11/4/2024

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal begins with Jack Miller Center President Hans Zeiger’s latest piece at RealClearPolitics. In light of Election Day tomorrow, Zeiger calls all citizens to vote: “‘We the People’ hold in our hands the decisions about the representatives who are to conduct the daily work of governing.” But citizenship “is about far more than voting for president every four years.” Zeiger notes that citizenship can also entail serving in government, at all levels and branches. And he adds, “The same civic energy...should also shape our homes, our workplaces, and our houses of worship.” After all, Zeiger writes that “it’s up to ‘We the People’ to govern ourselves, whether in our neighborhoods or in major cities across the nation.” Self-government means building up the moral and intellectual virtues that are necessary to care for “ourselves, our families, and our communities without a central power needing to step in and plan for us,” he argues. Zeiger closes by noting that “regardless of the outcome and all that will inevitably be said about the reasons for hope or despair, let’s step up and do our part in ‘the highest office in the land.’”

At the Fulcrum, Bill of Rights Institute President David Bobb makes the case that civic education can help fix our national exhaustion over elections. The key to this solution is not having the federal government lead the charge. Ever since the Department of Education was established, Bobb contends, education has continued to be a problem, civics included. “Our federal government, regardless of who is in power, is ineffective at allocating resources to improve student learning,” he argues. “The data has long made this apparent.” Bobb instead says that improving “civics must happen locally, where most funding and curricular decisions are made.” He points out that this is “already happening in places like Johnstown, Pa., where the University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown and local schools partnered to increase civic education throughout K-12 classes.” Bobb concludes by contending that if civics supporters begin by reaching “for Uncle Sam’s purse strings,” we should “expect our schools, teachers and students to become tangled in them.”