Civic Education Through Public Work
Civic engagement and calls for civic education can easily become highly sentimentalized and ephemeral, a "feel good" invocation of intentions and emotions, personal development, or therapeutic good works.

The Center for Democracy and Citizenship, based at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, argues, in contrast, for an approach to civic engagement and citizenship education based on the concept of "public work."

Public work differs from approaches that see civic engagement as off-hours voluntarism or service, on the one hand, or as a bitter, zero-sum political struggle over "who gets what?" on the other. Public work defines the citizen as the "co-creator" of democracy, understood as a way of life, not simply free elections. It ties civic engagement to productive, practical, gritty efforts by a mix of people - often of sharply different interests, backgrounds, partisan and moral frameworks -- that produce real and lasting outcomes. Thus it emphasizes the productive as well as the distributive sides of politics, while it also recognizes the conflict-filled, turbulent nature of the public world.

Public work politics emerges from the horizontal relations of citizens who join in common projects and problem solving and develop civic power in the process. It incorporates struggles for justice into a larger frame of "building and advancing the commonwealth." Public work politics are not mediated primarily through the state or elections, though these arenas play crucial roles in giving policy expression to its concerns and creating policy contexts and resources for its development. Public work is more a political philosophy than an ideology.

Thus, public work and civic educational approaches based on it - from educational efforts linked with New Deal programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps to movement education such as the citizenship schools of the southern civil rights movement -- have historically formed a populist counterweight to the power of elites in business and government. They have also formed a populist counterweight to excessively partisan concepts and practices of politics. It has been through everyday politics of public work that ordinary Americans have been energized to participate in public life and have often built working public relationships and respect across lines of bitter conflict and misunderstanding. In a time of deepening ideological, religious, cultural and other divisions in the United States and across the world, the public work approach recalls the vernacular genius of American politics - its citizen centered, practical, creative dimensions.

Public work includes sustained attention, in practice and theory, to how professional practices and the cultures of a variety of institutions - from schools, congregations, family services, and nursing homes to government agencies and higher education -- can develop civic and political dimensions. In public work approaches, culture is created, not given or static. Culture making in every setting has democratic possibilities. This means, in particular, that professionals (such as teachers, ministers, social workers and others) develop politically and civically educative dimensions to their regular professional work. sometimes surprising contexts, the public work approach to civic education is proving to be an effective way to generate or regenerate democratic public action. For instance, Putting Families First, a movement especially in suburban America building parent clout to reclaim family life from over-scheduling and consumer pressures, crosses many lines of partisanship and division. The publisher of Ladies Home Journal and Better Homes and Gardens describes on recent covers of both magazines Family Life First as a

"trend that's sweeping the country: exhausted and overextended families are saying no to the mad scramble of sports practices, music lessons and ballet recitals and making family time their top priority. Here's how you can join them."

The uses of the public work theoretical framework in this movement are described on the Putting Families First web site (http://www.puttingfamilyfirst.info/html/theory.html).

We are eager, in short, not only to see more civic education but also to see much more debate and discussion about what civic education entails. Raising the question of "what does citizenship mean in the turbulent, dangerous world of interconnected problems - but also democracy possibilities - of the 21st century?" holds potential to recast public discourse, in vital ways.

For more on the public work approach, see also the web sites of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship (www.publicwork.org); and also the web sites for Public Achievement (www.publicachievement.org) and the Jane Addams School for Democracy (www.publicwork.org/jas).

Harry Boyte, Co-Director
Center for Democracy and Citizenship
Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs
301 19th Avenue South
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455