Education Next – Frederick Hess
“Civics education should certainly encourage participation: voting, volunteering, attending rallies, and all the rest. But, in one sense, this is the easy stuff. Telling students to pick their favorite candidate or cause and support them is important but also pretty intuitive. Free nations also rely on norms and habits of mind that are less intuitive. Civics education needs to focus on these too—precisely because they’re less obvious. I want to touch on three in particular: the conviction that laws should be uniformly applied, an appreciation for checks and balances, and the confidence that victories and defeats are never final.” (more)