to be considered a professional in a particular field, then the basis for any set of accreditation requirements should be the concrete skills deemed fundamental for professional performance in that field. In some fields, that might mean that the average student would be expected to take just two years to complete all the relevant coursework, while in other fields the average student might need six years before reaching basic proficiency. It is a perverse approach to measure the quality of a degree program based on an abstract and arbitrary minimum quantity of credit hours; a fundamentally different approach should replace the current status quo (see CROSSROADS: Course Credit Software).
Note: there is currently an initiative that has been taken on by the regional accreditors to start normalizing three-year degrees.source While I think this is in some ways a step in the right direction, it does not solve the fundamental problems that I have addressed.
A major part of the problem is that the current mainstream philosophy of education takes for granted the abstract importance of "rigor" (see Neoliberal Universities), which has been taken on faith to be a necessary virtue of higher education courses, though any reasonable pedagogical analysis would result in the conclusion that intellectual development is extremely individual and that the ideal curriculum must be determined based on the degree to which it is able to accommodate the unique needs and interests of each student rather than merely how "rigorous" or, in other words, overloaded, it happens to be. Some students work better under pressure, whereas other students require a curriculum that grants them the leeway to take as much time as they need to let a particular topic soak in, which would be utterly undermined by a curriculum based entirely on the pursuit of rigor (see Alternative Higher Education Advocacy).
Because accreditation reform deals with both major economic issues as well as pedagogical issues within the system of higher education, it entails a wholistic populist reform movement that covers not just cost reduction but ideas of fairness and opportunity within higher education (see Civic Education Advocacy).
Tutorial Education Advocacy
Tutorial Education Advocacy
There are two general approaches to education: classroom-based education and private or small-group tutoring. The apparent advantage of a university-style classroom is that students are able to work together, which in some contexts may work well (such as some applications of inquiry-based learning that take place in class with students split up into groups) and in other contexts may result in catastrophe (such as the dreaded group project). However, the fundamental problem is that the professor is forced to maintain a consistent lesson schedule within an inflexible timeline (a quarter or semester) regardless of whether or not each student is actually able to keep up the pace (or, in some cases, whether or not there are students who have already mastered much of the content and want to move along faster than the expected schedule). Furthermore, making personalized changes in the content based on how the individual student intends to specialize (or generalize) are trivial with private tutoring and rather difficult under a predetermined course curriculum.
The real reason why classroom-based instruction is the standard is because it is (a.) the traditional approach in university (based on a historical lecture-based pedagogy) and, more importantly, because it is (b.) far easier to plan, manage, evaluate, and especially scale to a large student base. This second set of advantages means that classroom-based instruction is, in a sense, a necessary "evil", though it should also be noted that hybrid alternatives such as online asynchronous courses have been implemented on a large scale and are not mutually-exclusive with regional accreditation.
In any case, it must be accepted that some students may find both the traditional classroom approach and asynchronous learning to be unfeasible or at least unideal for themselves for a myriad of reasons, a major reason being pacing. Since some students would be greatly advantaged by the completely personalized education offered by private or small-group instruction, there should be pathways for those students to receive university education in this form, for this kind of education to receive regional accreditation, and for this alternative education to be able to be paired with internship/practicum opportunities.
Theoretically, at least as far as the requirements laid out by the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) are concerned (these may vary depending on the regional accreditor in question), there is no guideline disqualifying an institution that offers degree programs based on private or small-group tutoring from receiving accreditation; however, some of HLC's eligibility requirements would likely disqualify such an institution. Usually, education in the form of private tutoring is specific to a particular topic or subject, and for this reason tutoring programs most of the time seek to receive programmatic accreditation, which is accreditation for a particular educational program rather than an entire institution.
These circumstances may call for an advocacy campaign that involves either the creation of private/small-group instruction programs within already regionally-accredited universities, or the creation of such programs by third-party institutions that receive, say, programmatic accreditation and are then implemented within a degree program by a regionally-accredited university "through contractual relationships approved by HLC [or the relevant regional accreditor]."source
Though I solely discussed pedagogy, perhaps the most striking advantage of a partial or entirely tutor-based education is financial. First, a student would not have to pay exorbitant amounts of money for required textbooks supplied by blatantly corrupt publishers (such as Elsevier). Second, if this kind of alternative education develops into a more robust and common system, because it does not require large university-style campuses, it may result in significantly lower tuition costs in the long run since students will not necessarily have to cover the massive maintenance costs of university facilities.
Tuition Payment Reform
Tuition Payment Reform
There are many cases where a student either drops out before finishing a degree program or ends up in a deadlock due to lacking prerequisites for a certain course that is necessary for graduation with no way to attain these prerequisites. This entails an enormous waste of time and money for these students with absolutely no long-term benefit (a degree) to offset these losses. In this simple way, universities literally ruin some people's lives.
At this point, we are dealing with an issue that is just as much about economics as it is about justice and accountability. Through accreditation organizations and federal laws, universities are held accountable for maintaining consistent and reliable facilities that provide "quality" educational programs; however, there is practically no accountibility at all of universities to actually provide students with real career advantages. This aspect is taken as a matter of faith, both in the quality of education (which in practice is often insufficient, even if an accrediting organization approved of the program) and in the assumption that the student will indeed complete the degree program.
There is a (theoretically) simple solution: to require universities to receive tuition payments as a portion of a graduate's income. (Shout out to Eisel Mazard for this idea. #mazardianeconomics). In other words, the university itself invests in each student's education, and the return on the investment comes from the student's career success, which is supposedly the fundamental point of a degree program in the first place. This may be accomplished by universities taking federal loans (perhaps with low interest) to offset the initial costs and then paying off these loans over a course of, say, five or ten years by taking a portion of graduates' incomes. The university itself would have to take the brunt of any financial shortcomings caused by a failure to ensure a real career advantage.
While this would have obvious direct implications on justice and accountability, even more important would be the domino effect outcomes. First, because universities would now be accountible for graduate employability, degree programs would likely become more streamlined and focused. Second, universities would become more selective in accepting applicants, which may sound like a downside, but would actually result in a twofold improvement: one, there would be fewer students who are genuinely unfit for any given university program, meaning that classroom environments would be improved; two, this could open the door for alternative programs and institutions (including, but not limited to, what I argue for in Tutorial Education Advocacy) that are more tailored to students who are unlikely to thrive in the traditional system, resulting in a win-win situation. Finally, since high schools are expected to prepare students for college, there will be more pressure on secondary education to properly expose students to various career paths, which is an education reform opportunity in itself (see Career Experience Lobby).
Note: I repeatedly discuss course reduction and degree program streamlining. This implies that I am opposed to a general education curriculum in higher education. While I believe that there is merit for some degree of general education in higher education (perhaps including general academic literacy, numeracy, etc. and arguably even an in-depth civic curriculum), my own model for education entails that much of what is now delegated to the optional higher education sphere will be moved to the free (and technically optional but near-universal) high school level through civic education reform.
Simply put, a political movement advocating for this kind of tuition reform would be populist to the extreme, so much so that it would actually become somewhat anti-establishment. For this reason it will be extremely difficult to accomplish and will most likely fail; on the other hand, it could provide a strong entry point for a broader populist education reform campaign (see Civic Education Advocacy).
Crossroads
Course Credit Software
Course Credit Software
University credit is based on an abstract unit called "course hours" that does not represent any real thing, and this leads to problems when a student transfers from one university to another since there is no objective metric to determine whether X amount of course hours from one university is equivalent to Y amount of course hours in another.
To solve this issue, many universities have standardized their courses, usually at the local (state) level, so that what one university offers is equivalent to that of another university, making credit transfers relatively trivial. What this means, however, is that because courses in one university are now tied to parallel courses in several other universities, it is extremely difficult to add, revise, or remove a particular course because this would have to be agreed upon and synchronized by professors and administrators across multiple schools.
My proposed solution is to fundamentally change the way course credit is measured such that it accounts for concrete topics covered. Instead of using abstract credit hours, professors would design their course curricula around themes that are attached to summative assessments and then registered as credit offered by the course.
For example, an introductory course on Roman History will, rather than provide an abstract 3 credit hours, provide credit for particular themes covered: general history of pre-republic Rome, general history of the Roman Republic, general history of the Triumvirate, and general history of the Byzantine Empire, plus, say, the life of Julius Caesar (supposing the professor decided to add a unit of the course that dives into his life in particular).
The only standardization required then would be a common system of tracking themes. This could be achieved by the common use of a student credit database software that provides a visual tree of the students' academic history based on a predetermined set of themes (allowing, when necessary, the addition of custom themes). Each subject would have a core set of themes starting from the general and moving towards the specific. Universities using the same software could then trivially transfer detailed information about student progress in particular subject areas.
The software could also be used in a primary/secondary education context to allow for teachers to provide and keep track of personalized and differentiated curricula for each student, meaning that students who have covered required core themes can independently study the more granular parts of favored subjects, and these individual study routes can be tracked by the software.
Both a desktop application (presumably C++/Qt, relying heavily on networking and database features) and a full stack website with a student and administrator mode will need to be made to support this system. Click here if you want to help me create this software.
Software Distribution
Software Distribution
The course credit software can only be useful if networks of different schools use it, since the entire point is to create a new common means of tracking course credit. Therefore, a critical step in course credit reform is actually promoting the new software.
A fact sheet detailing the problems with the current course credit system as well as the solutions the new system provides will need to be written and distributed. The most important thing will be to network with university professors and administrators, which can be done directly through connecting with and (when relevant) becoming members of certain higher education organizations such as NAFSA and AAC&U.
Credit Reform
Credit Reform
There is a serious problem that would remain unsolved if a theme-based credit system were implemented, and that is the fact that courses that are unsynchronized may offer different themes and therefore fail to be properly aligned. For example, in two different courses on Roman history, one may provide a unit on the life of Julius Caesar while another may provide a unit on the life of Cicero. While the credits will transfer, it may be the case that the Cicero credit can only be obtained through that introductory course (that is, the rest of the courses provided in the university's history curriculum assume that Cicero has already been covered).
One solution is that each university has a system wherein there are core, general themes required for graduation (such as the general history of the Roman Republic), whereas more specific themes (such as the lives of individuals) may be counted generically on a numeric basis. That is, in addition to the core themes, there may be, say, 60 more credits required on any specific theme, meaning that the transferred credit of Caesar's life would count for a point even if Cicero remained unstudied by the student. Incidentally, this system could potentially allow for a much more individualized curriculum in which students could choose to focus on particular topics of their choice after studying the general core curriculum (without necessarily being tied to entire quarter- or semester-long courses).
Another solution, which is somewhat more structurally difficult to achieve but is also the most reasonable structural change from the point of view of a transfering student, is allowing students with partial thematic credit (such as a student who does not have the expected credit in the life of Cicero) to apply only for the unit(s) of a course that pertain to the relevant theme(s), taking only the assessments that pertain to the relevant theme(s) and paying a proportional fraction of the full tuition. (Or, when possible, a student could take a formative assessment directly in order to gain the credit while skipping the course entirely).
This means that professors would have some students entering and/or leaving the course early or late and would make classroom management more complex, which may entail some professional resistance; however, the point of an education system is to effectively educate the students, so issues of credit transfer and proper covering of materials are necessary problems to deal with.
A fact sheet detailing the problems with the current course credit system as well as the solutions the new system provides will need to be written and distributed. The most important thing will be to network with university professors and administrators, which can be done directly through connecting with and (when relevant) becoming members of certain higher education organizations such as NAFSA and AAC&U.
Teacher Education Reform
Teacher Education Reform
There are two categories of teacher education: institutional (university education) and professional development. Professional development (sometimes called "teacher training") does not involve "reform," per se, though the passing of laws that change the content or methodological requirements of schools may entail the creation of a teacher training plan to support these changes (that is, a thought-out professional development plan will likely be necessary to convince lawmakers that the changes are feasible).
In Illinois, teachers are required to attend 120 hours of professional development events provided by Approved Illinois Professional Development Providers. Approved providers include the basic sectors of the education system such as public and charter schools as well as many third-party organizations with facilities located in Illinois, including the Civic Leadership Foundation and the Illinois Council for the Social Studies. It is also possible for state-approved professional development providers to work with unapproved third-party professional development providers "at their sole discretion." Some third-party organizations providing regular professional development for social studies in Illinois are Facing History & Ourselves, Northwestern University, and the Field Museum. It is possible to create a new third-party organization and attempt to collaborate with state-approved professional development providers, but this would entail establishing and maintaining a non-profit organization; a much easier approach would be working directly with established civics-related organizations that provide professional development.
For radical civic education reform, the real focus of teacher education reform will be institutional, and this will be an extremely challenging political goal to achieve. (For my own pedagogy, I call for extreme changes to university teacher education that go beyond the realm of civics and deal more directly with pure pedagogy and the economics of education. See Neoliberal Universities.)
To illustrate the problem: if a person has a Bachelor's Degree that does not provide teaching endorsements (even if it is an education degree) and wants to teach as a full-time professional educator in Illinois (where, by the way, there is a concerning teacher shortage), then officially that person will have to take at least a year or more of a university program in the best-case scenario where the person takes a licensure-only program such as that offered by Illinois College in Jacksonville. Admittedly, this is the "official" route, and there are interal opportunities for paraprofessionals to become full professional educators that may very well be tailored more aptly to the needs of the individual, but the institutional problems are nevertheless clear.
See Neoliberal Universities for a much more in-depth criticism of the higher education system and the way in which it determines who is and is not an expert in a particular field.
Futoko (Dropout)
Futoko (Dropout)
The primary way I intend to disseminate the message of radical civic education reform to the masses so as to create an environment where many people are seriously considering substantial change in the education system is to produce an animated series about the failures of Neoliberal education called 不登校 "Futoko", or "Dropout".
The story takes place in JapanWhy? and deals with the failure of English education in the country, demonstrating that the problems underlying language education are also present, but harder to see, in social studies education, which has serious implications for the economic and political future of Japan and all other Neoliberal countries, including the United States. Ultimately, the animation will be thematically complex and deal with many problems that exist in modern-day society, including work culture, cost of living, relationships between boys and girls, heritage, and conformity culture.
Though this description may sound technical and dry, these themes will be covered through what is really an artistic coming-of-age story that is at times silly, tragic, inspirational; and I intend to write a story that will be not just educational but also entertaining and thought-provoking for teens and adults alike (See Futoko Summary).
The animation will be very music-centered (one of the main characters is a composer, and all four main characters eventually form a band), and it will have a soundtrack that I am currently composing and will eventually perform live. Click here if you are interested in performing live music with me at some point (or being a voice actor for any of the characters).
Making a 3D animation is a massive undertaking (see How I Plan to Make the Animation), and there is no guarantee that it will receive any significant level of public attention, but there seems to be some vague desire for original, especially indie, animation in my opinion, especially due to the creative stagnation of major entertainment studios.
The method for publicizing a series is, of course, to first create at least some promotional material (trailers, etc.), if not a full pilot episode; once there is substantial material, the first published project can be submitted to film award festivals via, for example, FilmFreeway. In order to guarantee at least some publicity, contestants usually submit their projects to both major film festivals (such as Sundance, Cannes, and Berlin International Film Festival) as well as many smaller festivals. A set of submissions for just one project can cost upwards of $6,000 depending on how many festival submissions are sent. Many festivals, such as Cannes, have a category specifically for trailers, which could help significantly with getting an audience before publishing the pilot episode.
Futoko will be the brunt of the force in my social movement, and there is so much to say on the matter that I cannot possibly fit in a short description (see The Fujunko Movement).
