“The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.” – Robert Maynard Hutchins
It’s important to know how democracy works but as we’re seeing more and more these days we need to know how it doesn’t work.
Civics at its core is about group problem-solving, it’s a tool to navigate co-existence and organize society. Civics, and democracy, is like literacy or driving: it takes practice and training. Civics education is a vital ingredient in an effective democracy. But civics has been ignored for decades because education became a political football.
As a result, we’ve lost important lessons.
Among these lessons, civics education needs to teach how tribalism works.
We need to spot logical fallacies in our own and others’ thinking and we need to know how to constructively disagree and when to give credit where it’s due.
We need to know the difference between opinions and knowledge and how to grow an opinion without seeing it as a betrayal of values or an affront to our identity.
We need to know how to map controversies and appreciate nuance.
We need to know how humans behave in organizations, how organizations stray from their vision and values and what we can do to bring them back. We need to know how people behave in power.
The fact is, as far back as Herodotus, democracies fail for the same reasons: people are irrational, often short-sighted, and too often tragically tribalistic, and politics will both reflect and feed on that.
Our culture has a very unhealthy attitude toward disagreement. We see disagreement as disloyalty and we have not been given the tools how to navigate this. Compounding this, we have had decades of a Cold War that culturally pit the Left versus the Right in a death match. The effects of that Cold War culture war is still with us today.
Ultimately, you can’t fix what’s broken if your tools are also broken. This project is focusing on the tools of civics.
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