A Landscape Analysis and Case for Collaboration
This 2019 white paper, From Civic Education to a Civic Learning Ecosystem, authored by Citizens & Scholars president Raj Vinnakota provides a comprehensive landscape of the civic education space to understand how the work of funders, policymakers, educators, researchers, and nonprofit organizations comes together and interacts to produce our current system of civic education.
The report notes the surprising consensus among people ideologically diverse people in the civic education space that our current system of civic education needs to be reimagined and rebuilt for the 21st century.
There is a broad concern that our current patchwork system of high school classes, after-school programs, and online platforms is failing to produce enough young people who are well-informed, productively engaged in, and hopeful about our democracy.
While the words people use to describe the existing challenges and exactly what they hope to achieve vary, these three ideas are central. Almost everyone interviewed believes that a new, improved system of civic learning should be designed to produce citizens who are:
civically well-informed (i.e., they have a nuanced understanding of our history, government, civil society institutions and current affairs)
productively engaged for the common good (i.e., they are active in their communities and able to work with all kinds of people without fear or contempt to craft solutions to their common problems)
hopeful about our democracy (i.e., they love their country for the lofty ideals it espouses, namely liberty and justice for all, while recognizing that we have often struggled to live up to those ideals)
