Growing up, I experienced various kinds of educational environments: private Catholic school, secular public school, a selective boarding school, and homeschool. I found that, besides homeschool, the other three environments consistently provided me with education that was either irrelevant or poor in approach. When I was very young, my mother (who happens to be a professor) had told me about various incidents of dishonesty by school staff that occurred to my detriment. As such, from the beginning I had a kind of skepticism towards the system of education and, instead of taking for granted the authority of my teachers, I critically observed the problems that seeped through curriculum, methodology, and overall educational philosophy in each school environment.
In Catholic school, besides the problems embedded within the religious education itself, I often faced a rigid approach to instruction that was heavily focused on lecture and meaningless note-taking. Much of the content, particularly in the subject of science, was simply irrelevant for anyone but specialists while also lacking in the development of a wholistic understanding of how the different fields of science relate to each other or why they may be important for students who want to solve real-world problems. Language education was mediocre, and after five years of Spanish classes, I could still hardly utter a single coherent sentence in the language.
In junior high, I attended a public school where we learned English grammar as linguistics, yet could hardly begin to describe, again, what comprised a Spanish sentence from a syntactical point of view. Science class became even more akin to busywork, implying the importance of an understanding of science without developing the prerequisite scientific inquiry that would make such understanding productive. In both private and public school, we were exposed to civics—but only in the most abstract way, enough to fill out a multiple-choice quiz, yet not enough to even understand why somebody would call their local representative in the first place, or how to find out who that representative is, or how to become that representative yourself, or how to become a grassroots activist and collaborate with that representative to make change happen. As was usual, facts were learned out of context and, without having any apparent use, were quickly forgotten.
In my first year of high school, I was homeschooled, and I mostly taught myself through books and online material. Having nearly complete academic freedom, it was this year that I started actually learning a foreign language, that I was first introduced to philosophy and theology (which soon led to my study of politics and history), and that I first came to realize just how important it would be for me to learn and study with purpose.
In Sophomore year, I attended a selective high school, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, which, as its name suggests, was obsessive over the study of math and science as subjects, per se. Never before had I been so oppressed by utterly pointless mathematical busywork dealing with esoteric mathematical problems so specialized that they couldn't even be useful in theory; nor had I previously experienced being so berated by a science curriculum stitched together as an unsightly combination of electives and core courses, both categories being utterly indistinguishable due to their equivalent irrelevance to anyone but the most technically oriented, who frankly could have figured out much of the curriculum on their own given their typically autodidactic inclinations towards the study of mathematics or science. At the same time, I was teaching myself the math that was not in the curriculum, as, being a hobbyist game developer, I needed to become familiar with certain kinds of algorithms, trigonometric formulas, and applications of linear algebra. In an attempt to teach all mathematics as one monolith, hardly anything of note was learned at all, and as usual I was left to teach myself. There was a political side to the curriculum, and it was grossly biased and grotesquely poorly thought out. All throughout my entire educational career up to this point, I never once learned what a nonprofit is, nor how to start one, nor how to start a grassroots political movement with or without one.
Inasmuch as every family is a part of a state, and these relationships are the parts of a family, and the virtue of the part must have regard to the virtue of the whole, women and children must be trained by education with an eye to the constitution, if the virtues of either of them are supposed to make any difference in the virtues of the state. And they must make a difference: for the children grow up to be citizens, and half the free persons in a state are women.
Admittedly, Aristotle had also written things that warrant high levels of moral repulsion... But he outlines here the core idea of a civic system of education: the students, who are citizens and who will obtain legal rights, ought to be prepared to utilize those civil rights, as such political action will determine the structures and values of the state until a future generation once again challenges the presumptions of its antecedents.
In a civic education system, students study subjects as politics, and learn politics, per se, as praxis. The study of science only matters if the student is aware of how this knowledge will allow for technological, medical, psychiatric, or environmental advancement. The study of history only matters if it is treated as a study of both political activity and the state of human nature (though, perhaps the value of foreign culture could be considered a third reason), each of these bits of knowledge being inseperable from informed approaches to political action. The study of civics only matters when the graduates of a civics program have written out their plans of action, soon to be put to the test.
With these things in consideration, it must be made clear that a civic pedagogy demands fundamental change in both curriculum and in methodology. Purpose is personal, so a purposeful curriculum is one that follows an individual person. While core subjects are still crucial, there comes an inevitable point in any student's life where the curriculum needs to bend and warp with the natural flow of human learning. A civic curriculum, while covering numerous events in world history along with their accompanying literary and artistic works, in any case requires the flexibility of a student-centered approach, or else the majority of students will be wasting their youth studying for another student's test.
Democracy is a system built on disagreement. Every citizen is informed in a uniquely dangerous way. Some strands of misinformation intoxicate large swaths of the populace, yet unless the education system takes a critical approach, these dangerous ideas will continue to thrive and ruin the lives of an innumerable mass of people. Dangerous ideas are not treated by censorship—that merely makes them more attractive. Instead, dangerous ideas lose their power when placed unassumingly next to the ideas that prove them wrong: this is learning by contradiction, and the introduction of hitherto unknown facts disillusionment. Many people are hard-headed and fail to heed to the facts in front of them. A methodology based on contradiction forces the students to hold these uncomfortable facts in their hands and either markedly disprove them through research and evidence or come to terms with them in the end.
This article gives a concrete example of what one part of a civic curriculum might look like.